2015 Reading Challenge Intro

I’m taking part in a reading challenge that’s doing the rounds on Facebook.

 

I’ll be letting books count towards more than one heading for several reasons – I have a fairly busy year planned and didn’t have the time to read as much as I wanted last year. I’ve also found I write less the more I read, and I want to get more of my own writing done. If things go well, I may change my mind and try to read a book for each category, but I’d rather start this way and not feel like I’ve let myself down if I don’t manage it.

I’m currently reading Faust by Robert Nye. My Dad and Step-Mum are sincere bibliophiles who periodically run out of shelf-space, at which point Husbit and I tend to acquire new books. This is one that was passed to me some years ago and has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read ever since. It also has a one-word title, is set in a different country, is by an author I’ve never read before, has magic in it, is making me laugh, and is a book that has been at the bottom of my “to-read” list.

I’ve just picked up two books by Gail Carriger (Heartless and Timeless, parts 4 and 5 of the ‘ParasolProtectorate’ series). I re-read the first three in the series between Christmas and New Year. I was on a bit of a re-reading kick, starting with The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and moving onto Sergei Lukyanenko’s ‘Watch’ series (which would have covered a few categories, had I known of this challenge sooner - though I've just learned there's a fifth, so I may still be able to use this) before picking up Soulless again. These (Heartless and Timeless) count as one word titles and I think set in another country for at least one – and they’re written by a woman.

The paperback version of PatrickRothfuss’s The Slow Regard of SilentThings comes out in October of this year and I’m really excited about that. It will definitely count as an unread book by a loved author.

My OU course books will certainly count as non-fiction, though I’ll probably find other options on this.

The book started but never finished concerns me a little – this gives me Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which I started a few months ago but found hard to read on my tablet (I kept wanting to make notes in the margin or highlight bits of text); Don Quixote, which I was reading on my e-reader and found to be very hard going with insufficient interest in the story to get me past that; and a book I started in my last week of middle school, thinking I would have time to finish it but ultimately not and had to return to the school library. I can’t remember what it was called, let alone who it was by, but the premise was that Elizabeth I was reading her mother’s diaries. I think (though I may very well be wrong) that the title included the word ‘labyrinth’.

The book I should have read at school but didn’t is also causing a dilemma, because I genuinely can’t think of one. I might read one of Shakespeare’s history plays – I read most of the plays I was meant to at uni, but struggled with the histories.

As I go through, I’ll try to give reviews (or at least mini reviews) of the books I’m reading. Book reviews is something I’ve been meaning to do here for a while anyway, so this is good motivation.

Anyone else taking part in the challenge? Any particular books or categories have you particularly excited or worried?