Reading Challenges

[osprey_archer]

I was thinking of not doing another reading challenge for 2018, because many of the books I chose for the 2017 challenge were so lackluster - books that I'd been meaning to read and hadn't got around to and was happy to have finished largely because that meant I could knock them off my mental list.

Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, and - oh, how this pains me! - Isobelle Carmody's The Red Queen all fell in this category. Few series have disappointed me quite like Obernewtyn did in the end (probably because I have loved few series the way I loved Obernewtyn in the beginning) and it pains me.

But then I finished Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and I might never have read that book at all had I not have a challenge for "a book with an unreliable narrator or ambiguous ending" - and speaking of ambiguous endings! Good Lord! I am not sure if I'm frustrated or incredibly impressed or WHAT, exactly, I feel about it (in fact I may need to reread the book again before I decide; clearly another book to add to my list of books to buy) - but. In any case. It's certainly very ambiguous.

And it also seemed like a good enough reason to do another reading challenge, because surely the point of a reading challenge is to read books that you might not ever otherwise read? Perhaps I've simply taken the wrong approach by using the reading challenge for books that I meant to get around to someday...

But then the Sayers' books I read this summer clearly fall into that category, and they were excellent in every way. So maybe there is no overarching point - at least not about how to select books.

Anyway! In the end I decided to go with the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2018 Reading Challenge, because I've done the Modern Mrs. Darcy challenge for the past two years and it's worked pretty well for me. Here's the list of challenges:

- a classic you've been meaning to read (perhaps I should finally read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White)
- a book recommended by someone with great taste (evelyn_b, I may hit you up for this one. I am going to have to insist on something shorter than the six volume set of Proust, though.)
- a book in translation (Finally a push to read The Brothers Karamazov!)
- a book nominated for an award in 2018 (This category will, again, be filled by a Newbery nominee)
- a book of poetry, a play, or an essay collection (Charles Lamb perhaps?)
- a book you can read in a day
- a book that's more than 500 pages (unless this is the category for The Brothers Karamozov. Or The Woman in White, for that matter. Clearly these are books I've been putting off because they're so ungodly long.)
- a book by a favorite author
- a book recommended by a librarian or an indie bookseller
- a banned book (Maybe I should finally read some Kurt Vonnegut?)
- a memoir, biography, or book of creative nonfiction
- a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own

Thoughts? Ideas? Book recommendations?

Comments

[minutia_r]

I adore The Brothers Karamozov, and actually didn't find it that depressing, although that may have to do with the facts that a) I read it in college when I was even more of an angstmuffin than I am now and b) it's probably one of Dostoevsky's less depressing works? The only one that I can think of offhand that's less depressing is ... The House of the Dead. On the other hand, if you want a shorter Dostoevsky which I really really enjoyed (but is super depressing), there's The Idiot.

I don't remember if you've even mentioned George Eliot, but if you haven't read her works you should. Middlemarch is definitely her masterpiece, but also very very long, and if you'd like something shorter that's among my favorites, you can read Adam Bede, and then after you read The Woman in White you can join me in shipping Marian Halcombe and Seth Bede, despite the fifty-or-so-year age difference if you pay close attention to the internal chronology of both books. IDK, maybe Seth Bede became a HYDRA supersoldier and spent a lot of the interval frozen or something.

Alternatively, if you want George Eliot's take on the "crusty old misanthrope accidentally acquires adorable moppet, becomes reconnected to his community and feelings" plot, there's Silas Marner, which is very short.

And speaking of 19th-century novels, you might like Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, which shares the milieu although it was actually written a few years back. Actually the thing I would most recommend by Zen Cho is The House of Aunts but that's not a book so it won't check off any squares for you. It is however, Twilight set in Malaysia if it was told from Edward's point of view and also Edward was a Malaysian girl and the Cullens were her aunties, and also if Twilight was funny.

[osprey_archer]

The only Dostoevsky I've read is Notes form Underground which is an astonishingly soul-killing book given that, IIRC, no one dies or even suffers any great external tragedy. The narrator is just such a sad miserable person that it wafts a bitter miasma over the earth just reading about him.

I have actually read quite a lot of George Eliot, despite never really clicking with any of her books except for some reason with Dinah in Adam Bede. Why did the Methodist preacher girl speak to me so? Who knows. In any case I remember Seth being too much of a milquetoast for a budding detective like Marian Halcombe, although admittedly I haven't met Miss Halcombe yet so perhaps she's into that sort of thing.

I still haven't read The Mill on the Floss, though. (Or Romola or Daniel Deronda, although my impression is that those books are not considered as good.) Maybe I should read that one? I've already been spoiled for the ending and it makes me sad but it might be worth reading the book anyway.

[minutia_r]

Excuse you, Seth Bede is great. The fact that he accepts that the woman he likes isn't into him, stays friends with her, and is genuinely happy for her when she finds someone that she is into is not a character flaw; quite the reverse! But, um, anyway. I actually ship him and Marian largely because they are both characters who don't conform to the strict gender expectations of their Victorian novel milieu, and as such are relegated to having their happy ending be to be the doting aunt/uncle to their more gender-conforming sibling's children, because as much as their author may personally like and admire them, no one actually wants to hit that, am I right? (No, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot, you are not right.)

I mean I also like Dinah very much and she deserves to be with the ripped manly carpenter dude that she desires, BUT.

I actually didn't like The Mill on the Floss, though; I just got sick of Maggie Tulliver constantly and consistently torpedoing any chance she had for any kind of happiness. I mean, I'm not saying it's unrealistic or anything, but, I mean, it's not like someone in her situation really had as few choices as the book makes out. I mean, George Eliot herself had other choices and made other choices.

Daniel Deronda I did actually like, and it's the reason that there's a George Eliot Street in Tel Aviv. But then again, you may just not like Eliot, that's a thing that happens.

[kore]

Woman in White! Such a great book. MARIAN.

[landofnowhere]

I don't know Seth Bede, but I agree that Marian Halcombe should get with someone from another Victorian novel -- no one else in Woman in white is good enough for her.

Actually I'd set her up with Marian Yule from New Grub Street by George Gissing -- there's an age gap the other way, but they can form the Underappreciated Marians Society.