Tag: Mount TBR Challenge

Challenge Update

How did I do with the reading challenges I undertook this year? Here’s a round-up of my progress, or lack thereof, along with my intentions for next year.

I always do well with the Book Blogger Discussion Challenge, perhaps because I set a reasonable goal for myself (one discussion per month), and so far I haven’t run out of ideas! Here are the topics I discussed this year:

 

With the Back to the Classics challenge, I fell short of reading from all twelve of Karen’s categories, but I certainly enjoyed what I did read. I made it to nine (earning two entries in the challenge giveaway) and am currently reading one more book which would count for pre-1800 (Don Quixote). I hope to finish DQ by the end of the year, but don’t think I’ll be able to post a review by then. Here are the categories and what I read:

 

I challenged myself to read the New York Times list of Six Books To Understand Trump’s Win, and am super impressed that I did it! You can find my reviews of these titles, plus Dark Money (which in my opinion belonged on that list), in my Trying to Understand posts.

 

Now, Mount TBR! I started out strong and on target with my goal of 60 books, but floundered in the middle and gave up. Next year I’m going to deal with this goal differently, given that I seem to have the most energy for it in the first months of the year. I did read 34 books from my list and am working my darnedest to finish #35, the aforementioned Don Quixote, which is actually a pretty impressive result.

  1. The Blackthorn Key – Kevin Sands
  2. Bronze and Sunflower – Cao Wenxuan
  3. Carry On, Mister Bowditch – Jean Latham
  4. The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz – John Crowley
  5. The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
  6. Esperanza Rising – Pam Munoz Ryan
  7. Everyone Belongs to God – Christoph Blumhardt
  8. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
  9. A Fugue in Time – Rumer Godden
  10. The Gilded Chalet – Padraig Rooney
  11. The Goose Girl – Shannon Hale
  12. Hell and High Water – Tanya Landman
  13. I Was a Stranger – John Haskett
  14. It Ends with Revelations – Dodie Smith
  15. The King Must Die – Mary Renault
  16. Life at Blandings – P.G. Wodehouse
  17. The Little Grey Men – B.B.
  18. Mansfield Park Revisited – Joan Aiken
  19. Midnight Is a Place -Joan Aiken
  20. A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr
  21. The Morning Gift – Eva Ibbotson
  22. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
  23. One Half from the East – Nadia Hashimi
  24. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
  25. Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
  26. Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death – James Runcie
  27. Smoky-House – Elizabeth Goudge
  28. Sophie Someone – Hayley Long
  29. The Spirit Within Us – Evelyn Capel
  30. Towers in the Mist – Elizabeth Goudge
  31. Troy Chimneys – Margaret Kennedy
  32. The Transcendental Murder – Jane Langton
  33. Why on Earth? – Signe Schaefer
  34. Wild Strawberries – Angela Thirkell

 

With Lark’s Backlist Reader Challenge, I read only one book out of my goal of ten (An Unnecessary Woman). Oh, plus I read The Little Grey Men aloud to my son. I like the idea of this challenge but I just had too many balls in the air at once.

I’ve already summarized my results from the Around the World project. I’m pleased with my progress on this one, perhaps because I had no particular goal for the year to meet or fall short of. A lesson for the future?

With that in mind, a challenge of mine for 2018 is going to be taking on fewer challenges. (Famous last words, right?)

I’m going to carry on with the Classics Club, but not do Back to the Classics. I’m going to continue Reading All Around the World, but not have a particular target for Mount TBR. My Backlist Reading will have to take a back seat for now too.

The Book Blogger Discussion Challenge isn’t really a reading challenge, and I love having discussions on my blog so it’s something I would do anyway. The linkups provided by the challenge hosts are a great help for connecting with other bloggers, and to me that’s the main point of the exercise.

One new challenge I do want to take on is the Chapter-a-day Les Miserables readalong. I just can’t resist the idea of reading a chapter a day of a single book for an entire year. Will it be too slow for me? Will I lose momentum? Or will it make the book feel more like part of my life than reading usually does? I can’t wait to find out!

What challenges have you undertaken this year, and how do you feel about them? What are you excited about for next year?

Mount TBR Checkpoint #1

Mount TBR Challenge host Bev of My Reader’s Block has posted some questions for our first quarterly checkpoint here. Here are my answers along with a list of what I’ve knocked off my pile so far.

Tell us how many miles you’ve made it up your mountain (# of books read). 

