Zero's 888

This should prove to be a fun way to add a little variety to this years reading.

{Original Challenge completed June, 24th}
{Original Challenge doubled November, 18th}



Categories now start at Message 12-20, 26, 33. 39, 50

Augie March lands me my fifth laureate.

Marguerite Duras puts me two up.

Doubling up again with Ms. Byatt this time. Herrn Strindberg makes my second playwrite.

Added William Faulkner to my laureates.

My third French novel for the year is Jealousy and Thomas Pynchon marks my fifth contemporary writer.

I'm a book away from closing out my Nobel Laureates this year after Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. I also read Jorge Luis Borges' 1941 collection of eight short stories, The Garden of Forking Paths, from his collected Fictions. The inimitable Stendhal's Scarlet and Black graces my French reading list.

I haven't been following the show off your ticker / counter thread, but I must say your book ticker looks great!!

Thanks!

8 Victorian-Era Novels {complete}

1. Bleak House by Charles Dickens **
2. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James ****
3. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins ****½
4. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens **½
5. Two on a Tower by Thomas Hardy ****
6. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell ****
7. The Tenent of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë ****½
8. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy ****½

Double {complete}

9. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens ***½
10. Mill on the Floss by George Eliot ****½
11. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins ****
12. Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy **½
13. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray ****
14. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson ***
15. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy ****
16. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë *****

8 French Language Novels {complete}

1. Le Père Goriot by Honore de Balzac ****
2. La Jalousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet ***
3. Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal *****
4. Quatrevingt-treize by Victor Hugo ****
5. Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost ***
6. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père *****
7. L’Étranger by Albert Camus *****
8. Germinal by Émile Zola ****

Double {complete}

9. Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo ***½
10. Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola ***
11. À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs by Marcel Proust *****
12. À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans ***½
13. Les Trois Mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas, père ****
14. Nana by Émile Zola ***½
15. La Vagabonde by Colette ****
16. Eugénie Grandet by Honore de Balzac ****½

8 Philosophical Works {complete}

1. Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
2. Letters Regarding the English Nation by Voltaire
3. The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
5. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
6. Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill
7. Zadig by Voltaire
8. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Double {complete}

9. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
10. Rhetoric by Aristotle
11. Poetics by Aristotle
12. Liberalism by Ludwig Von Mises
13. The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul
14. The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche
15. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
16. The Universe in a Single Atom by Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

8 Nobel Laureates {complete} x2 {complete}

1. Thomas Mann - Death in Venice ****, The Magic Mountain ****½
2. John Galsworthy - The Forsyte Saga ****, A Modern Comedy, End Of the Chapter
3. André Gide - The Immoralist ****½, Strait is the Gate ****½
4. Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March ***½, Humboldt's Gift ****½
5. William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom! ****, As I Lay Dying ****½, Intruder in the Dust
6. Heinrich Böll - The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum ***½, The Bread of Those Early Years **
7. John Steinbeck - Cannery Row ****½, Of Mice and Men ***½
8. Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf ****½, Demian ***½

Triple {complete}

9. Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude *****
10. Knut Hamsun - Victoria **
11. V.S. Napaul - A Bend in the River ***½
12. J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace ***
13. Rudyard Kipling - Kim ***½
14. José Saramago - Blindness ****
15. Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth ***
16. Sinclair Lewis - Elmer Gantry ****

8 Contemporary Authors {complete} x2 {complete}

1. Don DeLillo - White Noise **½, The Body Artist ½
2. Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night ****, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ***
3. Philip Roth - The Counterlife ****, Everyman **½
4. Ian McEwan - Saturday **½, The Comfort of Strangers ***½
5. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest *****, Sometimes a Great Notion ***½
6. Paul Auster - Oracle Night ***, The Book of Illusions ***½
7. Charles Bukowski - Post Office ****, Factotum **
8. Chuck Palahniuk - Diary ½, Survivor **

Triple {complete}

9. Jerzy Kosinski - Being There ***½
10. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 ****
11. Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time **½
12. Tobias Wolff - The Barracks Thief ***½
13. Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses ****
14. E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime ***½
15. Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys **½
16. Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ***

8 Novels by Women {complete}

1. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton ***½
2. Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt ***
3. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing **½
4. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton *****
5. White Teeth by Zadie Smith ***½
6. The Awakening by Kate Chopin **½
7. The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark ****
8. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen ***½

Double {complete}

9. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri ****
10. Emma by Jane Austen ****½
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark ****½
12. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver ****
13. To the Lighthouse by Virgina Woolf ****
14. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen ***½
15. Northanger Abby by Jane Austen **½
16. Jacob's Room by Virgina Woolf **½

