2023 TBR Challenges

By

I'm going to continue with Bev's TBR challenges in 2023.

 

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. Map Drawn By a Spy, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba)
  2. The Green Roads of England, by Hippisley-Cox
  3. The World of Odysseus, by M. I. Finley
  4. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, by Drakulic
  5. Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey (Ghana)
  6. Pageants of Despair, by Dennis Hamley (this is a children's book??)
  7. The Way to the Sea, by Caroline Crampton
  8. Ransom for a Knight, by Barbara Leonie Picard
  9. The High Book of the Grail (Perlesvaus), ed. Nigel Bryant
  10. How Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt
  11. Samson's Hoard, by John Verney
  12. Hippolyte's Island, by Barbara Hodgson
  13. Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  14. Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum

 


The Mount TBR Reading Challenge is simple: pick how high you want to go.  As always, I'll be aiming for 24 books from the pile, though that is not nearly as many as I should read

Excelsior!


Pike's Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s
Mount Blanc: Read 24 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Vancouver: Read 36 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR piles/s
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 60 books from your TBR pile/s
El Toro: Read 75 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Everest: Read 100 books from your TBR pile/s
Mount Olympus (Mars): Read 150+ books from your TBR pile/s


My pile is bigger than ever, so I'm signing right up for 24 titles: Mont Blanc.

Titles read:

  1. Hippolyte's Island, by Barbara Hodgson
  2. The Forgetting Room, by Nick Bantock
  3. The Inugami Curse, by Seishi Yokomizo
  4. Samson's Hoard, by John Verney
  5. The Origins of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, by Andrew Breeze
  6. The Green Roads of England, by Hippesley-Cox
  7.  The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women, by Rosalie Gilbert
  8. Expanding the Borders of Zion, by Charlie Bird
  9. Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Anne Applebaum
  10.   Carrie's War, by Nina Bawden
  11.  Map Drawn by a Spy, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
  12.  Letters From Russia, by Astolphe de Custine
  13. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by Sara Nickerson  
  14. Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  15. High Book of the Grail
  16. The World of Odysseus, by M. I. Finley
  17. Ransom for a Knight, by Barbara Leonie Picard
  18. The Way to the Sea, by Caroline Crampton
  19. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, by Drakulic
  20. Pageants of Despair, by Dennis Hamley
  21. Codependent Discipleship
  22.  


 The Virtual Mount TBR Challenge is library-based, which is good for me because my pile of library books is nearly as large as my actual TBR pile.   If the book is on your mental TBR list, and you get it from the library, it counts.  I'll be aiming for Mt. Crumpit, which is also 24 books.  Naturally, the virtual mountains are fictional.

 I decided to create a Virtual Mount TBR Reading Challenge Books for all those folks with mile-long "wish-list" of TBRs who would like a chance to climb as well. The strategy and general set-up is the same--except you don't have to own the books. Heard about a great book from a friend, took note of the title, and then never got around to reading it? Saw a book online that you thought sounded intriguing but you keep putting off ordering it up from the library? You borrowed a book from somebody and need an extra push to read it and return it? This is the place for you!
 Challenge Levels:
Mount Rum Doodle: Read 12 books
Mount Crumpit: Read 24 books 
Mount Munch: Read 36 books
White Plume Mountain: Read 48 books 
Stormness Head: Read 60 books 
Mount Mindolluin: Read 75 books 
Mount Seleya: Read 100 books
Mount Olympus: Read 150+ books 

My library-books bookshelf is just as stuffed as my TBR bookshelf, so this will be good for me.  I am pretty much going to limit myself to books from the library that I've been meaning to read since before Jan. 1, 2021.  That is a lot of books.  I'll aim for Mount Crumpit, 24 books.  Also, I think the image for this challenge is great!

Titles read:

  1. The Story of Roland, by James Baldwin
  2. North to Paradise, by Ousman Umar
  3. The Story of Seigfried, by James Baldwin
  4. Frozen Time, by Anna Kim
  5. Dark Archives, by Megan Rosenbloom
  6. A Place for Everything, by Judith Flanders
  7. Motl the Cantor's Son, by Sholem Aleichem
  8. Old Norse Women's Poetry: the Voices of Female Skalds, by Sandra Ballif Straubhaar
  9.  Death on Gokumon Island, by Seishi Yokomizo 
  10.  The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, by Todd B. Kashdan
  11.  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
  12.  

Comments

  1. Bev HankinsDecember 31, 2021 at 11:58 AM

    Thanks for joining me and congratulations on making your goals!

    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

CC Spin #36: Rob Roy

By
Image
 Success!  I had a little trouble with this one, because I was trying to read it on my phone, and that was just not working very well.  I was less than halfway through and March was looming, but a nice Penguin copy came across the donation table and I took it home.  After that, it was easy to read 50 pages a day and zoom through... Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott When I read The Heart of Mid-Lothian , I was surprised that it wasn't about Jacobites adventuring all over the highlands, but that turns out to be Rob Roy.  Honestly I preferred Jeanie Deans, but this was quite fun.  I can see why stay-at-home English folks of the mid 1800s loved reading this! It's 1715, and our narrator is Frank Osbaldistone, whose father is a London businessman.  Young Frank prefers art and poetry to accounting (and doesn't quite see why he should work hard when his dad has plenty of money), and his exasperated dad sends him off to cousins in Northumberland, pointing out that he who does not work do
Read more