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I met my goal of 45 last year but it was a bit of a desperate stretch towards the end, so this year I'm scaling back to 37. It seems I managed to meet most of Stravinksy's challenge criteria last year so I'm not doing too bad diversity-wise. I'm considering doing this challenge list that I mentioned in the last thread. Which reminds me how absurd but also kind of hilarious it is that reading books by women is apparently something a lot of people have to go out of their way to do. I guess it makes for a nice, easy warm-up hurdle in terms of an overall reading challenge, but still. my goodreads. I use it a fair bit. Feel free to add me.
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Jan 2, 2015 03:09
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anilEhilated posted:I do read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, so let's say... 20 non-SF books? As a sub-challenge, I'm going to start with what's been sitting on my shelf for about a year, House of Leaves. It gets a lot of flak around here so I'm genuinely curious; wanted to start it up about a million times but never really got to it. Yeah, it's fairly divisive, although I think the general consensus amongst readers is that the Navidson Record parts are at least pretty entertaining. I keep wanting to re-read the book but I'm not sure I can technically call it a proper re-read if I ignore everything else involving Johnny Truant. Ugh, Johnny Truant 
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Jan 2, 2015 17:05
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Out of the poetry I've read recently, I'd recommend Warsan Shire's Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and also the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as poetry that's not too difficult to get into. The Rubaiyat's a lot of fun. Very hedonistic. Teaching My Mother was published a few years ago. It's much more grim and personal. Both are quite short, so you're not at much of a loss if you don't end up liking them.
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Jan 3, 2015 13:25
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Off to a good start  I'm going to miss this momentum when uni starts again.Added links for longer reviews that are going to clog up the page otherwise. Leaves of Grass (1st edn) - Walt Whitman The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides Frankenstein - Mary Shelley The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg Better than good, but not quite great. None of the advice is particularly mind-blowing or something I haven't heard a dozen times before, but it was still useful to hear again. I'd say the biggest draw of the book is the sheer amount of enthusiasm and motivation Goldberg made me feel after reading a few chapters at a time. Would have been helpful to finish this back in november for nanowrimo as I'd originally intended, but better late than never. The Virgin Suicides and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter were the definite stand-outs for this month. The Virgin Suicides was brilliant, but I've noticed I came away with a pretty different interpretation of the story compared to other people that loved it too. It seems to partly come down to how creepy you found the obsessive viewpoint characters, and how nostalgic you found the setting to be. I didn't find it nostalgic and I thought the viewpoint characters were creepy in the extreme so for me the whole thing came off as a critique of the mysterious dead girl trope and not some ode to old days passed. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was crushing in the best way. Apparently the rest of her output isn't as good, but I've heard promising things about The Member of the Wedding so I'll be keeping an eye out for that.
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Jan 28, 2015 05:10
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screenwritersblues posted:The Virgin Suicides was probably one of my favorite books that read in 2013. I was surprised by how easy it was to read and loved the fact that the entire story was told by a bunch of different narrators, which is something that everyone doesn't pick up on. I'm trying desperately to read The Marriage Plot, but it's hard to get into it. Yeah, I was surprised as well at how easy to read it was. Everything flowed so well. It was hard to put down, actually. I haven't really looked into any of his other books yet, so I'll be interested to see what you end up thinking about The Marriage Plot. I suppose I should try to tackle Middlesex at some point too. I've heard pretty mixed reviews about it from the usual people I get my book recs from, but it seems to be his defining book.
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Jan 29, 2015 07:22
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Aphra Bane posted:Off to a good start Penguin's Poems for Life - edited by Laura Barber Tales of Hoffmann - E. T. A. Hoffmann Persuasion - Jane Austen PopSugar's 2015 reading challenge: 13/50 (I'm combining some of the challenge criteria, hence why the number's higher than books I've actually read) Penguin's Poems for Life was disappointing. It introduced me to some new interesting poets and a good chunk of its poems were decent, but overall it was just kind of bland and uninspired. Tales of Hoffman was a lot more interesting. Some of his stories were genuinely entertaining and creepy, though a lot of them had the same story arc and character types, which got tedious. Persuasion was great. It was such an uneventful book, really, yet compelling in all its restrained character interactions. I kept wanting Anne Elliot to be more assertive, but she was so resigned to her life, and believably so. Ugh, Austen's stories are so suffocating to read sometimes. But the romance aspect was really well done. Overall it was a lot more melancholic than I was expecting. An appropriate final novel to have been published, I guess.
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Mar 2, 2015 06:16
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Aphra Bane posted:Penguin's Poems for Life - edited by Laura Barber Whoops, it's been a while. House of Many Ways - Diana Wynne Jones. Fun, if rambling, and unexpectedly disturbing at times. Freedom Bound vol. 1 - Patricia Grimshaw. Transcriptions of Australian historical documents. Pretty dry. Religion, Culture and Society - Andrew Singleton. Pretty easy reading for a textbook, thanks to its shortness and subsequent shallowness. Not bad but not an instant recommendation either. To Learn a New Song - Susannah Kay Brindle. This was a transcribed lecture about environment politics, quakerism, and not being shitheads to Indigenous Australians. Not a quaker but I like their perspective. Turned out to be a pretty inspiring read. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams Wise Child - Monica Furlong. Hyrule Historia - Patrick Thorpe Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett Current tally: 16/37 I hit a reading block for a while, but Guards! was a fun, easy read and managed to pull me out of it. I'm super pumped to start my current book, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Somehow Catherynne Valente has become one of my favourite authors without even having read any of her books. Hopefully it can live up to my expectations.
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Jul 8, 2015 16:45
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Final List for 2015 1) Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman 2) The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides 3) Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 4) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers 5) Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg 6) Penguin's Poems For Life - edited by Laura Barber 7) Tales of Hoffman - E. T. A Hoffman 8) The Dream of the Earth - Thomas Berry 9) Persuasion - Jane Austen 10) House of Many Ways - Diana Wynne Jones 11) Freedom Bound I - Patricia Grimshaw 12) Religion, Culture & Society - Andrew Singleton 13) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 14) Wise Child - Monica Furlong 15) Hyrule Historia 16) Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett 17) Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare 18) Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf 19) Deltora Quest: The Silent Forest - Emily Rodda 20) Deltora Quest: The Lake of Tears - Rodda 21) Deltora Quest: The City of Rats - Rodda 22) Deltora Quest - The Shifting Sands - Rodda 23) Old Wives' Tales - Mary Chamberlain 24) The Sacred Balance - David Suzuki 25) Distant Star - Roberto Bolano 26) The Turn of the Screw - Henry James 27) I Hate You and You Must Save Me - Jacob Clifton 28) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 29) The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland - Catherynne Valente 30) Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett 31) Time Without Clocks - Joan Lindsay 32) The Dunwich Horror - Lovecraft Managed to meet my goal ... after reducing it a tad.  Bolded my faves. This year wasn't as successful as last year numbers-wise, but I managed to knock off a bunch of books long buried in my to-read pile so it wasn't all bad.
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Dec 31, 2015 17:29
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