8 Playwrights {complete}

1. Bryony Lavery - Frozen: A Play **
2. August Strindberg - The Ghost Sonata **
3. Friedrich von Schiller - Mary Stuart ****
4. Jean Racine - Phaedra ****
5. Tennessee Williams - The Glass Menagerie ****
6. Sarah Kane - Phaedra's Love *½
7. Woody Allen - Riverside Drive **
8. Molière - The Misanthrope ***½

Double

9. Eugene O'Neill - The Emperor Jones **½
10. Euripides - Hippolytus **
11. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus *½
12. Anton Chekov - The Cherry Orchard ****½
13. Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ***½
14. Aeschylus - Agamemnon ***
15. Noel Coward - Blithe Spirit ****
16. Peter Shaffer - Amadeus ****

Short Stories by 8 Authors {complete}

1. Miranda July - "No One Belongs Here More Than You
2. Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
3. Gustav Flaubert - Three Tales
4. James Joyce - Dubliners
5. Robert Musil - Five Women
6. Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
7. Leo Tolstoy - "The Kreutzer Sonata; Family Happiness"
8. Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Rashomon and Other Stories

Double {complete}

9. John Galswothy - "Indian Summer of a Forsyte; Awakening; A Silent Wooing; Passers By"
10. Nikolai Gogol - "The Overcoat; The Nose; Diary of a Madman"
11. Émile Zola - "The Attack on the Mill; Captain Burle; Death of Olivier Becaille"
12. W. Somerset Maugham - "Rain; Footprints In The Jungle; The Outstation"
13. Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
14. Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
15. Tim O' Brien - The Things They Carried
16. Fyodor Dostoevsky - "Notes From the Underground; White Nights"

Extra Credit: 1001 Remainders {complete}

1. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ****
2. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov ***½
3. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien ****½
4. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh ****½
5. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton ***
6. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis ***
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ***½
8. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James ****

Double {complete}

1. The Castle by Franz Kafka **
2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner ****½
3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson **½
4. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway **
5. The Child in Time by Ian McEwan ***½
6. The World According to Garp by John Irving ***½
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ****½
8. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ****

Extra Credit: Spies and Private Eyes {complete}

1. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré ****
2. The Innocent by Ian McEwan ****
3. The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene **
4. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad **½
5. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler ***
6. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré ***½
7. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett ***½
8. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming **

8 French Language Novels

1. L'immoraliste by André Gide
2. L'Amant by Marguerite Duras
3. La Jalousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet
4. Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal

---------------------

Okay, if you didn't grow up speaking French at home I think you should get double (triple!) points for each of these (and this goes for anyone else reading novels in a non-native tongue). I've studied both French and Italian, and I have tremendous admiration for anyone who can read literature in a language they didn't grow up with.

I only wish I was worthy of such admiration but it is admittedly unearned. I'm afraid that my usage of the original language titles has proven to be misleading (the touchstones seemed to work better.) My limited french isn't up to the task of reading a novel in anything but translation as much as I would love to be able to say otherwise.

Sorry for the confusion.

Flaubert and his Three Tales contribute to the short story section this week. Ken Kesey and John le Carré complete my contemporary authors (although I'll push out duplicate listings in future reads.) Zadie Smith's first book and Kate Chopin's last leave me a lady away from closing out my third category of the year.

Ninety-Three takes it's places as my fifth French novel of the year. Paul Auster negates any needless duplication among my contemporary authors. James Joyce's Dubliners contributes to my short story reading for the year and both Racine and Schiller make their mark among my years playwrights.

Recently Added

Victorian Novel: Trollope's Barchester Towers French Novels: Manon Lescaut, The Count of Monte Cristo Contemporary Authors: Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski Playwright: Tennessee Williams Ex-Credit: A Clockwork Orange, The New York Trilogy

Leaving me a book away from closing out my French category.

Extra Credit: Literary Traveler {complete} x2 {complete}

1. Austria - The Confusions of Young Törless *****
2. Russia - {5/5}
~ a. War and Peace ***½
~ b. A Hero of Our Time ****½
~ c. The Brothers Karamazov ****
~ d. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf ***
~ e. The House of the Dead ***½
3. Sweden - Doctor Glas ***½
4. Netherlands - The Following Story ***½
5. Argentina - The Invention of Morel ****
6. Turkey - Snow ****
7. Japan - {5/5}
~ a. Norwegian Wood ****
~ b. The Wild Geese ****½
~ c. The Master of Go ****
~ d. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ***½
~ e. After the Quake ***½
8. Brazil - The Alchemist **

Extra Credit: Speculative Fiction {complete}

1. Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami **½
2. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman *½
3. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson ***½
4. Stardust by Neil Gaiman **½
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke **½
6. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card ***½
7. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman **
8. Ubik by Philip K. Dick ***

Finished - Walden, The Good Earth, and Unions

Closed out my female author catagory; started 8 More Languages in my extra credit section.

