Good morning!
🚨Long Book Post Alert🚨
As mentioned in my welcome post, I am pursuing a minor in English. This minor is a result of my love for English and my need to take a break from the math and science associated with an engineering degree. Taking these English (mostly literature) classes forces me to take a break and to continue reading throughout college (which is very difficult for most college students to do).
For this semester, Spring '19, I am taking a World Literature class which includes works by authors from India, China, Japan, Chile, and Nigeria. Along with these works I am also trying to get back into reading for my own enjoyment. This year I was introduced to the Goodreads and Popsugar challenges which have started to help guide me in my reading pursuits.
For those who don't know, Goodreads is powered by Amazon and tracks the books you want to read, are reading, and have read and contain a social feature to connect with others as well as a place to enter ratings for books you have read (which will be transferred to and from Amazon). The challenge associated with Goodreads is a simple, each individual chooses how many books they want to read for the year, and as they tell Goodreads that they have finished a book, it gets added to their challenge.
My Goodreads goal this year was 16: a little over 1 book a month. This should be easily doable, but that was my point for my first year doing this. I didn't want to stress about having to read even 2 books a month if school ended up becoming more in the way than I thought at the beginning of 2019. This is where I currently am at:
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| Goodreads Challenge as of 3/6/19 |
The other challenge I am participating in is the 2019 Popsugar Challenge. This gives a list of prompts which helps readers reach out of their comfort zone and find new types of things to read. The 2019 challenge is given below, and although my number of books read for the year does not come close to the amount required to read for this challenge, I do want to use it to help guide my "fun" books and also see where my required reading for my minor falls in line with the prompts. I am also counting the same book for multiple prompts which most people who are reading much more than 16 books this year will not do.
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| Popsugar Challenge 2019 |
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (completed)
- My first reading of the year was a reread of a short story **SPOILERS**: about a woman who is driven insane by the movement in the yellow wallpaper in the room she is living in while going through postpartum depression.
- Goodreads:
- #1/16
- Popsugar:
- A book that makes you nostalgic
- A reread of a favorite book
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (completed)
- My first novel I read for my English class. The narrator, Ma, and his best friend, Lou, are stuck in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960's, and have been forced to go to a re-education camp on Phoenix Mountain in order to be taught how to be good Communist farmers instead of intellectuals who might overthrow the Chairman, Mao Zedong. This book shows the incredible power of reading and knowledge and how it can change people and how reading from other cultures can have a great impact on how you view your own culture and even yourself. As someone who is trying to get back into my love for reading, this was an incredibly uplifting and motivating read.
- Goodreads:
- #2/16
- Popsugar:
- A book about a hobby (reading)
- A book with an item of clothing or accessory on the cover
- A book written by an author from Asia, Africa, or South America (China)
- the author was Chinese, but was exiled and wrote this book while in France and in French
- A book told from multiple character POVs
- there are three chapters told from the point of view of characters who are not the narrator
- A novel based on a true story
- I highly suggest looking up the Cultural Revolution before reading this novel
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (not completed, 58%)
- My first "fun" novel of the year. Summary from Goodreads: "Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks. Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere."
- Goodreads:
- not completed
- Popsugar:
- A book told from multiple character POVs (again)
- potentially more after finished reading
- The Library Book by Susan Orlean (not completed, %)
- I actually won this book through Reese Witherspoon's book club on Instagram and only recently began to read it. From Goodreads: "On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?" Orlean recounts her experience in learning about the fires after moving to California as well as counts from the day of the fire and through the investigation.
- Goodreads:
- not completed
- Popsugar:
- A book recommended by a celebrity you admire
- Reese Witherspoon
- A novel based on a true story (again)
- potentially more after finished reading
- A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (not completed, 13%)
- My second novel for my World Literature class. From Goodreads: "Kenzaburō Ōe, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, is internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. The Swedish Academy lauded Ōe for his 'poetic force [that] creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.' His most personal book, A Personal Matter, is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child."
- Goodreads:
- not completed
- Popsugar:
- A book written by an author from Asia, Africa, or South America (China)
- the author was Japanese and the book was written in Japan
- A book you think should be turned into a movie
- potentially more after finished reading
Be on the lookout for my updates, book on, and follow my bookstagram @bookz.bez!!
-T
