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The joke is on me this year. A few years ago, I began a challenge list to read the books that had fallen to the bottom of my TBR pile and stayed there for too long.
The first year, I made the mistake of adding books that I wanted to read, but did not own and then I never did buy them so after that I stayed with books that I already had on the pile.
It worked so well for years having 20 books on the list that I shrank the pile and this year I only have seven books on the list and some of them are new. They are the sort of book that I wanted to read, but kept putting off. Now that they are on the list, it will happen.
One big rule that I made throughout the years was that these are books I do want to read.
I have been very happy each year that I chose to read the books and not let them sit forever forlorn.
Once, I found that a book was a big mistake and I replaced it with another title.
So this year I will just have seven books and they are the kind that will take me a while to read and I won’t have to rush. I may add some to the list as the year progresses…books that I want to read, but might put off if they are not on a challenge list. I tell myself that I only need to read five pages a night and I end up reading more than that.
I have been enriched by the great books I have read the past years so I invite you to try a challenge list. It can be any number of books…even one. But it should be a book you really do want to read and have been putting off. That makes it a special victory when you finish the story.
My 2015 Challenge list:
1. Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
National Book Award Finalist
From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
2. Endangered Species by Gene Wolfe
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
… This is a hefty volume of over 30 unforgettable stories in a variety of genres— SF, fantasy, horror, mainstream-many of them offering variations on themes and situations found in folklore and fairy tales, and including two stories, "The Cat" and "The Map," which are set in the universe of his New Sun novels. Wolfe's deconstructions/reconstructions are provocative, multilayered, and resonant. This embarrassment of literary riches is a must for all Gene Wolfe fans, and anyone who loves a good tale beautifully told.
3. American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
… Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time.”
How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slave-holding state in the country.
4. The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy.
As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.
Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.
Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end—and created a culture that sustains America’s deepest dreams of freedom.
5. The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones by Thomas Asbridge (new)
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
A renowned scholar brings to life medieval England’s most celebrated knight, William Marshal—providing an unprecedented and intimate view of this age and the legendary warrior class that shaped it.
Caught on the wrong side of an English civil war and condemned by his father to the gallows at age five, William Marshal defied all odds to become one of England’s most celebrated knights. Thomas Asbridge’s rousing narrative chronicles William’s rise, using his life as a prism to view the origins, experiences, and influence of the knight in British history.
In William’s day, the brutish realities of war and politics collided with romanticized myths about an Arthurian “golden age,” giving rise to a new chivalric ideal. Asbridge details the training rituals, weaponry, and battle tactics of knighthood, and explores the codes of chivalry and courtliness that shaped their daily lives. These skills were essential to survive one of the most turbulent periods in English history—an era of striking transformation, as the West emerged from the Dark Ages.
A leading retainer of five English kings, Marshal served the great figures of this age, from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart and his infamous brother John, and was involved in some of the most critical phases of medieval history, from the Magna Carta to the survival of the Angevin/Plantagenet dynasty. Asbridge introduces this storied knight to modern readers and places him firmly in the context of the majesty, passion, and bloody intrigue of the Middle Ages.
The Greatest Knight features 16 pages of black-and-white and color illustrations.
6. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age by William Manchester
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
From tales of chivalry and valor to the barbarity of the Inquisition and the devastation of the plague, no era has been a greater source of fascination and horror than the Middle Ages. With extraordinarily crafted prose, acclaimed historian William Manchester takes us on a vividly painted journey into the medieval mind.
We travel from the depths of the Dark Ages to the heights of the rebirth that spawned some of history's greatest artists and thinkers—and that eventually ushered the West into the brilliance of the Renaissance. For Manchester, the man who best epitomized this new quest for knowledge in a changing world was Ferdinand Magellan, the great circumnavigator, whose inspiring story Manchester dramatically recounts, along with the stories of countless medieval men and women from every walk of life who influenced and changed the course of history.
7. Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Overview
There are still places on earth that are unknown. Visually stunning and uniquely designed, this wondrous book captures fifty islands that are far away in every sense-from the mainland, from people, from airports, and from holiday brochures. Author Judith Schalansky used historic events and scientific reports as a springboard for each island, providing information on its distance from the mainland, whether its inhabited, its features, and the stories that have shaped its lore. With stunning full-color maps and an air of mysterious adventure, Atlas of Remote Island is perfect for the traveler or romantic in all of us.
(I admit that I was disappointed in this book when it first arrived so I am not sure if I will do well with it or not).
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Unreliable Narrators
by Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Kos Katalogue 2014 Holiday Mothership - HOTLIST THIS!!
by Sara R
http://www.dailykos.com/...
NOTE: plf515 has book talk on Wednesday mornings early
Note: Bookflurries will not be here on Christmas Eve or New Year’s
Eve.