Faye’s Comments (group member since Nov 05, 2013)

Faye’s comments from the The Reading Challenge Group group.

Crime & Punishment was my first Russian Lit experience, too. I think it is for a lot of people, so it must be a great place to start!

I have to finish 15 more books by the end of the year to meet my 2013 goal. HELLO PANIC.

The good news is, I've got a lot of relatively short books at my fingertips, so I'm not completely out of the game yet! So my to-read list for the rest of the year is -

Paradise Lost (I'm about halfway through)
The Outsiders (ditto)
Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (again, halfway through)
The Old Man and the Sea
Jason and the Golden Fleece
Exodus
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
The Abolition of Man
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen
Indiscretions of Archie
Big Money
The Girl in Blue
The Dead Secret

And naturally, my annual Dickens binge...

A Christmas Carol
The Haunted Man

Wow. Yeah. Why am I sitting here? I NEED TO READ!!!

I'm reading The Outsiders. I'd seen the movie and enjoyed it, but I'd never read it. It's excellent!

Wait, what I miss? We had a sock?? I didn't even get notifications that anyone named Arya posted anywhere...

Welcome, Russell!

Wow, lots of newbies! Welcome all. :)

Welcome, Erik! I love C.S. Lewis. :)

Yay Poe! Some of his stories are meh, but they're greatly outnumbered by the ones that are awesome.

Wow, a lot of those are looooong books! You've got your work cut out for you there, but they're SO GOOD that it probably won't feel like work at all. Good luck!

Nice selections! You'll have a great reading year. :)

Rose wrote: "Ive only just joined goodreads and it's great to find there are so many readers out there! Nobody I know reads! I read for at least an hour or so a day and 2-3 books a week so I think 120 might be ..."

That's awesome! I love Goodreads for that reason, too - a lot of people in my life read, but they read very different books than I do, so it's refreshing to come to a place where, no matter what the book, someone else has read it. :)

Great goals, everyone! Keep them coming!

And Sarah, I love that we've encouraged you to aim higher than usual for 2014! Good luck! :)

Welcome, Jade and Rachael! I hope you enjoy the group. :)

Great goal, Casey!

And yes, the new Reading Challenge appears once the 2013 one ends. :)

Welcome to the group and to Goodreads, Casey! It's the best website on the internet. :)

Frankenstein for horror. Diary of Anne Frank for non-fiction. The Code of the Woosters for humour.

Dune for Scifi! And I'll be back with more later. :)

There's not much I can add to Narim and Emad's thoughts, because I completely agree! I adore Dostoyevsky - he could sure spin a good yarn, and make you think about some pretty deep, dark subject matter at the same time. Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are two of my favourite books ever.

Tolstoy is great, but he often seemed to bite off more than he could chew, or perhaps focused a little too much on style over story. War and Peace was wonderful, but come on, the girl with the short upper lip (that lip is mentioned on every single page, not even kidding) was pregnant for TWO YEARS if you do the math. Yeah. And Natasha was a bit of a time traveller, considering how often her age changed. But it's still a FANTASTIC book, because that was the magic of Tolstoy - he could hypnotize his readers into completely overlooking his shortcomings and simply being blown away by his skill.

I'd also recommend Dead Souls by Gogol, Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, and The Master & Margarita and The White Guard by Bulgakov. Oh, and In the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn, which I LOVED. I hope to read his Cancer Ward in 2014.

I love Russian literature!

Welcome, Natalie! :)

What I read in January depends entirely upon what I DON'T manage to read in December, heh. I know for sure I'll be reading The Book Thief, because I've been on the waiting list for it at my library for quite a while and should have it by the end of December. On top of that, I want to get through some of the many many unread books gathering dust in my room, plus whatever library books catch my eye (I can't stop myself! No matter how many books I already have, I can't think of the word "library" without craving another huge stack!!).

Narin, I loved Demons! Kind of an odd story, but very engaging. Which can be said of most Russian literature, now that I think about it, haha.

Welcome, Glady! :)