Goodreads 2014 Challenge

Every year I set out to read 50 books by the end of the year. I open myself up to possible online shaming by posting this goal on Goodreads. I started these challenges in 2011 and have yet to accomplish one once. The failings haven’t hit too hard though. I committed myself to the challenge after I realized that I hadn’t finished one single book over a couple of years.

Since then, my average book reading hovers around 30 each year. The only limitation for the Goodreads tracking is that they don’t include books I’ve already read and I’m a big believer of the reread. 2014 has not exactly been a banner year for reading in the Ria house. Every rationale spills out of my mouth like cheap excuses so I’ll just say my 2014 reading is at 18. Gulp. I am in the middle of several books right now and have over 3 months for redemption from feeling a little less wretched.

An article popped up on my reader via Joy the Baker reminding me why I started the challenge in the first place. Also, every year I invariably fall in love with a new book(s).

Here are the books I’m currently reading:

Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: This is a very buzzy book and I adored Donna Tartt’s writing since The Secret History. So far, I am not disappointed.

Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems: My guidelines for “book” are less stringent than just novels and after reading The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas, this felt like a natural next.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: This was September’s book club book and I’ve only read the first page. Oops. Must finish.

Neuromancer by William Gibson: After reading Idoru and Pattern Recognition, I thought I’d be ready for Neuromancer. Nope. I have not given up because I’m stubborn. But 62 pages in and I have no idea what’s going on.

Advertisements

4 thoughts on “Goodreads 2014 Challenge

  1. Bad Gifter says:

    Neuromancer (stupid spellcheck made me re-type that SEVEN times!) was Gibson’s first foray into long form fiction, so it can be a bit abstruse at times. But I think the pay-off is worth it. It sort of gets “Citizen Kaned” a bit by modern sci-fi readers, just because what he did is kind of old hat now, but it was crazy ground-breaking back in the day.

    My dream is that once you plow through Neuromancer you’ll want to tackle the whole sprawl trilogy, but as it is, I’m pretty darned excited that you’re just reading this.

    Like

  2. Bad Gifter says:

    Also, I don’t know why this came to me (the Citizen Kane reference, pro’lly) but I just checked out an excellent Jane Eyre movie from the library. It had Orson Wells as Rochester. He was properly dramatic.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://rianaria.com/2014/09/21/goodreads-2014-challenge/
rianaria.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-34
80139
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Y36SQYBQYS42RSH2SHYE23RERGNJJM66
<urn:uuid:3c1d6ad9-5014-4ee1-8fe2-ce7d0dbead9e>
2018-08-21T01:57:09Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:MIXHSLXJDU2ESBVAIN77AT5AVOR7RUNS
<urn:uuid:b9c92237-56f0-48e6-8649-985380240c45>
https://rianaria.com/2014/09/21/goodreads-2014-challenge/
response
<urn:uuid:4c0872ed-5b66-4b8c-aa52-b089b72bbaeb>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-11-199-188.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/