TBR Challenges

By -

 Is three TBR challenges too many?  I guess we'll find out!  Adam is back with his Official TBR Challenge, and Deb can always be depended on for the Mount TBR and Virtual Mount TBR (for library books!).  Here we go:

The Official TBR Pile Challenge returns at Adam's Roof Beam Reader blog.  Adam requires that the list be selected ahead of time, and here it is, 12 titles plus two alternates:


  1. The Eternal Husband and other stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  2. Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
  3. The High Book of the Grail (Perlesvaus), ed. Nigel Bryant
  4. We Never Make Mistakes and other essays by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  5. A Word From Wormingford, by Ronald Blythe
  6. Needle and Thread: A Tale of Survival from Bialystok to Paris, by Charles Zabuski
  7. The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford
  8. Mink River, by Brian Doyle
  9. Magic Mirrors, by John Bellairs
  10. Model Children, by Paul Thorez
  11. Caldecott & Co., by Maurice Sendak
  12. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles McKay
  1. The Druids, by Peter Berresford Ellis  (possibly a new entry in the 'dodgy anthropology' section, don't know yet)
  2. Mysteries of the Middle Ages, by Thomas Cahill


Bev, on the other hand, only requires that we choose a number of books to read for her Mount TBR Challenge, and as always, I'm going for 24. 

Same for the Virtual Mount TBR Challenge -- 24 titles.


Phew, that's a lot!  Wish me luck.

Comments

  1. Karen K.January 3, 2022 at 6:19 AM

    From your TBR Pile Challenge I've only read Our Mutual Friend, which I loved but I am a huge Dickens fan so that's not surprising! I haven't heard of that John Bellairs but I loved his early books when I was a kid -- I didn't know he'd written anything for adults, must look for this!

    I hadn't intended to sign up for any challenges this year but I might not be able to resist this one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanJanuary 3, 2022 at 12:44 PM

      The nice thing about this challenge is that it just makes me read the books that are already there and waiting. :) This Bellairs book is actually a collection of his short works that have often been hard or even impossible to find. Some of it is material I've read before, but much is new, and as a Bellairs super-fan, I'm super-excited. :)

      I've tried to read OMF once or twice, and failed so far, despite being a Thames/London addict. Imma do it this time!

      Delete
  2. Emma at Words And Peace / France Book ToursJanuary 3, 2022 at 10:07 AM

    Nice list! I'm interested to see what you think of these Russian titles.
    Here is my list:
    https://wordsandpeace.com/2022/01/03/2022-tbr-pile-reading-challenge/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bev HankinsJanuary 16, 2022 at 7:32 AM

    Jean, you've got an interesting list for Adam's challenge. I haven't read any of them, but I recently started reading John Bellairs so I'm interested to see what you think of that one. good luck with all your challenges!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanJanuary 16, 2022 at 9:04 AM

      Oh Bev, I am such a Bellairs geek it is ridiculous. I hope you love him too!

      Delete
  4. JaneJanuary 19, 2022 at 6:13 AM

    Good Luck with your challenges, I haven't read any of them so will look forward to finding out more!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Beth @ This Tangled SkeinJanuary 22, 2022 at 4:52 PM

    I don't think 3 challenges is too many. But I might not be a very good judge of such things, given my own track record. :) Good luck!!

    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 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 ...
Read more