Singota's very first challenge on LT

Hi everyone, I'm new on LT (signed in yesterday) and after asking for some advice and exploring the groups and topics I got really excited to begin a challenge. I'm going to try a 12 in 12 challenge because it will be a good way for me to see how many books I read in a year but I don't want to aim too high yet

Because of my studies I didn't have much time to read this first semester and I'm in the middle of my exams at the moment so I won't be able to start off immediately but I'll have less classes next semester and I hope I'll find the time to read some more then.

I am going to cheat a tiny bit and include one book that I've already read this month for school and one I'm currently reading so it'll be like I started the first of January.

Since it's my first challenge, I've looked for some inspiration with other people's topics and I hope I will be forgiven for the ones I've copied. I do not attempt to read all the books listed under "Options" but they are the once which I'd like to read most of all.

I've set my goal at 100, not because I want to read 100 books in a year but just to see how far I'll progress



My categories;

1. Read for school this month (not including the poetry)
1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

2. Never thought I'd like these
I read a book by these authors in my English literature classes and they have had such a profound effect on me that I want to read more by them
1.

Options
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
For whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

3. All Hail the King!
I've gone into a kind of Stephen King frenzy a few years ago and still have quite a few on my reading list so here are some that I still need to read
1.

Options
Needful Things by Stephen King
It by Stephen King
Under the Dome by Stephen King
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
Cujo by Stephen King
Cell by Stephen King

4. Continuing the Freak series
I've started rereading the Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan before school began but so much work and time went into my studies, that I had to pause when I arrived at book 5. I hope I'll be able to finish the series now
1. Trials of Death by Darren Shan (book 5)
2.

Options
The Vampire Prince by Darren Shan (book 6)
Hunters of the Dusk by Darren Shan (book 7)
Allies of the Night by Darren Shan (book 8)
Killers of the Dawn by Darren Shan (book 9)
The Lake of Souls by Darren Shan (book 10)
Lord of the Shadows by Darren Shan (book 11)
Sons of Destiny by Darren Shan (book 12)

5. Random stuff
Random books that drew my attention for some reason or other (mostly library books)
1.

Options
Lycidas by Christoph Marzi
Books of Blood by Clive Barker
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) by Roald Dahl
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

6. Flemmish/Dutch authors
Books in Dutch that are seen as classics and must-reads
1.

Pieter Daems by Louis Paul Boon
Het Geuzenboek by Louis Paul Boon
De Leeuw van Vlaanderen by Hendrik Conscience
De Zaak Alzheimer by Jef Geeraerts

7. It's my birthday
Books published in my year of birth (1989) --> I did get the inspiration to this from another topic in this group but I really liked the idea
1. Creature by John Saul
2.

Options
The Dark Half by Stephen King
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
A Time to Kill by John Grisham

8. Booksale Bags
I've got two bags full of books I've bought on booksales standing next to my bookcase because I can't put them anywhere and all of them still unread
1.

Options
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Shindler's List by Thomas Keneally
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Tales from the Arabian Nights
Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Virgin Blue and Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

9. 1001 books to read before you die
1.

Options
So much to choose from...I'll come back to this when I feel like reading something from the list
Or if you have a suggestion from the list which you'd think I should definitely read, please tell me :)

10. Dickens' Bicentennial Year
The first Dickens novel I read was The Old Curiosity Shop and I found it somewhat tedious and boring to be honest so it put me off reading Dickens for a while. At school, we had to read Hard Times and it appealed a lot more to me so I'm eager to pick him up again and read some more

1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
2.

Options
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Complete Ghost stories by Charles Dickens (also included - A Christmas Carol)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (recommended to me by christina_reads)

11. Books off the shelves
Books that don't belong to the other cathegories but are also in my bookcase, waiting to be read
1.

Options
Bracke for girls by Dirk Bracke (Flemmish)
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Deception Point by Dan Brown
Irish Folk and Fairytale Omnibus by Michael Scott
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft (an omnibus with his best tales)
The Complete tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by E.A. Poe

12. Rereads
Books or stories I've read but would like to read again
1.

Options
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
Insomnia by Stephen King
Four Past Midnight by Stephen King (especially "The Langoliers" and the "Library Police")

Well that's it, I'm certain I won't be able to to finish all the books listed here but at least it'll give me a nice overview of what I've achieved.

Can someone please tell me how to put text in bold or italics?
I've tried HTML codes but those didn't seem to work for me :)

Hi Singota and welcome to the challenge.

You'll have to forgive me cause I don't know the correct terms, but to put text in bold, use the pointy arrow key (above the coma) on one side and the pointy arrow key (above the period) on the other. Put a b in the middle for bold and an i in the middle for italics.

Hope this makes sense.

Welcome! Looks like you have some great reading ahead for the year.

The "less than" and "more than" symbols should work.

Very useful link is over here!

ETA: #12 What Judy said! :)

Found it :)
How stupid of me, I kept putting the "b's" between the square brackets :D
Thank you!

I think you've chosen a great group to start with! Good luck with the challenge.

I was just coming back to give you the link but I see Eva already has.