I’m impressed that I’ve managed to keep up with my goal of 5 books a month, aiming at 60 total for the year. With 15 books read, I’m a quarter of the way up the mountain!

Post a picture of your favorite cover so far.

Who has been your favorite character so far?

Though I’ve enjoyed meeting many characters from different times and places, I think I felt closest to the thoughtful anarchist scientist Shevek in The Dispossessed.

Have any of the books you read surprised you?

Troy Chimneys surprised me by being more emotionally moving than I expected.

My Cousin Rachel surprised me with its cleverly ambiguous story of suspense.

What I’ve read so far:

  • Bronze and Sunflower – Cao Wenxuan
  • Carry On, Mister Bowditch – Jean Latham
  • The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz – John Crowley
  • The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
  • A Fugue in Time – Rumer Godden
  • Hell and High Water – Tanya Landman
  • I Was a Stranger – John Haskett
  • The King Must Die – Mary Renault
  • Midnight Is a Place -Joan Aiken
  • A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr
  • The Morning Gift – Eva Ibbotson
  • My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
  • Sophie Someone – Hayley Long
  • Troy Chimneys – Margaret Kennedy
  • Wild Strawberries – Angela Thirkell

What I’m reading now:

I’m currently reading Towers in the Mist in preparation for Elizabeth Goudge Day. What else I will manage this month remains to be seen!

 

When all times become one: A Fugue in Time

Rumer Godden, A Fugue in Time (1945)

Rumer Godden’s storytelling style often involves shifts in time and point of view, sometimes within the same paragraph or even the same sentence. In A Fugue in Time, she made time-shifting the whole basis of the narrative, telling interwoven stories of three different generations within the same London house. (The complete title was originally Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time).

We start with the “present” of the book (told in the past tense), when the elderly Rolls is reluctantly facing the end of his family home’s 99 year lease, when he will be forced to leave. The past inhabitants and events of the house appear (told in the present tense) in shifting waves that gradually build up a tragic legacy of misunderstanding. When two young relatives from different branches of the family come to the house, there is the potential to change that trajectory and move into a better future — which we also briefly glimpse from time to time.

If it sounds confusing, it is rather — but after I got used to the device, it was fairly easy to negotiate the different story threads. Having read Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse not so long ago, the book reminded me of how Woolf also mixed up time and memory and point of view into a sort of kaleidoscopic impression. However, Godden’s language is more conventional than Woolf’s, aside from the frequent shifts that break it up into shorter or longer chunks.

The character of Griselda, Rolls’s mother, who quietly and futilely rebels against the constraints of her traditional female role, also reminded me of Woolf. I wonder how conscious these references may have been.

Not exactly a ghost story, more complex than a straight historical novel, this was an interesting experiment that didn’t completely take off for me. I understand that later Godden tried to do the same thing with China Court, perhaps more successfully, and I’d like to give that one a try. Have you read either of these? What did you think?

Classics Club List #21
Back to the Classics Challenge: Classic by a Woman Author

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Mount TBR Challenge

mount-tbr-2017

Before I started blogging, I didn’t really have a problem with physical books piling up in my house. I had a smallish collection of books I loved and wanted to keep and reread, which I would add to occasionally, and the occasional impulse buy. But for everyday, casual reading I would mostly rely on whatever was on the New and Interesting shelf at the library, or work my way through some newfound author’s backlist, also using the library.

Now that I’ve been blogging for almost three years, I have books I’ve bought because other bloggers made them sound irresistible, books I’ve won in giveaways, books I’ve gotten in book swaps, books I’ve received from publishers for review (solicited and not), books I acquired for various challenges, including my own Reading New England challenge, books I picked up at ALA Midwinter, and more. I’ve also added some titles to the collection of books-I-love-and-want-to-keep-and-reread, but I haven’t had time to reread them because of all the other books pressuring me.

I don’t mind having an endless list of books that I want to read, knowing that I will never get to the end of it, but I do not like having this pile of unread material staring at me from my bedside bookshelf. It’s a monument to unfulfilled intentions and unkept promises, and even if I can’t raze it to the ground, I’d like to make some serious headway.

To that end, I’m joining the 2017 Mount TBR challenge hosted by My Reader’s Block, at the Mt. Kilimanjaro level (60 books). That comes out to 5 books a month, which amounts to about half of my total reading and allows for plenty of spontaneity. Sounds doable, right?

Here’s the list of what I want to conquer this year, arranged alphabetically by title. If you’re signing up, or have any other ideas of how to scale your TBR pile, let me know!