Finished three more: Phaedra's Love: A Play, and two Victorian novels Two on a Tower and Cranford

The Stranger completes my french language catagory this year. I plan on reading more Gide to remedy the existing duplication as I bump my reads to two per laureate (starting with Intruder in the Dust). Woody Allen's Riverside Drive leaves me one dramatist away from finishing my fifth catagory of the year. Added a Speculative Fiction bracket to my extra credit reads.

I'm halfway through my new Speculative Fiction section with Murakami's Dance Dance Dance. Molière finishes off my playwright category; Dickens performs the same duty for my Victorians. The Man Who Was Thursday fits into my 1001 catch-all category and the spanish language The Invention of Morel leaves me three other languages left to represent in my reading this year.

1001 Remainders: Lucky Jim Spies and Private Eyes: The Innocent Speculative Fiction: Never Let Me Go, Neverwhere More Languages: Victoria (Norwegian)

Kafka completes my Speculative Fiction catagory: although I'll probably switch things around a bit later. Austen replaces J.K. Rowling among my female authors to avoid duplication in my extra credit reading.

Changing up my Victorian catagory to introduce more authors.

I still need to iron out my Nobel Laureates catgory; after I finish Disgrace and perhaps more Gide I'll feel better about things.

I'm expanding my extra credit categories again.

Extra Credit: Dystopia {complete}

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell ****
2. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess ****½
3. The Road by Cormac McCarthy ***
4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ***
5. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick **
6. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells **
7. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick ***
8. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ***½

Extra Credit: The American West {complete}

1. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy ****½
2. The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard ***½
3. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry ****½
4. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy ****
5. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy ***½
6. Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry ***
7. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx
8. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather ***

Trying to get my bearings back after an off week here. Doubling up again on authors with Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion and Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (my favourite work by the author thus far). Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent makes for some light reading in my Spies and Eyes category, the same can be said of Wells' The Time Machine in my new Dystopian category. Sherwood Anderson is also my sixth short story writer of the year.

Finally managed to tidy things up. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall makes Anne Brontë my seventh Victorian author of the year for my revised Victorian category.

Finished Nabokov's fantastic translation of Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time.

Clearing out the last remaining duplicate in my French category with Germinal. Finally polished off Disgrace with Night on it's heels (just a placeholder at present).

I'm also looking to polish off my short story category this week, leaving me free to double the book count in most of my original categories (the philosophy section will come in time).

Finished Night and my Tolstoy short stories/novellas. Halfway through a collection of Akitagawa stories which closes out my 7th category of the year. As long as I keep it light I may be able to polish off my Philosophy section this month.

I also adjusted a few of my original categories with object of doubling up in most of them.

Decided on my final categories for the challenge:

Extra Credit: (Semi) Autobiographical Novels {complete}

1. Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham ****
2. L'Amant by Marguerite Duras ***½
3. On the Road by Jack Kerouac ****
4. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell ****
5. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene ****½
6. The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce ****½
7. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller ****
8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ***½

Extra Credit: Non-Fiction {complete}

1. The Gulag Archipelago: Vol. 1 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ****
2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion *****
3. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris ***½
4. Supercrunchers by Ian Ayres ***½
5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami ***½
6. The Gulag Archipelago: Vol. 2 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ****½
7. The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind ***
8. Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin ***½

Double {complete}

9. The End of Faith by Sam Harris **½
10. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas by Frederick Douglass *****
12. The Gulag Archipelago: Vol. 3 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ****
13. Histories by Tacitus ***½
14. The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell **½
15. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini **
16. The Sun King by Nancy Mitford ***½

Just finished Zadig which means as soon as I complete Marcus Aurelius' Meditations I will have completed my original 888 challenge categories.

Since my last post I've completed: Strait is the Gate, The House of Mirth, Utilitarianism, and Snow

Finally completed my original 888 challenge. Since my last post I've finished...