Finished The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne



Rated

If I can compare it with Wuthering Heights which I'm reading now, I find that the story development and characters of WH are much more pleasing. The Scarlet Letter was an enjoyable read but I didn't know how to feel about Pearl, whether I liked her or not and I knew from the start who the father was (don't know if that was the purpose of the novel though) and I had a rough sense of how the story would develop further. I did like the ending, very moving.

Welcome! I'm not as new as you, but still fairly recent and I find this group is really great. Lots of imput, ideas, and support... and no question from a newbie ever seems too silly.

Welcome to the group!

Welcome!

The Scarlet Letter took on an added significance to me when I read something that said that one of my ancestor's wives (not the one from which I'm descended) may have been the inspiration behind Hester Prynne. He, himself, was a rather controversial preacher, so it does kind of fit.

I read The Scarlet Letter about 20 years ago and remember not liking it, but that's about all. I did read When She Woke recently, which is a science fiction re-telling of the story and I loved it. (Not enough to go back and read the original again though!)

Welcome! Looks like you have a lot of great reads ahead of you. East of Eden is fantastic, and not as depressing as some of Steinbeck's other works (e.g. The Grapes of Wrath). I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell recently and loved it! Also, if you're looking for a good Dickens novel, I'd definitely recommend Our Mutual Friend in addition to the ones on your list.

Thank your for the warm welcome everyone, I have noticed that I have to remember doing a bit of reading beside surfing on this site...it's quite addictive :D

>23 christina_reads: Thank you for the recommendation, "Our Mutual Friend" didn't cross my mind because I'm not very familiar with it or the plot but I went looking for a brief description after your recommendation and after reading the following...

Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature.

...I was sold :D

Welcome, and good luck with your first challenge!

I had no idea about the story-line of Our Mutual Friend - I'm sold too! :)

Welcome to the group, some good books ahead of you there, especially Steinbeck ( we're doing a group read in September) and Strange and Norrell one of my favourite reads froma few years ago, possibly time for a re-read soon

Just posting a quick update on my reading;

It will take a little while before I'll be able to finish Wuthering Heights and can fully tackle the above list. I'm currently trying to reread most of the poetry which I have to study for my Romanticism exam this thursday.

So I'm currently rereading poetry, letters and bits and pieces of literary essays by William Blake, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Burns, William & Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, Emily Brontë, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson

This has been the most interesting course for me so far. Before I took this class the only bit of poetry I had ever read was "The Raven" by Poe. I had this prejudice that poetry was just a jumble of nonsense words, too difficult for me to understand so I'm ashamed to admit that I never really looked into it more thoroughly. Reading poetry certainly isn't the same as reading a novel but I noticed that reading poetry can be incredibly relaxing and that it puts me in a kind of meditative trance. My favorites are Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge although I'm also eager to read the full version of Don Juan by Byron (we only read a small part of it).

So, apart from the broad range of new genres and authors that I got to know thanks to these studies, this is another example of how I have learned to broaden my mind. And I still have a year and a half to go ^^. I can't wait for the things I still have to discover!

Welcome to the challenge! It's cool that you are reading the Darren Shan books. My hubby was totally addicted to them when they came out. They are definitely good reads (so I'm told). There are many nights I remember him staying up 'til 1 in the morning reading them.

As to the poetry, you named so many good ones. Sometimes appreciating poetry, or any other writing, comes with time and/or experience. I know there are things I can reread later and understand and appreciate them so much more than I did before.

Oh dear, today's exam didn't go too well (it wasn't Romanticism though). And while other girls might want to go shopping for clothes or shoes when they're feeling a bit down, I suddenly want to buy books. I told myself not do buy any more until I've cleaned out my bookcase but what the h., 2 more books can't hurt can they :)

I was thinking about ordering The Shining by Stephen King (I already read that one twice but want to reread it again...so far it's my favorite King) and The Stand because I really want to read that one since I've read so many positive reviews about it but can't seem to find it anywhere.

Well I think it would be unhealthy to resist this urge...I'm off to the bookshop!

Edit; Thank you mandymarie20. Yes, I really like Darren Shan ^^ . I only have the Cirque du Freak series but I'd really like to have the Demonata series as well.

When I was a student I crossed the southern United States from west to east on Greyhound buses and I bought and read the stand whilst doing so, I've fond memories of the book and the trip, that rather battered book sits on my shelf still after many house moves and I've re-read it several times. Since I was backpacking I didnt want to carry much excess weight so got the book because it was over 1000 pages long And therefore I would only need the 1 book...

#28 As much as I sometimes have balked at literature classes, I also had a poetry class that totally opened my eyes to the beauty of different styles of writing. Mine was a women of color poetry class with greats like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Joy Harjo. Before that class, I always thought poetry was so random and cryptic. I'm glad you enjoyed yours as well!

Finished Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë



Rated:

I really, really enjoyed the story, much more than I had anticipated and I'm now very eager to watch the movie with Ralph Fiennes playing Heathcliff.

Some parts and characters really irritated me at times and I didn't think the part about the second generation was as good as the first (which could be attributed to the fact that her first manuscript was deemed too short and Emily quickly had to add a second part) which is the reason why I didn't rated four stars.