  1. The Art Forger – B. A. Shapiro
  2. Before the Feast – Sasa Stanisic
  3. The Blackthorn Key – Kevin Sands
  4. The Blood of the Martyrs – Naomi Mitchison
  5. The Blue Flower – Penelope Fitzgerald
  6. Bronze and Sunflower – Cao Wenxuan
  7. The Butterfly Mosque – G. Willow Wilson
  8. Carry On, Mister Bowditch – Jean Latham
  9. The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz – John Crowley
  10. The Country Child – Alison Uttley
  11. A Different Kind of Daughter – Maria Toorpakai
  12. The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
  13. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
  14. Dream Days – Kenneth Grahame
  15. The Edge of the World – Michael Pye
  16. Esperanza Rising – Pam Munoz Ryan
  17. Everyone Belongs to God – Christoph Blumhardt
  18. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
  19. A Fugue in Time – Rumer Godden
  20. Gentian Hill – Elizabeth Goudge
  21. The Gilded Chalet – Padraig Rooney
  22. Golden Boys – Sonya Hartnett
  23. The Goose Girl – Shannon Hale
  24. Hell and High Water – Tanya Landman
  25. I Was a Stranger – John Haskett
  26. It Ends with Revelations – Dodie Smith
  27. The Infinite Air – Fiona Kidman
  28. Jude The Obscure – Thomas Hardy
  29. The King Must Die – Mary Renault
  30. Life at Blandings – P.G. Wodehouse
  31. The Little Grey Men – B.B.
  32. A London Girl of the 1860s
  33. A London Child of the 1870s
  34. A London Home in the 1890s – Molly Hughes
  35. Love – Elizabeth von Arnim
  36. Love in a Fallen city – Eileen Chang
  37. Marmee and Louisa – Eve LaPlante
  38. Mansfield Park Revisited – Joan Aiken
  39. Midnight Is a Place -Joan Aiken
  40. A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr
  41. The Morning Gift – Eva Ibbotson
  42. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
  43. Notes on a Cowardly Lion – John Lahr
  44. O Pioneers! – Willa Cather
  45. One Half from the East – Nadia Hashimi
  46. The Path – Michael Puett
  47. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
  48. Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
  49. Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death – James Runcie
  50. Smoky-House – Elizabeth Goudge
  51. Sophie Someone – Hayley Long
  52. The Spirit Within Us – Evelyn Capel
  53. Thornton Wilder – Penelope Niven
  54. Towers in the Mist – Elizabeth Goudge
  55. A Traveller in Time – Alison Uttley
  56. Troy Chimneys – Margaret Kennedy
  57. The Transcendental Murder – Jane Langton
  58. Why on Earth? – Signe Schaefer
  59. A Week in Paris – Rachel Hore
  60. Wild Strawberries – Angela Thirkell
  61. The Wolves of Andover – Kathleen Kent
  62. Writing America – Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Completed:

  1. The Blackthorn Key – Kevin Sands
  2. Bronze and Sunflower – Cao Wenxuan
  3. Carry On, Mister Bowditch – Jean Latham
  4. The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz – John Crowley
  5. The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
  6. Esperanza Rising – Pam Munoz Ryan
  7. Everyone Belongs to God – Christoph Blumhardt
  8. Excellent Women – Barbara Pym
  9. A Fugue in Time – Rumer Godden
  10. The Gilded Chalet – Padraig Rooney
  11. The Goose Girl – Shannon Hale
  12. Hell and High Water – Tanya Landman
  13. I Was a Stranger – John Haskett
  14. It Ends with Revelations – Dodie Smith
  15. The King Must Die – Mary Renault
  16. Life at Blandings – P.G. Wodehouse
  17. The Little Grey Men – B.B.
  18. Mansfield Park Revisited – Joan Aiken
  19. Midnight Is a Place -Joan Aiken
  20. A Month in the Country – J. L. Carr
  21. The Morning Gift – Eva Ibbotson
  22. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
  23. One Half from the East – Nadia Hashimi
  24. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
  25. Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
  26. Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death – James Runcie
  27. Smoky-House – Elizabeth Goudge
  28. Sophie Someone – Hayley Long
  29. The Spirit Within Us – Evelyn Capel
  30. Towers in the Mist – Elizabeth Goudge
  31. Troy Chimneys – Margaret Kennedy
  32. The Transcendental Murder – Jane Langton
  33. Why on Earth? – Signe Schaefer
  34. Wild Strawberries – Angela Thirkell