Tagged: reading challenges
The Charity Reading Challenge, hosted by Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews, is a new challenge for me, and I’m excited to participate in it. Here’s how Becky explains it: Read for a good cause! Buy books at a charity shop, or, even a friends of the library book sale, or, donate a certain percentage of money for each book you read for the challenge. You can choose your own goal of how many books to read, what charity you’ll be donating money towards, how much money, etc. (For...
I’m happy to be participating again in the Back to the Classics Challenge, hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate. The idea of the challenge is to read six to twelve classics that fit predetermined categories. This year’s categories are a perfect fit for many of the books I’ve already got planned, so I’m going to go for all twelve. I think most of the categories speak for themselves, but there are a couple I want to mention. First, for the “classic that scares you” I’ve chosen The Violent...
Gilion at Rose City Reader is hosting the European Reading Challenge again for 2018. The “gist” of the challenge, according to Gilion, is to read books by European authors or books set in European countries (no matter where the author comes from). The books can be anything – novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, or any other genre. You can participate at different levels, but each book must be by a different author and set in a different country – it’s supposed to be a tour....
I had so much fun with my first year of reading challenges that I can’t wait for next year. I still have several challenges to finish for 2017, but I’m already planning for 2018. Last December I summarized all of my challenges in one post and tracked them all on one page. This year I still plan on tracking them on one page, but I’m going to write separate posts about each of the challenges, and right now I’m already up to nine challenges, not including the Les...
As I was looking at my TBR pile I noticed I have quite a few unread westerns. I started looking around for a reading challenge that focused on the American West, but I came up empty. I checked three lists of 2017 challenges from Feed Your Fiction, Girlxoxo, and Xxertz, and aside from a few choose-your-own-genre challenges, I didn’t see any that were specifically aimed at reading westerns. So, I thought, why not create my own challenge for next year? Thus, the Wild Wild West 2018 Reading Challenge...
The What’s in a Name Reading Challenge hosted by The Worm Hole was a lot of fun. The challenge was to choose a book from each of six categories, write reviews of each of them, and post them on the appropriate pages at The Worm Hole. I’m happy to say that I have finished the challenge–my first real reading challenge ever. Here are the books I read in the order I read them, along with links to my reviews: A title which has an “X” somewhere in it: The Chronicles...
O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come. How Green Was My Valley is a gem of a novel. It took me a while to warm up to it, since it doesn’t really have a focused plot, but instead is a coming-of-age story that unfolds the way life does. It’s the story of a coal mining community in South Wales as told through the...
The Deal Me In Challenge continues with three more macabre stories, each from a different one of Alfred Hitchcock’s anthologies. Over the past three weeks I drew the K♦, 7♦ and 2♥, which were assigned to the following stories: K♦ – “Prolonged Visit” by Hal Dresner from Alfred Hitchcock’s Hard Day at the Scaffold (read January 15, 2017): This was a pretty mediocre story about a mother-in-law who comes to visit and overstays her welcome. Besides perpetuating the stereotype of the intrusive mother-in-law, the story did not interest me at all. 7♦...
I love the concept of the The Deal Me In Challenge, hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis. For this challenge you choose 52 short stories for the year, reading one each week. What makes this challenge more fun is that you assign each story a different card from a deck of standard playing cards. Then each week you draw a card at random and read the story assigned to it. This is my first year participating, and I decided that my theme for the year would be “The Macabre.”...
Because I graduated from high school in 1984, I’ve always had a connection with both the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell and the rock album 1984 by Van Halen. Over the years, the former has grown in my estimation and the latter has declined. The album by Van Halen is something you outgrow. The novel by Orwell is something that grows with you. I put Nineteen Eighty-four on my Classics Club list because I knew my daughter would be reading it in her senior high school literature class,...
I have no ambition to be an author. An author is always something of a romancer, and God knows, the mystery of The Yellow Room is quite full enough of real tragic horror to require no aid from literary effects. Gaston Leroux, The Mystery of the Yellow Room 2017 is here, and I’ve kicked off a new year of reading with The Mystery of the Yellow Room. This early twentieth century novel is a classic locked-room mystery by Gaston Leroux. Leroux is probably best known as the author of The Phantom...
With 2017 on the horizon, I’m entering new reading territory by committing to several reading challenges. I’ve never done a reading challenge before, but I’ve enjoyed seeing other bloggers write about their challenges, so I’m jumping into the fray. Here are the challenges I’m signing up for this year: Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge – The challenge here is to read 26 books, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. Back to the Classics – This challenge has readers choose classics in twelve different categories. British Books Challenge – Books...