I don't think my emotions towards the characters in a novel have never been so varied and constantly changing as here. I pitied certain characters at first, was later extremely annoyed by them and eventually hated them before pitying them again. The only one I never seemed to really hate (strangely enough) was Heathcliff himself. I could understand why he wanted revenge seeing how badly he was treated as a child. I also really liked Hareton.

My next read is probably going to be Great Expectations by Dickens for the group reading on this site http://www.librarything.com/topic/131784 and of course in honor of his bicentennial year. It will be my third Dickens novel, my first being The Old Curiosity Shop which dissapointed me (I found it to be quite tedious and boring) and which put me off reading Dickens. My second was Hard Times which I read for school last year and I found this one to be a major improvement and it got me eager to read more by him again so I hope I'll like this one as well.

Quick update on my reading...
Still reading Great Expectations (I almost finished 3/4 of the novel by now) and I also started reading The Best Ghost Stories of J. S. LeFanu in the evening. There's nothing better than curling up under my blankets when it's dark and windy outside with just a night light beside me while reading an old-fashioned Victorian ghost story

I had a free space of two hours between lessons today and accompanied a friend too her bus stop. This route brought me directly in front of a second-hand bookstore and, naturally, I wander in empty-handed with the simple thought of "taking a peek" but when I got out again, lo and behold, I got a bag in my hand (now how on earth did that got there :D)

Anyway, I made the following purchases;
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe --> got this one for free because of an action that was going on
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

I am not familiar with the work of Elizabeth Gaskell nor with the novel called "Moll Flanders" but I liked the story at the back and since my studies I have become very interested in social novels of the 19th Century.

I'm really going to struggle when I get home to find space in my bookcase. I don't think there's any room left and I know there's an upcoming book fare in May...oh dear -_-'
I really need to get rid of my Twilight box, it's taking up precious space and I'll never read them anyway (why oh why did I ever buy them!)

Edit; I've also recently finished The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and I really, really, really loved it. I laughed out loud a couple of times which doesn't happen that often when I'm reading. I immediately watched the movie afterwards, that is the version of 2002 with Colin Firt and I really loved it, especially the muffin scene. I've given it ****

Bookstores are always dangerous, but I find second-hand ones the worst. So many books at such great prices! I always come out with a bag.

@ 35 -- You have a real treat ahead of you with North and South -- it's one of my favorite books! There is also a BBC miniseries that is pretty fantastic.

I also love The Importance of Being Earnest, and in fact a poster from the Colin Firth movie is hanging in my living room!

@ 37 -- thank you for telling me about the miniserie, BBC really is the best at making those adaptions. I never thought I'd like drama/romance before I started my classes in Romanticism and Realism but I've grown quite addicted to it. I still love horror and fantasy as I always did but I'm really happy I can now appreciate other genres and that I'm more open to discovering completely new authors

*Swoon* The North and South miniseries is excellent, do look it up. You can find clips of it on YouTube as well.

Finished Great Expectations by Charles Dickens



Rated

I'm so glad that I found out about this site. If it wasn't for the February group read of the 12 in 12 Category this novel would still be on my TBR pile. I was captivated by this book from the beginning until the end although I couldn't quite get the meaning of everything (which I consider a good reason to it again some time). I loved it so much that I wrote my first review here on the site; http://www.librarything.com/work/7554

Now the next one will be a book called Creature by John Saul (though I have the Dutch version, called "Kind van het Kwaad" of which the literal English translation would be "Child of Evil"). I picked this one up randomly after strolling around in our library and it turns out to have been published in my year of birth, namely 1989. This makes it an excellent addition to the birthday category of this challenge.

I also still have The Best Ghost Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu so the next few days will be filled with tension and horror which will be an excellent escape from the dry and difficult tasks I now have to finish for school.

Finished Creature by John Saul



Rated

I had never heard of the author before when I borrowed this book from the library; it was just something I had picked up at random. The unnerving cover and the summary at the back reminded me of a Stephen King-ish horror story.

Although it didn't give me the stronger feelings of horror and intrigue that King's stories provide, it was an entertaining read. I do regret that they only had a Dutch translation in our library...the multiple spelling mistakes were quite annoying and one time I think two names were mixed up.

I would like to read more by this author but this is the only book written by him that my local library has.

I think I'll pick up Sheridan le Fanu's ghost stories next. I pauzed reading it when I wanted to finish Great Expectations and then I found Creature in the library and wanted to finish that one first (I'm not very good at reading multiple books at the same time).

Finished Trials of Death by Darren Shan



Rated

I decided to give up on Sheridan le Fanu. I had to return the book to the library and I really want to focus on some books in my own shelf. I'm finally able to start again in the Cirque du Freak serie by Darren Shan which I started a few months ago but I only got to the 5th book before I had to pauze my reading because I had lots of other reading assignments for school this last semester. I finished Trials of Death in 2 days time and still love it as much as when I first read the series when I was about 15 years old.

I prefer reading one book at the time so the next books so for the following days / weeks I'll probably concentrate on the entire series.