2014 Reading Self-Challenge

[thistlepong]

58/50... Can I back apply these to last year? I made 54/100 in 2013, so I guess I'm at 112/150 now?

Phantastes, a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald (1858) was kind of a surprise. It was footnoted several times in Planet Narnia and has been cited as an inspiration by both Lewis and Tolkien. Prolly makes it a required text for all the Inklings. Interesting stuff, quoting sources of its own and demonstrably influential. Even had a cottage with four doors corresponding to "the four doors of the mind" in Rothfuss. Not great, per se, but good to have known.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie was also a surprise. I mean, I guess it shouldn't have been what with all the folks here and elsewhere likin' it. But whatever. It had been sitting on my kindle for years and I finally figured I oughtta read it. I expected to be turned off by the grimdarkness and instead found myself using it as a reward for reading chapters in other books. There was a point near the end where I was absolutely giddy.

[Garett Hornwood]

Just completed book #3 for the month of April thus putting my total for the year at 11/35.

[Maithanet]

4 books this month, a little off the pace. Watching the NBA playoffs has not helped my reading. I'm at 19/52, with 6/19 by women. Still ahead of schedule.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I enjoyed this book a lot. It's nothing great, but it is nostalgic and easy.

Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Guadalcanal. by James Hornfischer. I enjoy WW2 history, and since my grandfather fought in this battle, that made it all the more interesting. This was a pretty harrowing campaign, filled with blunders and overconfidence for both sides. Twice the Japanese "lost" battles just because the confusion of battle set in and they retreated, rather than staying to wipe out what American ships remained.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after 20 Years Away by Bill Bryson. I have enjoyed everything Bryson has written, but this is his weakest entry. It is a collection of stories written for a British magazine about America, so a lot of the things he points out are nothing new to Americans. And there's an unfortunate tinge of "get off my lawn!" nostalgia for America of Bryson's youth.

Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank. More WW2 history, about the decisions being made by both America and Japan to end the war. The Japanese resistance to the reality that the war was lost was truly staggering. Even in the face of a strangling blockade, the utter destruction of the Japanese Navy, constant and devastating air raids, and two atomic bombs, there was still a great deal of resistance to the idea of surrender. This should be required reading if you want to debate the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Raja]

11/40 for me, that's just 2 books in about a month. Reading Wool by Hugh Howey now, it's a strange sort of book if I'm honest, might be too fast paced for my liking.

[Snowborn]

16/30 for me.

• The Crippled God was everything I expected and even more, so much more. Erikson is a genius.
  
• The Folding Knife pulled me off my post-Malazan depression, it was an entertaining read, and also very interesting, I want to read more of Parker's books.
  
• Shadow and Betrayal, and Seasons of War (omnibus editions of the Long Price quartet) were also great reads, I loved the worldbuilding and the concept of poets. I'll also read more books by Abraham.
  

[Er Rn]

9/30

The Traitor's Wife by Allison Pataki. This book was awful. One dimensional characters and very predictable. Peggy Shippen Arnold is basically the Regina George of colonial Philadelphia, but less interesting. She's horrible in every way possible; selfish, lazy, spoiled, conniving, a bad mother, and just plain old mean. She's of course brought down by her pure as the driven snow handmaiden, who has zero personality. Benedict Arnold is a bumbling idiot. It's just a really, really bad story.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. I really like urban fantasy. This book wasn't perfect, but had an interesting main character in Karou and good world building. I was totally engrossed the first half of the book, until she and Akiva meet up.

I found the plot twist of Karou being Madrigal reincarnated predictable and her romance with Akiva problematic

Overall I enjoyed this first book of the series and will continue on to the next.

[Reposado]

4 this month. So 21 of 52

[Inigima]

May update. Read a few comic trade paperbacks, which should help me make my goal, but I swear that's not why I read them. Still behind, too.

6. Max Barry - Lexicon - My own book club pick for the month. Won't win a Nobel or anything but I enjoyed the premise a lot. Don't want to say too much lest I spoil it for potential readers, but it's a quasi-thriller based on language.

7. Bill Willingham, et al - Fables, Vol. 1 - Decided to read some of this after playing Telltale's excellent The Wolf Among Us episodic game, which is based on it. Fairy tale characters, New York City and environs, adult themed (in the dark-and-grimy sense, not the pornographic sense). Good introduction to the series, too short as all comic trades are.

8. Bill Willingham, et al - Fables, Vol. 2 - Really liked this.

9. Bill Willingham, et al - Fables, Vol. 3 - Everyone but me seems to think this was a step up in quality. I thought it was a step down. The first two are full, self-contained story arcs; this one feels like odds and ends thrown together. Fine, but not amazing.

