Saturday, December 30, 2023

Backlist Reader Challenge

 I'm easing up on reading challenges for this year, but this challenge seems like a good one for the kind of year I'm planning.

It is a Backlist Reader Challenge.

The books need to be on my TBR or on my shelves before the beginning of 2024 and they need to be written in 2022 or earlier.

Simple.

I'm going for 40 books that fit this description. I hope to get to more of them, but knowing how badly I did on my TBR challenge this year, 40 will probably be a challenge.

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

The Big Jubilee Read

 The BBC has put together a list of 70 books for the Big Jubilee Read in celebration of Queen Elizabeth's platinum jubilee.

I don't really need another list of books to try to read, but this list is so intriguing. I'm going to go ahead and keep track of the ones I manage to read.

1952-1961

 

The Palm-Wine Drinkard - Amos Tutuola (1952, Nigeria)

The Hills Were Joyful Together - Roger Mais (1953, Jamaica)

In the Castle of My Skin - George Lamming (1953, Barbados)

My Bones and My Flute - Edgar Mittelholzer (1955, Guyana)

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (1956, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

The Guide - R. K. Narayan (1958, India)

To Sir, With Love - E. R. Braithwaite (1959, Guyana)

One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard (1961, Wales)

A House for Mr Biswas - VS Naipaul (1961, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

Sunlight on a Broken Column - Attia Hosain (1961, India)


1962-1971

 

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (1962, England)

The Interrogation - J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963, France/Mauritius)

The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark (1963, Scotland)

Arrow of God - Chinua Achebe (1964, Nigeria)

Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney (1966, Northern Ireland)

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (1966, Dominica/Wales)

A Grain of Wheat - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1967, Kenya)

Picnic at Hanging Rock - Joan Lindsay (1967, Australia)

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born - Ayi Kwei Armah (1968, Ghana)

When Rain Clouds Gather - Bessie Head (1968, Botswana/South Africa)


1972-1981

 

The Nowhere Man - Kamala Markandaya (1972, India)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré (1974, England)

The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough (1977, Australia)

The Crow Eaters - Bapsi Sidhwa (1978, Pakistan)

The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978, England)

Who Do You think You Are? - Alice Munro (1978, Canada)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (1979, England)

Tsotsi - Athol Fugard (1980, South Africa)

Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai (1980, India)

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981, England/India)


1982-1991

 

Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982, Australia)

Beka Lamb - Zee Edgell (1982, Belize)

The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1984, New Zealand)

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (1985, Canada)

Summer Lightning - Olive Senior (1986, Jamaica)

The Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera (1987, New Zealand)

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989, England)

Omeros - Derek Walcott (1990, Saint Lucia)

The Adoption Papers - Jackie Kay (1991, Scotland)

Cloudstreet - Tim Winton (1991, Australia)


1992-2001

 

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992, Canada/Sri Lanka)

The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (1993, Canada)

Paradise - Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994, Tanzania/England)

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (1995, India/Canada)

Salt - Earl Lovelace (1996, Trinidad and Tobago)

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997, India)

The Blue Bedspread - Raj Kamal Jha (1999, India)

Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee (1999, South Africa/Australia)

White Teeth - Zadie Smith (2000, England)

Life of Pi - Yann Martel (2001, Canada)


2002-2011

 

Small Island - Andrea Levy (2004, England)

The Secret River - Kate Grenville (2005, Australia)

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (2005, Australia)

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, Nigeria)

A Golden Age - Tahmima Anam (2007, Bangladesh)

The Boat - Nam Le (2008, Australia)

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel (2009, England)

The Book of Night Women - Marlon James (2009, Jamaica)

The Memory of Love - Aminatta Forna (2010, Sierra Leone/Scotland)

Chinaman - Shehan Karunatilaka (2010, Sri Lanka)


2012-2021

 

Our Lady of the Nile - Scholastique Mukasonga (2012, Rwanda)

The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton (2013, New Zealand)

Behold the Dreamers - Imbolo Mbue (2016, Cameroon)

The Bone Readers - Jacob Ross (2016, Grenada)

How We Disappeared - Jing-Jing Lee (2019, Singapore)

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo (2019, England)

The Night Tiger - Yangsze Choo (2019, Malaysia)

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart (2020, Scotland)

A Passage North - Anuk Arudpragasam (2021, Sri Lanka)

The Promise - Damon Galgut (2021, South Africa)


Wednesday, January 16, 2019

2019 Reading Log

Last year I didn't keep a list of the books that I have read on this blog, and I miss being able to quickly go back and look. So this year I'm keeping a list again. I'll also  note the challenges they worked for.

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Back to the challenges

After a couple of years of reading without taking part in any challenges aside from the Goodreads Challenge, I am looking forward to doing a few reading challenges this year. I am going to be careful not to get too many going, but a few should only enhance my reading.

I'll be picking them over the course of the next few weeks and I'll list them here.

1. Virtual Mount TBR Challenge: Since I have over 1,300 books on my Goodreads Want-to-read list, and I only own a few dozen of those, this is a great challenge for me.
2. Mount TBR Challenge: Because I need to read some of what is on my shelves.
3. Historical Fiction Reading Challenge
4. The PopSugar Reading Challenge
5. Cruisin' through the Cozies Challenge
6. My self-created Goodreads Challenge: I'll read five of the Goodreads Choice winners

I will do a post for each of these, but realistically, will do most of my keeping track in my bullet journal. Maybe I'll post pictures of those pages.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Change is good

For several years I have been participating in lots of reading challenges. I scaled back a little this year, but I still did quite a few, plus a goal for total number of books read, and an ongoing challenge or four.

I have decided that 2017 is going to be the year of no challenges.

For the first few years the challenges were good. They pulled me out of my box and got me reading different things. I broadened my taste and regained the ability--after the mommy years--to read hard books. I read some things that I wanted to read, but had put off.

This year, the challenges felt like a straight-jacket. They have started to take away my enjoyment of what has been my favorite pastime since I was a small child. Part of it is that I have read a good portion of the books that everyone is "supposed to read." I have developed a pretty broad taste in books, and so I end up with a lot of things that I want to read that don't fit any challenge. When I go through stressful times and just want brain candy, it stresses me out that those books don't fit my challenges.

 And, as a fairly well-read woman of 50+ years,  I no longer feel like I need to prove anything, even to myself. So the coming year is my year to read for the pure joy of it again.

I am going to post a couple of suggested reading lists that I will check off if I read the books. One will be a selection of the 2016 Goodreads Choice winners. I have found these books to be almost universally enjoyable. But this isn't a "read-ten-of-these list." It's a "these-books-look-good" list. I will keep a list of everything I read, but only because that has been an enjoyable thing. (As well as being useful!)

I will continue with the ongoing multi-year challenges, but only if they incidentally work with the books I'm reading. (I do have a few must-read books that I still must read: Les Miserables, Don Quixote, War and Peace. . . .

Reading shouldn't feel like one more chore to finish.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Review: Spoon River Anthology


WHEN I Discovered This Classic I found an illustrated 1915 edition of this book in a used bookstore.

WHY I Chose to Read It I needed a break from Midnight's Children, and this was a nice break.

WHAT Makes It A Classic I think that there are a couple of things that make this book a classic, but mostly the unique form. The book is a collection of poems, each of which is the epitaph of one of the denizens of the town cemetery. Woven together they tell a story of the town and it's inhabitants over time.
WHAT I Thought of This Classic
I enjoyed it. I will probably read it again.
WILL It Stay A Classic
I would guess so.
WHO I’d Recommend It To
I would recommend this book to people who enjoy poetry, words, and who would enjoy the challenge of piecing together the story from the many bits of information.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Book Review: The Good Neighbor

The Good NeighborThe Good Neighbor by A.J. Banner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This was so dreadful. I got it for free on Amazon, and I started reading it one night when I wanted to use my Kindle so my husband could sleep. At first I thought that the writing was just very simple. Sometimes, with good plotting and characters, that works. But this didn't have any of that. Just over halfway through I got to a section that was so badly written, that if it had been a book, and not my Kindle, I would have thrown it. Why, oh why, Amazon reviewers, did this have four stars? Abandoned, unfinished.

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