Tag: book lists

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? February Report

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

In January 2024, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing? I was trying to finish by the end of December, but I clearly didn’t make it.

Here are the holes in my project with the books listed for this month below. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: complete!
  • 1935-1944: complete!
  • 1945-1954: entry needed for 1948
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for 1955
  • 1965-1974: complete!
  • 1975-1984: entry needed for 1981
  • 1985-1994: entry needed for 1993
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for 1995, 2002, and 2003
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for 2005, 2006, and 2007
  • 2015-2024: complete!

Since January 29, I read the following books. The ones for this project are listed in bold. As you can see, I concentrated this month on books for this project:

  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen for 1813
  • One by One They Disappeared by Moray Dalton for 1929
  • The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien for 1960
  • Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner for 1971
  • September by Rosamunde Pilcher for 1990
  • American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis for 1991
  • The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett for 1997
  • Erasure by Percival Everett for 2001
  • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism for 2021
  • Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus for 2022
  • What Sheep Do in Iceland When Nobody’s Around by Brian Pilkington for 2023

Classics Club Spin #40!

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club spin! How does it work? You post a numbered list of 20 of the titles from your Classics Club list. The club picks a number, and that determines which book you read before the end of the spin.

If you want to participate, post your list before Sunday, February 16, and read the book and post your review by Sunday, April 11. That gives you two months to read the book. If you’re not a member of the club, all you have to do is post a list of 50-100 classic books you would like to read and set a deadline for yourself. Then sign up for the club at the Classics Club blog site. If you are having a hard time thinking of that many classic books, the reviews on our website or the Big Book List will help.

And here’s my list, with repeats, because I have fewer than 20 titles left to read:

  1. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  4. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  5. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  6. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  7. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  8. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  11. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  12. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini 
  13. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  14. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  15. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  16. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini 
  17. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  20. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I’ve got some hefty ones in there, and I have been reading a series of tomes, so I hope I get one of the shorter ones!

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading.

What I Am Reading Now

Actually, at this writing I haven’t started it, but by the time this is posted tomorrow, I’ll be in the midst of September by Rosamunde Pilcher. I already checked this book out once from the library, to fill the 1990 gap in my A Century of Books project, but I knew I wasn’t going to finish one of the four library books I checked out, and unfortunately, chose one of the others to be the last one I read. Unfortunately, because it turned out someone else had put a hold on this one. But now I have it back. I haven’t read anything by Rosamunde Pilcher except The Shell Seekers, years and years ago, so I’m curious.

What I Just Finished Reading

I finally got to read Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus for my Literary Wives club. It has been sitting on my pile for over a year, waiting for its turn to come up for the club. I enjoyed it very much. Review coming at our next club meeting, Monday, March 3!

What I’ll Be Reading Next

I was glad to get a little heaviness break by reading the above two books (although September is very long), because I made the mistake of putting my books for A Century of Books into a pile by length, shortest first, in an effort to get as many read as possible before the end of last year. (Obviously, I haven’t met my goal for this project.) The result is that the heftiest are all waiting for me. And I haven’t yet found a book for every year. I have four more years to find books for and some books on hold at the library that are taking a long time to get here. Anyway, my next book falls into the middling hefty category, both in length and seriousness. It’s Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It’s been a long, long time since I read any Stegner, and I’m not sure if this was one that I read or not, way back then.

Of course, my reading plans sometimes get thrown off. They did in January, when I suddenly decided to reread Sense and Sensibility for ReadingAusten25 instead of How Green Was My Valley, and that could happen this time, too, if some of those books that I’ve had on hold for ages arrive from the library.

What about you? What have you been reading or plan to read next?

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? January Report

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing? I was trying to finish by the end of December, but I clearly didn’t make it.

Here are the holes in my project with the books listed for this month below. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: complete!
  • 1935-1944: complete!
  • 1945-1954: entry needed for 1948
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for 1955 and 1960
  • 1965-1974: complete!
  • 1975-1984: entry needed for 1981
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for 1990, 1991, and 1993
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for 1995, 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2003
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for 2005, 2006, and 2007
  • 2015-2024: complete!

I had a little confusion this month with the year 1980. I finished The Name of the Rose only to find that the year was already occupied by Tropical Issue, a renamed book by Dorothy Dunnett. However, I looked that book up again, and it actually belonged in 1983. So, I filled two slots at once.

Since December 25, I read the following books. The ones for this project are listed in bold. As you can see, I concentrated this month on books for this project. I completed books for two more decades:

  • How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn for 1939
  • The Feast by Margaret Kennedy for 1950
  • Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (from 1811, too early to count)
  • The Temptations of Big Bear for 1973
  • A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul for 1979
  • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco for 1980
  • The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende for 1982
  • Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones for 1986
  • The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri for 1994
  • Malice by Keigo Higashino for 1996
  • Island by Alastair MacLeod for 2000

As of today, it looks like I have 15 books left to read for this project, although it will take a bit longer for me to post all the reviews.

13th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

When I started blogging, I decided to list my top ten books of the year at my anniversary instead of close to the calendar new year so that I would have reviewed a year’s worth of books. It’s that time again. My actual anniversary is tomorrow, but that’s not usually a book blogging day for me. This year for perhaps the first time, I haven’t had multiple books by the same author to choose between. Also unusual for me because I read so many vintage books, most the books on this list were published recently. Unusual for me, too, is that half the books are written by men.

I was only reviewing three books a week last year, so that made the list of Top Ten books a bit shorter than usual but a little easier to choose from.

It was really an excellent year for historical fiction for me. Of the ten books I chose, six are historical, one is dystopian, two vintage contemporary, and one contemporary fiction. Of the historical fiction books, one was set in the 18th century, one in the 19th century, three in the 20th century, and one spans the time between the 17th century and the present.

So, here they are, in the order that I reviewed them:

My Life in Books

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Okay, what the heck, I needed to avoid doing the dishes for another half hour or so, so I stole this idea from The Chocolate Lady, who took the prompts from Anna Book Bel. The idea is to finish out the prompts with titles from books you read in 2024. They don’t have to be true or make sense, but you can’t repeat any. So, here goes:

(Apparently, I have participated at least once before, as evidenced by the logo above being in my files. But I don’t remember doing it.)