2015 Challenges Wrapup

By -
So how did I do this year with my challenges?  Let's take a look.


The Classics Club: I read something around 27 titles from my CC list!  But I have 35 left to go.

o's Reading England 2015 Challenge: I read 25 books in 23 counties. Pretty good!

  1. The Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales, by Gerald of Wales (Herefordshire)
  2. Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte (Yorkshire)
  3. Sister of the Angels, by Elizabeth Goudge (Somerset)
  4. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis (Warwickshire) 
  5. Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome (Berkshire) 
  6. Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens (London) 
  7. The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope (Wiltshire) 
  8. King Lear, by William Shakespeare (Gloucestershire)
  9. Henry V, by William Shakespeare (Hampshire)
  10. Dr. Wortle's School, by Anthony Trollope (Northamptonshire)
  11. The Dean's Watch, by Elizabeth Goudge (Cambridgeshire)
  12. Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope (Rutland) 
  13. Poetry by Wordsworth (Cumberland) 
  14. The Provincial Lady in Wartime, by E. M. Delafield (Devon) 
  15. The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (Essex) 
  16. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, by John Donne (London again) 
  17. Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by the Venerable Bede (Tyne and Wear) 
  18. Kit's Wilderness, by David Almond (County Durham) 
  19. Five Children on the Western Front, by Kate Saunders (Kent) 
  20. The Old Straight Track (Herefordshire, again) 
  21. Lucky Jim, by Kingley Amis (West Midlands) 
  22. Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell (Cheshire) 
  23. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm (Oxfordshire)
  24. Mantlemass Chronicles, by Barbara Willard (Sussex)
  25. The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennett  (Staffordshire) 

Adam's TBR Pile Challenge:  I read 12 titles, using one alternate and finding that two titles were pretty well unreadable.

  1.  The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
  2. The Travels, by Marco Polo
  3. Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene Genovese * (DNF fail)
  4. Muhammad: Prophet of God, by Daniel Peterson (this is a secular biography)
  5. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichio Tanizaki *
  6. The Gulag Archipelago (abridged), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn *
  7. The History of the Renaissance World, by Susan Wise Bauer
  8. Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens *
  9. The Secret History, by Procopius
  10. Eight Pieces of Empire, by Lawrence Scott Sheets
  11. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
  12. Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  1. Crotchet Castle, by Thomas Love Peacock (DNF fail)
  2. Fairy Tale as Myth, by Jack Zipes
The Introverted Reader's Books in Translation Challenge: I read 33 books in 21 languages from 4 continents.

  1.  Prisoners of Power, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Russian)
  2. The Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales, by Gerald of Wales (Latin)
  3. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, by Victor Serge (French) 
  4. Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke (German) 
  5. Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal (Czech) 
  6. The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz (Polish)
  7. The Story of My Experiments With Truth, by Gandhi (Gujarati)
  8. Analects of Confucius (Chinese) 
  9. The Royal Game and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig (German) 
  10. Faust (Part I), by Goethe (German) 
  11. RUR, by Karel Capek , and three other Capek plays (Czech) 
  12. Sanaaq, by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (Inuttitut) 
  13. Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht (German) 
  14. The Secret History, by Procopius (Greek) 
  15. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki (Japanese) 
  16. Falling in Love: Stories from Ming China, trans. by Hanan (Chinese)
  17. My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad (Persian)
  18. The Song of the Volsungs (Old Norse) 
  19. An African in Greenland (French) 
  20. The Cloud Messenger, by Kalidasa (Sanskrit) 
  21. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by the Venerable Bede (Latin) 
  22. The Gulag Archipelago (abridged ed.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian) 
  23. Arabian Nights and Days, by Nahguib Mahfouz (Arabic) 
  24. Tevye the Dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish)
  25. The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson (Swedish) 
  26. The Hand of a Great Master, by Konstanineh Gamsakhurdia (Georgian)
  27. The Ancrene Riwle (Anglo-Saxon)
  28. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian)
  29. The Castle, by Franz Kafka (German) 
  30. Women and Appletrees, by Moa Martinson (Swedish)
  31. Chaka, by Thomas Mofolo (Sesotho)
  32. The Travels of Marco Polo (Old French/Italian) 
  33. The Absolute at Large, by Karel Capek (Czech)

Fanda's Literary Movements Challenge: This is the one I fell down on.  It took me three months to read The Brothers Karamazov, and I didn't read anything for the last three months' categories (except I am reading The Symmetry Teacher for December right now, but I probably won't finish before Dec. 31!)  This, woe is me, is the first time I have failed a challenge.  As my husband would say, ¡qué lástima!  Final count: 9 out of 12.
 

January :-- The Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales, by Gerald of Wales
February :-- King Lear and Henry V, by William Shakespeare
March :-- Faust, by Goethe and The Essay on Man, by Pope
April :-- Pieces of Blake, Bits of Wordsworth, and Two Drovers by Scott
May :-- Work, by Louisa May Alcott
June :--The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
July :--The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James (total failure) James' short stories
August :-- The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
September:-- The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky
October :-- Light in August, by Faulkner
November :--...Something by Kerouac?
December :--The Symmetry Teacher, by Andrei Bitov

Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge:  I read books for all 12 categories, finishing in October.


2.  A 20th Century Classic -- The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki (1957, English trans.)
 3.  A Classic by a Woman Author. Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell
7.  A Classic with a Person's Name in the Title-- Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte
8.  A Humorous or Satirical Classic. -- Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome
 9.  A Forgotten Classic. Street of the Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
10.  A Nonfiction Classic.  The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
11.  A Classic Children's Book. The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
12.  A Classic Play. -- King Lear, by William Shakespeare

I had some good challenges this year, and it was a lot of fun.  Thanks everybody!

Comments

  1. CleoDecember 26, 2015 at 4:34 PM

    Congratulations, Jean! You did a great job with your challenges. The Literary Movement challenge was a hard one (and I was too chicken to join). Do you have all your challenges chosen yet for 2016?

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanDecember 26, 2015 at 4:56 PM

    Yep. I'm sticking with the basics for 2016, but I sure wish someone would come up with a medieval lit challenge! I was tempted by the Greek one you joined, but then I would have to commit to reading Herodotus and Thucydides, because those are my big Greek TBRs. I'm not sure I want to do that. Still thinking about it, I guess.

    Anyway, my 2016 challenges post is in the works. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. oDecember 29, 2015 at 12:00 AM

    Well done! And thanks for joining Reading England - there's a good few I hadn't heard of or didn't know where they were set, so thanks for your research, too :)

    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