Mount TBR Checkpoint 3

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Time for a Mount TBR checkpoint.  Holy cow, I only have a few months left on this.  Help.  Bev says:

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. 

2. Complete ONE (or more if you like) of the following:
A. Who has been your favorite character so far? And tell us why, if you like.
B. Pair up two of your reads. But this time we're going for opposites. One book with a male protagonist and one with a female protagonist. One book with "Good" in the title and one with "Evil." Get creative and show off a couple of your books.
C. Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge without reading it all?
D. Choose 1-4 titles from your stacks and using a word from the title, do an image search.  Post the first all-eyes-friendly picture associated with that word.


Titles read:
  1. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
  2. Cromartie v. the God Shiva... by Rumer Godden
  3. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
  4. Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak
  5. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke 
  6. The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  7. The Umbrella Man, by Roald Dahl
  8. Reynard the Fox, trans. by James Simpson
  9. Green Dolphin Street, by Elizabeth Goudge
  10. Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington
  11.  The September Society, by Charles Finch
  12. The Fleet Street Murders, by Charles Finch
  13.  The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
  14. The Old Ways, by Robert MacFarlane 
  15. The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri
  16. Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, by Boris Akunin 
  17. Revolutionary Days, by Julia Cantacuzene 
  18. My Apprenticeship, by Maxim Gorky
  19.  Gentian Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge

I've read 19 titles, so I have five more to go to make it to my goal of Mont Blanc.  I've picked out the five in hopes of actually managing to do it, but I don't know, it's going to be close.

Favorite character?  Well, really my favorite isn't a character at all, unless you want to argue about constructed identity in memoir.  I want to go traveling around 1930s Bulgaria with Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of the travel memoir The Broken Road.  I guess I'll have to let him visit the male-only Mount Athos on his own, though.

For book pairings, we could put Revolutionary Days together with My Apprenticeship, and let the fiery Soviet writer duke it out with the aristocratic American-Russian princess.  Gentian Hill's Christian sensibilities could vie with Cromartie vs. the God Shiva's devout Hinduism (or let's bring in The Death of Vishnu to really confuse things).

Length of time on TBR pile: Gorky for sure, I picked him up back in the 1990s.  I've probably meant to read him for almost 20 years.  Although he's a little angry about everything, I'm enjoying reading the whole trilogy and looking forward to the next one (probably sometime next year).
Green Dolphin (OK, not the first, but the only one I liked)
Reynard Fox, 1860 illustration

Reynard Fox, I like this one better

Gentian

Comments

  1. KailanaOctober 4, 2016 at 6:38 AM

    The year is just flying by. Good luck working in those last five books!

    ReplyDelete

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