Skip to main content

Challenges, schmallenges

I’m sick and tired of reading challenges. Whenever I fail to reach a certain goal within a given challenge, my conscience acts up and makes me feel guilty for not reaching the goal and indeed for reading other books. This is not good, because when it comes down to it, reading is supposed to be fun.

The only one of my challenges that hasn’t become a chore is the TBR challenge, and I have already reached the goal I set myself for that one for 2011: to reduce my TBR stack to below 840 books.

The Buchmesse challenge is a chore because the books that have been translated into both English and German are mostly literary fiction and crime novels and I really need to be in a very specific frame of mind to enjoy the former, and the latter I have already read and reviewed all of those that fit the criteria, in some cases several years before the translations came out.

The Top Mysteries Challenge is throwing in my path some books that I just don’t want to read at this point, e.g. political thrillers and espionage novels, and I have come to the conclusion that having a reading schedule for it (two books from the list every month) just isn’t working.

The three outside challenges aren’t really challenges for me, because since I read over 150 books in any given year, it is statistically highly likely that I will read books belonging to them anyway.

What I am going to do is to drop the Buchmesse Challenge altogether, put the Top Mysteries Challenge into low priority mode (it was never meant to be finished in a given length of time anyway) and not specifically try to finish the three outside challenges, although I am, for the reasons stated above, fairly certain I will finish them. I will continue with the TBR challenge, because I have realised that while it feels good to be surrounded by books, the knowledge that I haven’t read 40% of them is annoying. I may become active in the challenges later in the year but right now I prefer to just read whatever strikes my fancy.

Comments

Trish said…
I've been feeling challenge fatigued too. I only signed up for two this year so I think I'll probably be able to complete them. But it's always there in the back of my mind when I start a book that isn't in the challenge, like guilty, or something.

-ehn- that's not what I'm reading for. Once I'm done these challenges I'll just concentrate on what's already on my TBR shelf.
Dorte H said…
I have done fairly well with my challenges so far, but I regret that I have accepted - or even asked for - a handful of review copies which are definitely very good books, but just not what I want to read right now. The period between Easter and the summer holidays is always very busy workwise so I need light entertainment, not something where I need to take a lot of notes to make a proper review.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme