a quill and vellum

#ReadHarder Challenge Accepted

I challenged my friend, Jo from RetiredBookNerd, to do The 2015 Book Riot #ReadHarder Challenge and she has accepted that challenge and published her list of books.

 

The Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge

Book Riot has just released information regarding The 2015 Read Harder Challenge (#readharder), in which I will be actively participating.  The premise of the challenge is to encourage readers to read more diversely in the new year by offering 24 reading challenges.  The challenges are amazing and I am looking forward to my participation.  There is even a Reading Harder group at GoodReads. Following are the challenges issued by Book Riot and the books which I will be reading to meet these challenges.  

1.  A book writtten by someone when they were under the age of 25.  White Teeth by Zadie Smith

2.  A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65.  The Lawgiver by Herman Wouk

3.  A collection of short stories (either by one person or an anthology by many people).  Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout

4.  A book published by an indie press.  The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock by Lucy Worsley, Pegasus Books

5.  A book by or about someone that identifies as LGBTQ.  The Color Purple by Alice Walker

6.  A book by a person whose gender is different from your own.  Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

7.  A book that takes place in Asia.  The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

8.  A book by an author from Africa.  No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

9.  A book that is by or about somone from an inigenous culture.  Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

10.  A microhistory.  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

11.  A young adult novel.  Legend by Marie Lu

12.  A sci-fi novel.  Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

13.  A romance novel.  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

14. A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade.  The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

15.  A book that is a retelling of a classic story.  Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

16.  An audiobook.  Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

17.  A collection of poetry.  Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins

18.  A book that someone else recmmended to you.  The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (recommended by Jo Lisa Way, RetiredBookNerd)

19. A book that was originally published in another language.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

20.  A graphic novel, a graphic memoir, or a collection of comics of any kind.  Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman

21.  A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure.  Bookplate Special by Lorna Barrett

22.  A book published before 1850.  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

23.  A book published in 2015.  The Porcelein Thief  by Huan Hsu

24.  A self-improvement book.   Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Bout of Books 11

I am so excited!  I am gearing up to participate in my very first reading challenge.  Bout of Books Read-a-thon 11 will begin on 18 August and run through 24 August, and I learned about this reading challenge from Andi at Estella's Revenge.   

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 18th and runs through Sunday, August 24th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 11 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

• Bout of Books is a week long read-a-thon, usually from 12:01am on a Monday through 11:59pm on a Sunday in whatever time zone you are in.
• It is low pressure, meaning participants are only asked to push themselves to read more than they normally would during any given week. There is no competition between readers.
• How much time a reader wants, and can commit, to read, tweet, or network with fellow bloggers is left to individual preference. All challenges and giveaways are optional.
• Networking with fellow bloggers is actively encouraged, though never required.
• Use Twitter to post updates throughout the read-a-thon. Everyone will be tweeting with the #boutofbooks hashtag.

My Bout of Books 11 Goals:

• Read a minimum of 500 pages
• Read Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman
• Read my very first Neil Gaiman book
• Read a Marvel graphic novel

So I will be reading the following:

 and/or

 

What are your reading goals for Bout of Books 11?  Let me know in the comments section!

-Joseph
Soli Deo Gloria

The 2014 Man Booker Prize

Even though I have been familiar with the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for some time, it has not been a book award that I have closely followed because it was central to books published in the United Kingdom.  Beginning in 2014, however, the prize has been opened up to books published in all countries and the United States is being represented by five published works, which represents about 38 percent of the longlist.  

The longlist was announced on 23 July and it contained thirteen works of literary fiction.  The list, in its entirety, is as follows:

• History of the Rain by Niall Williams (Ireland)
• Orfeo by Richard Powers (USA)
• The Dog by Joseph O'Neill (USA)
• The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (UK)
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (USA)
• How to be Both by Ali Smith (UK, Scotland)
• The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (USA)
• The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (UK)
• To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (USA)
• J by Howard Jacobson (UK)
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (UK, Ireland)
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Tasmania)
• Us by David Nicholls (UK)

My intention is to read the entire list prior to the announcement of the winner on 14 October and I will begin my reading with History of the Rain by Niall Williams, which has the most appeal to me.

For more information on the 2014 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, I highly recommend that you visit Kirat at his YouTube channel, ObsessiveCompulsiveReader.  This young man has very sophisticated reading tastes and he is obsessed witht he Man Booker Prize.

-Joseph
Soli Deo Gloria

 

Estella's Revenge Classics Club

Andi, who blogs at Estella's Revenge, has created a Classics Club in which she has determined to read 50+ books by 27 June 2018.  In an attempt to broaden my experience with classical literature, I will be joining Andi on this quest.  Following is a list of all the books Andi will be reading, plus some additions of my own.

1. Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
2. A Little Price by Frances Hodgsdon Burnett
3. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
6. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
7. Persuasion by Jane Austen
8. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
9. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
10. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
11. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
12. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
13. The Inferno by Dante
14. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
15. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
16. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
17. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
18. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. The Plague by Albert Camus
21. The Bell by Iris Murdoch
22. The Red and the Black by Stendahl
23. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
24. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
25. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
26. Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
27. Roast Beef Medium by Edna Ferber
28. The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
29. Middlemarch by George Eliot
30. The Collector by John Fowles
31. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
32. Terminal by Emile Zola
33. The Portrait of a Lady by DH Lawrence
34. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
35. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
36. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
37. Dracula by Bram Stoker
38. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
39. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
40. 1984 by George Orwell
41. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
42. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
43. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
44. Wise Blood by Angela Carter
45. The Outsiders by SE Hinton
46. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
47. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
48. The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
49. The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
50. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
51. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
52. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
55. The Theban Plays by Sophocles

Not on the original list, but read within the 5-year window:

56. Matilda by Roald Dahl
57. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
58. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
59. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
60. The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins

My Additions to the List:

61.  Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
62.  The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
63.  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fistzgerald
64.  The Old Man and the Sea by Ernes Hemingway
65.  Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
66.  The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
67.  Night, Dawn, Day by Elie Wiesel
68.  The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
69.  American Pastoral by Philip Roth
70.  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
71.  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
72.  Beloved by Toni Morrison
73.  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
74.  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
75.  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
76.  The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
77.  Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
78. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
79.  Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
80.  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
81.  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
82.  The Golden Bowl by Henry James
83.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
84.  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
85.  A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
86.  if on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
87.  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
88.  Invisible man by Ralph Ellison
89.  Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov
90.  Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
91.  Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
92.  Moby Dick by Herman Melville
93.  Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse
94.  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
95.  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
96. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
97.  The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
98.  Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
99.  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
100.  The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
101.  How Green was My Valley by Richard Lewellyn
102.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
103.  Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
104.  1984 by George Orwell
105.  Animal Farm by George Orwell
106.  Les Misrables by Victor Hugo

-Joseph
Soli Deo Gloria