9/30

As always, full reviews on my Goodreads.

In the midst of Fables, Vol. 4 and Haldeman's The Forever War now, with the new book club pick on the horizon.

[Isildur's Mane]

7/20

Earlier in the week I finished 'Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others' by Ruth Mazo Karras.

i thought it was a very interesting book which gave a good overview of sexuality in Medieval Europe. I thought it was a good starting place for those who wanted either a general understanding or for those who were looking to continue on with this subject but didn't know where to start.

I thought it was very well presented and easy to follow.

So now I have read:

Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett

Fortunately, the Milk - Neil Gaiman

1214 - Year of the Magna Carta - Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

Wild Women: History's Female Rebels, Radicals and Revolutionaries - Pamela Robson

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy- Douglas Adams

The Hero Within - Carol S. Pearson

Sexuality in Medieval Europe - Ruth Mazo Karras

I've almost finished : Eats,Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference by The Writer's Digest

[Winter's Knight]

22/100 A major depressive episode swallowed up my Easter Holidays and now I'm barely managing the 5/month rate required. xC

Of the 22, ten are by women.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

I'm at 27/75, so slightly ahead of schedule. As to one of my mini personal goals of reading 5 classical books for the year, I'm way behind on that one as I have only read one to date, The Great Gatsby.

I hope to hit The Odyssey this month.

[Anatúrinbor]

Finished Wuthering Heights and The Shining Girls. Can't say that I liked TSG. The jumping around made it very difficult to care about anyone, or anything. In fact, the only character/storyline I cared for was the killer's. Wuthering Heights is probably my favorite of the Brontë books.

48/50

[WrathOfTinyKittens]

Right on schedule this month with four books.

Read:

The Fell Sword, by Miles Cameron. The second book was good but didn't live up to the first. I look forward to the next. 3.5/5

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by NK Jemison. Very poetic and a good read, not at all what I expected. I have the next on my to-read list. 4/5

Low Town, by Daniel Polansky. An excellent noir fantasy. Apparently the second book doesn't exist in e-book form, which is disappointing. 4/5

Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo. YA fantasy that has seen some buzz around here. Although the writing was good and the setting superficially interesting, the plot and characters were formulaic and flat. Overall underwhelming. 2/5

That puts me at 20/52 and 4/20 by female authors.

May is looking good! Just finished The Forever Watch which was incredible, now going back to Dangerous Women, which I started and haven't finished.

[RedEyedGhost]

Low Town, by Daniel Polansky. An excellent noir fantasy. Apparently the second book doesn't exist in e-book form, which is disappointing. 4/5

Extremely. One of these days I'm going to have to find a way to legally purchase ebooks from other countries. I do have the second book in hardback and really need to get the third ordered, because the first was fantastic. It's too bad Doubleday miss marketed it.

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

I just finished 15/50. Goodreads tells me I am 2 books behind "schedule". Guess I have a bit of catching up to do.

(have a goodreads question: normally when I mark a book 100% read, it adds it to my "read" list and updates my reading challenge, but the last three books are not updating even though they are at 100% (in the "currently reading" shelf). Any ideas why? Do I need to do this manually? never mind. I did it manually and it all updated

[Snowborn]

Sometimes your "read" list doesn't get updated right away, for some reason, no idea why. Have you tried refreshing the page?

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

Sometimes your "read" list doesn't get updated right away, for some reason, no idea why. Have you tried refreshing the page?

Yes, it had actually been a couple of weeks since I finished the last two. I just did them manually.

[Whitestripe]

I read all the time, but when I started tracking, I realized that I was reading all of the same types of books.

My challenge was to read one classic each month from a variety of genres. I am picking things that I have never read or haven't read in a very long time. So far I've read:

Jan: Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (children's)

Feb: Fahrenheit 451 (SF)

March: The Crucible (play)

April: Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (poetry)

May: Grapes of Wrath (literature, to celebrate its 75 anniversary) I'm a quarter of the way through.

I'm thinking that I will do some sort of non-fiction for June. Any suggestions?

[Isildur's Mane]

9/10

Finished reading 2 more books in 2 days: 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss and 'The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference' by Writer's Digest.

Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett

Fortunately, the Milk - Neil Gaiman

1214 - Year of the Magna Carta - Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

Wild Women: History's Female Rebels, Radicals and Revolutionaries - Pamela Robson

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy- Douglas Adams

The Hero Within - Carol S. Pearson

Sexuality in Medieval Europe - Ruth Mazo Karras

Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss

The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference - Writer's Digest

Sorry - I don't have time to write my thoughts on them at the moment as I'm getting ready to leave

[Mark Antony]

18/30

Favorites thus far are Julian by Gore Vidal and The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman,