Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
A few years ago, I decided to set up a list of twenty books that I had been meaning to read and set myself the goal of reading just a few pages each night. That seemed less difficult somehow to my brain. It worked! Since then, I have read many interesting books that I might have left sitting around waiting and waiting to be picked up.
Challenge:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/...
4. A test of one's abilities or resources in a demanding but stimulating undertaking…
7. To summon to action, effort, or use; stimulate: a problem that challenges the imagination.
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/...
1 something that needs a lot of skill, energy, and determination to deal with or achieve, especially something you have never done before and will enjoy doing.
In addition to the challenge books, I still read many other books each year.
Why the book may end up on a challenge list:
1. It is huge (maybe 800 or 900 pages). I do want to read it and I like the topic, but I look at the size and cringe. As a challenge book, I keep it at hand and surprise myself.
2. It is sad. I know I want to read it and that I will be inspired, but I know it is going to be hard on my heart.
3. A friend loved it. It may have been a gift. I meant to read it, but it kept falling to the bottom of the pile. I am ashamed to let it languish any longer.
4. Short stories. I love fantasy short stories, but somehow I don’t pick up the book. Each short story takes a lot out of me because they are that good. They are intense. As a challenge book, I get going on them.
5. Autobiographies, essays, poems, books on how to write…all good books, but not mysteries or exciting so they slide down the pile.
6. I started it, I liked it, but something happened and it got laid aside.
7. I read a library book and realized I wanted to own the book and re-read it slowly.
8. I loved the book long ago and have been wishing to do a re-read, but I keep finding excuses.
I really do not put on my challenge list a book that I do not want to read. I am not a martyr to the idea that I have to read a book if it is in my house. Honest! I have learned better.
I know that my mood is an important part of why I choose to pick up one book over another. I know that I shouldn’t depend on the mood striking me right to pick up a difficult book even though I know I will be glad I did. I need the extra push to do it.
Over the past years I have really been glad that I read the books on my challenge list, not just to be done with them, but because they were good books. Once, I got half way through a book and decided I must not continue and I replaced it with a huge book of Calvino’s Italian Folktales that I had put off for 30 years. I am glad I did that.
I don’t really have to read all twenty if I don’t want to do so. As I remember, the first year I didn’t manage it. I always surprise myself when I do manage all of them, though.
This year I had too many books for one list so some had to be put off until next year or maybe read this year as a regular book from the tottering To-Be-Read pile.
Yes, the photo is new and those are the twenty challenge books.
The lists from the last two years
My 2010 Book Challenge List which I finished
1. Our Choice by Al Gore
2. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
3. The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama
4. Resistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnes Humbert
5. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
7. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
8. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen Sears
9. Fredericksburg Campaign by Francis Augustin O'Reilly
10. The Race for Timbuktu by Frank Kryza
11. Walt Whitman’s Civil War by Lowenfels
12. The Better Angel by Roy Morris also about Whitman in the Civil War
13. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
14. The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
15. Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz, a memoir
16. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
17. The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
18. Four Sisters of Hofei by Annping Chin
19. Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortensen
20. The Devil’s Brood by Sharon Kay Penman
(I admit that I did hate number 16 above, but I finished it anyway.)
............
Challenge books for 2011 which I finished
1. Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life by Vincent Dowling
2. Thunder Below by Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey
3. City of Dreams: A Novel of Nieuw Amsterdam by Beverly Swerling
4. The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga by Edward Rutherfurd
5. Chancellorsville by Stephen Sears
6. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
7. Fifth Business
8. The Manticore
9. World of Wonders
10. Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill
11. The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
12. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
13. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
14. Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
15. The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke 966 pages
16. The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith
17. Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
18. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
19. The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins
20. The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin
My challenge list for 2012
The First Ten:
1. No End Save Victory: Perspectives on World War II (3/5/2002)
Robert Cowley (Editor)
http://www.powells.com/...
Publisher Comments:
Essays on the most pivotal military conflict of the twentieth century written by renowned historians and presented by the editor of the acclaimed What If?
No reader interested in twentieth-century history and the Second World War will want to miss this collection of fascinating essays. In more than two hundred thousand words and twenty maps, some of the most respected and well-known military historians of our time describe the horror and heroism that defined a generation: the chaos of Europe and the Nazi reign of terror prior to D day; the far-flung fight in East Asia and the Pacific; the secret struggle of intelligence services; the final Allied push into Central Europe; and the atomic end in Japan.
Stephen E. Ambrose tells the miraculous story of a single American company that captured a bridge over the Rhine-a river Hitler had considered a barrier never to be broken. John Keegan takes us inside Berlin in the Spring of 1945 during the most intense city siege in history. William Manchester reminds us of the vital importance of the RAF's radar towers during the Battle of Britain, one of the truly hair-raising "narrow misses" of the war. In two pieces, Caleb Carr illuminates the only war Hilter won-the Blitzkrieg campaign over Poland in 1939-and brings to life the German "Black Knight," Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who so inspired his troops in late 1944 that he may have prolonged the war another six months.
Essays from other illustrious contributors include Antony Beevor on Stalingrad; Victor Davis Hanson on General Curtis LeMay; Eliot A. Cohen on Churchill; and Alistair Horne on Montgomery.
2. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (9/20/2011)
by Edwidge Danticat
Video with Edwidge here talking about this book
http://www.pbs.org/...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."—Create Dangerously
In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus' lecture, "Create Dangerously," and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself, who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them…
3. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 (11/28/1989) by Taylor Branch
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder…
From Barnes & Noble
Branch took home multiple honors - including the Pulitzer Prize - for this sweeping examination of America, race, and the emerging Civil Rights effort. King is very much of his age, yet ahead of the times. Epic in scope, rich in detail, Parting the Waters is Branch's first volume of a planned trilogy on King.
4. Highways to a War (6/1/1996) by Christopher J. Koch
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
In a riveting new novel of wartime Cambodia and Vietnam--part thriller, part mystery, part heroic epic--the author of The Year of Living Dangerously offers the story of a likeable, brave, but ultimately mysterious war photographer who has disappeared into the jungles of Cambodia.
5. An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography (2/27/2007) by Paul Rusesabagina
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
The remarkable life story of the man who inspired the film Hotel Rwanda
Readers who were moved and horrified by Hotel Rwanda will respond even more intensely to Paul Rusesabagina's unforgettable autobiography. As Rwanda was thrown into chaos during the 1994 genocide, Rusesabagina, a hotel manager, turned the luxurious Hotel Milles Collines into a refuge for more than 1,200 Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees, while fending off their would-be killers with a combination of diplomacy and deception.
In An Ordinary Man, he tells the story of his childhood, retraces his accidental path to heroism, revisits the 100 days in which he was the only thing standing between his “guests” and a hideous death, and recounts his subsequent life as a refugee and activist.
6. Zeitoun (6/15/2010) by Dave Eggers
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In this startling and deeply humane work of nonfiction, readers will witness our country's worst natural disaster through new eyes, encountering all the hope and contradiction of a unique moment in American history.
7. Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China (6/2/2009) by Diane Wei Liang
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Diane Wei Liang, creator of the Mei Wang literary mystery series, brings us a tale as spellbinding as any she could invent: her own love story, intertwined with the dramatic history of modern China, including the international trauma of Tiananmen Square.
Shedding a new light on history: Liang fled Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and returned to Beijing six years later in an attempt to find her sweetheart, from whom she had been separated once the troops rolled in. With her graceful, confident voice, Liang is the perfect author to shine a light on this moment in history, telling her true, dramatic story at a time when the world’s eyes are focused once again on China…
8. Best of Edward Abbey by Edward Abbey , Edward Abbey (Editor) , Edward Abbey (Illustrator)
Publication Date: July 1, 2005
This is the only major collection of Abbey’s writings compiled by the author himself: in his own words, “to present what I think is both the best and most representative of my writing—so far.” It serves up a rich feast of fiction and prose by the singular American writer whom Larry McMurtry called “the Thoreau of the American West.”
Devoted Abbey fans along with readers just discovering his work will find a mother lode of treasures here: generous chunks of his best novels, including The Brave Cowboy, Black Sun, and his classic The Monkey Wrench Gang; and more than a score of his evocative, passionate, trenchant essays—a genre in which he produced acknowledged masterpieces such as Desert Solitaire. Scattered throughout are the author’s own petroglyph-style sketches.
This new edition adds selections from work that appeared shortly before Abbey’s death: a chapter from Hayduke Lives!, the hilarious sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang; excerpts from his revealing journals; and examples of his poetry. A new foreword by Doug Peacock—Abbey’s close friend and the model for the flamboyant activist Hayduke—offers a fond appreciation of this larger-than-life figure in American letters.
9. The Writing Life (8/28/1990) by Annie Dillard
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
With color, irony and sensitivity, Pulitzer prize-winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes, The Writing Life offers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions.
10. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (5/28/2000) by Neal Stephenson
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Set in twenty-first century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens when a state-of-the-art interactive device falls in the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life—and the entire future of humanity—is about to be decoded and reprogrammed…
Stephenson looks at a future ruled by Neo-Victorian thought, and the brilliant technologist who publishes an illegal primer designed to encourage girls to think for themselves.
The Rest:
11. Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
12. Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs
13. The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis
14. The Sword of Knowledge, an anthology of fantasy stories
15. Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stores of Frederic Pohl
16. Wings of Fire, an anthology of dragon stories
17. Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Trillin
18. All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell
19. The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley
20. Downtown: My Manhattan by Pete Hamill
Did you try a challenge list this past year? How did you do? Did it work for you?
Are you thinking of trying a challenge list this year? What books will you have on it?
Diaries of the week
Write On! Enter the villain.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
In memory:
Literature for Kossacks: Vaclav Havel
by pico
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Please read!
R&BLers: Mulling Things Over
by Limelite
http://www.dailykos.com/...
NOTE: plf515 has book talk on Wednesday mornings early.