Mount TBR Checkpoint

By -
Bev at My Reader's Block is requiring a challenge check-in.  She says:

For those who would like to participate in this checkpoint post, I'd like you to do two things:
1. Tell us how many miles you've made it up your mountain (# of books read).  If you're really ambitious, you can do some intricate math and figure out how the number of books you've read correlates to actual miles up Pike's Peak, Mt. Ararat, etc.

I started off at the basic Pike's Peak level of 12 books, and completed that a little while ago, so I moved up to Mt. Vancouver--25 books.  I've completed 14 books and am almost done with the 15th.  Here they are:
  1. The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner
  2. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
  3. The Book of Beasts, trans. T. H. White
  4. Mr. Dixon Disappears, by Ian Sansom
  5. Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock
  6. The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Stories, by M. R. James  
  7. The New Road to Serfdom, by Daniel Hannan 
  8.  Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope
  9. Winking at the Brim, by Gladys Mitchell 
  10. Lovely is the Lee, by Robert Gibbings 
  11. A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
  12.  Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
  13. Decameron, by Boccaccio
  14. Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson 
  15. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

2. Complete ONE (or more if you're ambitious) of the following:

Who has been your favorite character so far? Why?
 This is a tricky one, as half my books don't have characters, really, or they're satire or stock mystery or something.  But I do love Mary Thorne and her slightly undeserving husband Frank Gresham from the Trollope novel.  I like Siri, Susebron, and Vasher in Warbreaker.  No one else is terribly likeable--Emma Bovary is a well-drawn, fully realized character, and I am loving the book, but I would like to bonk her on the head.

Have any of the books you read surprised you--if so, in what way (not as good as anticipated? unexpected ending? Best thing you've read all year? Etc.) 
I was hoping that Boccaccio would be better than it turned out to be, and I did not expect to enjoy Madame Bovary so much.

Here's my TBR pile as it looks right now (not that much changed!): 

Comments

  1. sawcatJune 22, 2012 at 5:32 PM

    Congrats on finishing! You have a very eclectic TBR pile there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bev HankinsJune 22, 2012 at 5:34 PM

    Doing great! And you are certainly right about Emma Bovary...she needs several bonks on the head, I think.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more