2012 Challenges

Did you finish the challenge books for 2012?

Back Roads by Tawni O'Dell

 

 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

 

 

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

 

We'll continue reading Steve Jobs for the 2013 winter challenge since it's sooooo long. We need to set a meeting time to discuss Back Roads, and maybe we can just go see the movie Anna Karenina.

100 Books Project

How's the 100 Books Project coming along? Half of our club is now participating: Kate, Veronica, Linda and Karen. You can see our book lists, slideshows and montages in the right hand column.

My list includes 100 prize-winning books (Pulitzer, Man Booker, etc).
Veronica's list includes 100 books by authors she's never read before.
Linda's list includes 100 books she's acquired over the years but never read.
Karen's list includes 100 books she's been meaning to read.

We have 5 years to complete our 100 books...I'm stuck on #6.

100 Books List

If you have your 100 books list completed, email it to me and I'll put a slide show of your books in the side bar.

Challenge Update

I finished reading The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1992.

The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book (full-length English novel) of the year.

Synopsis:

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

I did not like this book. I thought it was very difficult to read; I could not follow what was going on a lot of the time. I wasn't interested enough to read large portions at once, so that may have brought on some of the confusion. I did push through and finish it, so I give The English PatientUp next for me is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
___________________________________________________
Read about the June Book Choices before voting!

Challenge Update

I finished reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

About:

The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to.

I saw the movie The Hours in 2002 when it came out. I loved the movie, but hadn't read the book until now. The book was even better. I had forgotten the ending, and it still surprised me the second time, even though I had already seen the movie. It was so good. I give The Hours
Up next for me is The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Challenge Update

I finished reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and also the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best Fiction Debut of the Year.

Each calendar year, PEN New England presents awards to writers whose work has made an outstanding contribution to fiction, non-fiction or poetry in the previous year. The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, established in 1976 by the late Mary Hemingway in honor of her husband Ernest Hemingway, includes an $8,000 cash prize for a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction.

About Interpreter of Maladies:

Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection...Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage...Interpreter of Maladies unerringly charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In sotries that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.

I really liked this collection of stories. I loved her style of writing...it was so easy to read. I especially liked the first and last stories called "A Temporary Matter" and "The Third and Final Continent" (which is based on her father). All of the stories are brief (~20-30 pages), but by the end of each, I always wanted it to continue on to a whole novel. The characters were all so interesting. I will definitely read her other collection of stories called Unaccustomed Earth and her novel The Namesake (also a 2007 movie featuring Kal Penn).













I give Interpreter of Maladies
Up next for me is The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

Challenge Update

I finished reading The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995.

The Pulitzer Prize was established by journalist Joseph Pulitzer, founder of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (with a $10,000 cash reward) goes to a work of "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life."

About The Stone Diaries:

This is a fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

This book did not win me over. I had trouble finishing it (but I did finish), so I have to give it
I did appreciate the author's style of writing. It was very vivid and descriptive. I would be willing to try another one of her books (good thing, because Larry's Party is also on my challenge list); this one just didn't interest me.

Up next for me is Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Challenge Update

I finished reading Everyman by Philip Roth. One down, ninety-nine to go. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2007.

The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year. Three judges, chosen annually by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, select five books from among the more than 300 works submitted, making this the largest peer-juried award in the country.

My quick review of it--short, kind of depressing, sometimes very weird, but I still sort of liked it. My rating (see rating system in sidebar):

Read the first chapter here.



Up next for me is The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields.

Reading Challenge

I heard about this reading challenge called Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project and thought I would try it out. The challenge encourages you to make a list of 100 books that you want to read in the next 5 years. The woman/author who started it "collected a list of 100 books that she wants to read in her life to fill in some of her reading gaps of classics and great contemporary fiction." Other people joining the challenge have different types of lists: all fiction, all non-fiction, biographies, ABC authors, ABC titles, books already owned, classics, and all sorts of other list types. I decided to try a Prize Winners list. I included books from the past 20 years (1989-2009) that won one or more of the following awards: Man Booker Prize, National Book Award for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Faulkner Award for Fiction, and/or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Here's my list:

Reading Challenge: 100 Prize Winners

1. Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
2. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
3. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
4. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
5. The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
6. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
7. Three Junes by Julia Glass
8. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
9. In America by Susan Sontag
10. Waiting by Ha Jin
11. Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
12. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
13. Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett
14. Sabbath's Theater by Phillip Roth
15. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
16. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
17. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
18. Mating by Norman Rush
19. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
20. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
21. The Gathering by Anne Enright
22. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
23. The Sea by John Banville
24. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
25. Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
26. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
27. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
28. Digrace by JM Coetzee
29. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
30. The God of Small Things by Araundhati Roy
31. Last Orders by Graham Swift
32. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
33. How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
34. Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
35. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
36. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
37. Possession by AS Byatt
38. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
40. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
41. March by Geraldine Brooks
42. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
43. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
44. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
45. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
46. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
47. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
48. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
49. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
50. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
51. Independence Day by Richard Ford
52. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
53. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
54. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
55. Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
56. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
57. The March by EL Doctorow
58. Atonement by Ian McEwan
59. Being Dead by Jim Crace
60. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
61. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
62. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
63. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Road Home by Rose Tremain
65. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
66. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
67. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
68. Small Island by Andrea Levy
69. Property by Valerie Martin
70. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
71. The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
72. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
73. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
74. Larry's Party by Carol Shields
75. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
76. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
77. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
78. Everyman by Philip Roth
79. War Trash by Ha Jin
80. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
81. Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
82. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
83. The King's Evil by Will Heinrich
84. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
85. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (co-winner)
86. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
87. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
88. The Early Stories by John Updike
89. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
90. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
91. Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories by Gina Berriault
92. Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin
93. Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow
94. Spartina by John Casey
95. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
96. The Caprices by Sabina Murray
97. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
98. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
99. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
100. The Great Man by Kate Christensen

I might substitute some of these with new prize winners as they come out. I'm starting with #78 Everyman by Philip Roth. From Goodreads:

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.



Do you want to participate in the challenge (using my list or your own)? If you make your own list, post it in the comments. I'll post updates on the challenge as I make progress on the books.