2015 Challenges Wrapup

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 lástimaFinal 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. 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. 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. 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

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