In extra credit categories: Blood Meridian, The Big Sleep, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

And doubling-up in original categories: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Namesake, No Country For Old Men, Dawn

Original Categories: Doctor Thorne, Therese Raquin, Utopia, A Modern Comedy, Steppenwolf, The Counterlife

Extra Credit: The Wild Geese

OC: The Counterlife, A Bend in the River, A Modern Comedy The Bread of Those Early Years, Factotum

EX: I Am Legend

OC: Emma EX: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

OC: Framley Parsonage, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

EX: The Alchemist, Gulag Archipelago Vol. 1, The Year of Magical Thinking

OC: The Poisonwood Bible, To the Lighthouse EX: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Also finished some short stories by Gogol and Zola.

Complete: doubled up on eight of my contemporary authors.

OC: Everyman, Saturday EX: Fahrenheit 451, Stardust

OC: The Emperor Jones EX: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Super Crunchers

... and my final, final categories of the year:

Extra Credit: Series and Sequels {complete}

1. The Complete Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
2. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
3. A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter by John Galsworthy
4. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
5. The Night Trilogy by Elie Wiesel
6. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
7. The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope
8. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

Extra Credit: Literary Debris {complete}

1. Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner ***
2. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole **
3. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino ****
4. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ****
5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift ****
6. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz ****½
7. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence ****½
8. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge **½

Double {complete}

9. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Peter Süskind ****
10. Sanctuary by William Faulkner ***½
11. Housekeeping by by Marilynne Robinson ***½
12. White Jazz by James Ellroy *½
13. Yellow Crome by Aldous Huxley ***
14. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson ***½
15. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri **½
16. The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham ****

OC: Cannery Row, Hippolytus, Mansfield Park EX: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (category complete)

Closing out a 10,000 page month~

OC: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Small House at Allington, As I Lay Dying, Within a Budding Grove, Interpreter of Maladies, The Barracks Thief

OC: Oliver Twist, Three Lives, The Things They Carried, Survivor, Of Mice and Men EX: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I've posted what I promise are my last two extra credit categories "Series and Sequels" and "Literary Debris." I've also doubled up in "Novels by Women" and "Short Stories."

OC: Northanger Abbey, The Mill on the Floss, Notes from Underground, Against Nature EX: The Great Gatsby, Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2, The Black Hole War

Doubled my Victorian category.

OC: The Moonstone, Kim, Demian, Rhetoric

OC: Blindness, The Satanic Verses EX: Thomas Hardy

OC: The Three Musketeers, The Magic Mountain, No One Belongs Here More Than You, Poetics EX: Life, the Universe and Everything

OC: Nana, Liberalism, Jacob's Room EX: Ender's Game

OC: La Vagabonde, The Revolution: A Manifesto, The Anti-Christ, Under the Greenwood Tree, Doctor Faustus EX: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Doubled my French category

OC: Vanity Fair, Eugénie Grandet EX: So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, The Castle of Otranto

OC: The End of Faith, The Girls of Slender Means EX: Tropic of Cancer, Invisible Cities, End of the Chapter (Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, Over the River), Mostly Harmless (finishing the Hitchhiker series)

OC: The Cherry Orchard, The Universe in a Single Atom (doubled my Philosophical Category), Elmer Gantry (tripled my Nobel Category) EX: The Brothers Karamazov, The Sorrows of Young Werther

OC: Ragtime, Kidnapped, The Book of Illusions EX: The Master of Go, Gulliver's Travels, The Street of Crocodiles

OC: Wonder Boys, Le Père Goriot, The Comfort of Strangers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead EX: Man in the High Castle, Up from Slavery, The Sound and the Fury

EX: The Last Chronicle of Barset (completing the Baretshire series)

OC: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, The Return of the Native, Capitalism and Freedom, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jane Eyre (doubling my Victorian category since I moved the Barchester novels to my 'series' section) EX: The Maltese Falcon, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Master Georgie, The Graveyard Book, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ubik

OC: Agamemnon EX: Gulag Archipelago Vol. 3, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The Divine Comedy, Horseman, Pass By, Little Women

OC: Blithe Spirit EX: Sanctuary, To Have and Have Not, The Histories, Housekeeping, The Wordy Shipmates, White Jazz, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, The Child in Time, Crome Yellow

EX: The World According to Garp, Out Stealing Horses, The Iliad, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, The Wasp Factory, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Moon and Sixpence, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Sun King

EX: The House of the Dead, After the Quake, Brideshead Revisited, Casino Royale, Sons and Lovers, "Brokeback Mountain", Amadeus, O Pioneers!, The Odyssey, Day

That appears to finish off my challenge and extra credit categories for 2008. See you in January!

Congratulations on finishing your 888 Challenge!
--BJ

Holy cow. How many books did you read this year?

Are you independently wealthy? A speed reader? Happily retired? An insomniac?

Absolutely amazing. Congratulations.