December Group Challenge, 2019

For December, let’s finish up our goals for the year (or get closer!). Share what your goal for this year was or if you don’t set one at all. And then share how close you’ve come to finishing. To help each other out, let’s recommend some personal favorites of short books or fast reads from the list. I know I’ve found that some of the short books take forever, so don’t recommend by page count, but by how quickly it read. Hopefully everyone can tell us about what they are reading to close out the year and finish up their 2019 goals with a short book from the list.

If you have great ideas for 2020 challenges, please remember to PM me or suggest them here. http://www.librarything.com/topic/295242

I read 109 list books in 2018 and hoped for a similar number in 2019. As of today I’m on 112 for the year so happy with that.

I read Thurbers The 13 Clocks which is a delightful and quick read. I have Exercises in Style coming up soon which looks like a quick read - the same two paragraph story retold 99 times. On the other hand I also have Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 which I suspect will be the longest 127 pages of my life!

>2 puckers: I have been quietly watching your amazing rate -- posting a review about every three days!

Exercises in Style could be read quickly, but it's best to not. I was charmed when I read three or four examples each day. Wwhen I tried to finish the second half all in one sitting, it got tedious and then irritating.

I read a couple of short ones that also read quickly this year.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen
The Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton (only 59 pages!)
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti

>3 ELiz_M: thanks for the tip about Exercises. I’ll pace myself accordingly.

I have a lot of relatively short books lined up at the moment though I’m likely to slow down during the December/January holidays as, perversely, I have less free time for reading on holiday than during my daily commute to work.

I had hoped to read 25 books from the list in 2019 and, as of today, I have read 32. One goal I did have this year was to read Lolita and for some reason I never quite got to it so my goal for December is to finally get Lolita read.

As for quick reads I found the following books went by very quickly:

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

I'm almost embarassed to post my goals for the list this year, after the totals listed above. I wanted to read 6 off the list, with 10 being excellent. I've finished 11, so I'm very pleased with that, if not a little surprised. That's out of less than 80 books for the year, so I'm clearly slacking somewhere >;-)

The group reads have certainly helped with that total, so thanks for those. I won't join in all the time, but where I can, I will tag along.

This year I read The End of the Affair which is short.
Strangely, I flew through The Monk. It has to be the quickest 500 pages I've read in a long time! A riot of a story.

I don't think I had a goal this year in terms of reading. Well, my goal was to join a book discussion group, which I did, which has slowed me down on the 1001! I should have read about 26 List books by the end of the year, though, which is not too bad. Some were quite short...

Two very enjoyable short books this year: Platero and I, and my favorite, Cain.

So far I have read 114 books this year (about to finish 115). A three-hour commute helps! All but one have been 1001 list books. The one outlier was My Struggle Book 5 back in May. I may attempt book 6 of that series in December, now that it is out in paperback here.

My goal this year was to read books off the list that had been purchased a long time ago and have been sitting in the TBR stack. L'Assommoir, The Master and Margarita, A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Golden Notebook were all books I read this year that had been collecting dust for a couple decades, at least. I did not get to The Magic Mountain, Corelli's Mandolin, or The Garden Party. Next year!

For shorter books, I read In Watermelon Sugar, Intimacy, Woman at Point Zero, Nancy Mitford's books, and two of Henry Green's books. I read a bunch of short ones in February as a challenge to myself.

Wow! I'm impressed with the high percentage of list books you guys read. I read from the list because it stretches my reading, but because of that, I find that about 25 is my max for the year (I usually read about 75 books total).

This year I wanted to read 20 and I've read 16. But one of those was Pilgrimage, which I actually somehow finished, so I'm not stressing about finishing 4 more before the end of the year. I think 2 more is likely.

I will keep my eye on these short ones you guys are mentioning to see if I can get to 20 for the year.

Also, if anyone somehow hasn't read A Christmas Carol yet, it's short and very good!

>6 DeltaQueen50: Good luck with Lolita. It is a book I have been avoiding my whole life but I actually found the beautiful writing made up (maybe not entirely!) for the subject matter. Look forward to seeing what you think.

I started this year and had set a very tentative goal of 100 books a year. However this would only work if I read nearly all 1001 Books (I have read 108 books to date this year) but that has not been the case. Too many other books I wanted to read as well! So I have read 39 1001 books so far this year. Hoping to add at least another three or four as I am nearly finished Great Expectations and I always read A Christmas Carol in December.

For quick reads, I would say both the Nella Larsen books, Passing and Quicksand. I also read a few of the childrens books from 'adult' the list with my boys, The Little Prince, The 13 Clocks Pippi Longstocking. The Edgar Allan Poe stories and The Yellow Wallpaper. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is a fun read. Breakfast At Tiffany's.

Happy reading for December! Let's finish this year with a bang!

>6 DeltaQueen50:, If you listen to audio books and can find it, Jeremy Irons is an exquisite narrator.

Short books I have found enjoyable and are probably quick reads:
Silk, Chess Story, The Pigeon, Fear and Trembling, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Barabbas, The River Between, Ethan Frome, Giovanni's Room, Kitchen, Season of Migration to the North, July's People, A Kestrel for a Knave, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, The Summer Book, On Love, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Things They Carried

I've fallen far short of my overall goal for the year- only at 55 books for the year thus far. But I have two weeks of vacation to round out the year, so I'm hoping to recover some of the shortfall! I've read 23 list books and while some of them were a bit sloggy, a few were enjoyable (and short):
The Pigeon
After the Quake
The Driver's Seat

One that I would absolutely recommend, even though it was not short, is House of Leaves. I read through the 500 pages in 2 days, SO worth the read.

I have had a good year, I ended 2018 on 777 and am currently on 877. This is with a double checking of spreadsheets and realising I had counted a couple I hadn't read. I am on track for finishing before Oct 2021, which is my 40th birthday. I have also reread a couple of books and have The Namesake to reread as it is part of a bookgroup readalong. I'd like to end the year on 880 minimum.
I have enjoyed Hunger- brutal but not long; Thousand Cranes - beautiful writing; Kiss of the Spider woman; Fear and Trembling - a French woman living in Japan; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen -another hard-hitting book, but I couldn't put it down; War with the Newts - a sci-fi drama allegory; Holder of the World - another book I couldn't put down.

You have all done so well!

I had a modest goal of 1 1001 book a month and I'm at 9 at the moment. I've been working on Pilgrimage for a while, and I just have to deal with the fact that If I'm going to get through some of the tomes on the list, my total number is not going to be that high, given all the other non-1001 reading I do. So, hopefully I'll finish Pilgrimage 3 and 4 this month, which will give me a grand total of 10 1001 books this year.

In addition to the many listed here, I found these books to be relatively quick reads:

The Reader
Rebecca
The Book of Illusions
The Collector
The Plague
The Stranger
The Return of the Soldier
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Summer
Lord of the Flies
The Thirty-Nine Steps
No One Writes to the Colonel
Castle Rackrent
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

I finally have gotten Lolita off my TBR pile. I really didn't like this book as I couldn't get past the subject matter but I am happy to have this one done with.

I picked up Memento Mori at the library today. It isn't quite as short as her others on the list, but I'm hoping to squeeze it in before the end of the year. That would put me at 18 books for the year. I was hoping for 20, but not too bad.

I did finish Memento Mori. It was good, but not my favorite book by Spark - it didn't shock me like some of hers do and I missed that.

So now I've read 18 books from the list and that's it for this year. That brings me to 319 read.