Tweedledum's 2014 challenge

[Tweedledum]

13 Short Stories
A mixed bag of 12 stories or story collections.
The Christmas Dog
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Duel: Terror Stories
The adventure of the dropped catches
The Cleverness of Ladies
The Babi Yar Chapter
The Church Mice and the Ring
The Church Mice Adrift
A Wayne in a Manger
Moomintrolls and Friends
Prepositions

[Tweedledum]

14. Travel
Just 2 neither of which are on the original list!

Notes from a Small Island
Tents and Tent Stability: A Month-Long Camping Adventure In Germany - In a Rather Dodgy Tent!

[Tweedledum]

Summing up my reading journey for 2014:
I have read 140 books this year......no mean achievement especially considering how busy and pre-occupied I have been most of the year. Looking back I see that these have fallen into 13 categories rather than the 14 I intended. My failure to read anything in the spirituality section is interesting and almost certainly a reflection of the turmoil the family has been going through all year. It was certainly ambitious to make such a comprehensive list of planned reading and anyone who knows me well would have predicted that I would have been unlikely to stick closely to the list as I have always tended to read in an elliptical way going off on tangents and enthusiasms.

It's been good to revisit some old "friends " this year including :Mama Ramotswe, Artemis Fowl, Brother Cadfael, and Charles Wallace. And it's been fun too to indulge in some light hearted reading . Reading Are You Dave Gorman? gave me a lot of pleasure but a big surprise for me was how much I enjoyed The Wobbit A Parody (Of Tolkien's The Hobbit): or, There Goes My Back Again (The Wobbit: A Parody Series).

Professionally I have been exploring links between epilepsy and autism and taking time to really read properly Carol Gray's The New Social Story Book : Illustrated Edition having attended her inspiring training course this year. I have written and used social stories for many years now but it was really good to meet Carol and follow the development of her thinking on this.

Crime fiction continues to be a genre that I can fall into to relax and I have loved discovering SJ Paris' Giodarno Bruno novels. Inspired by them I hope to read The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I in 2015.

2014 is the centenery of the start of WWI and it was extra-ordinarily moving to find and visit and my grandfather's war grave this year. A grave that seems to have been unknown to the family despite being located in Paddington old cemetery! As a reservist he was called up on August 4th 1914 and took part in the retreat from Mons to Ypres being awarded a bar for bravery along the way. All of this was unknown to me until we stumbled across Jerry Murland''s Retreat and Rearguard 1914: The BEF's Actions from Mons to Marne in December 2013, in which he is mentioned by name and thanks to Jerry's painstaking work we now know the progress and actions of his battalion ! (2KOSB)This inspired me to take an active interest in the detail of the early years of the 14-18 war and hence to read Battle Story: Ypres. In the light of this visiting the poppy display at the Tower of London was particularly moving and the purchase of one of these poppies for the family seemed an important thing to do.

Terrorism continues to be a scourge on societies across the globe. Christmas Day 2013 saw an horrific attack on Christians in Bagdad while this Decembrr, perhaps in response to the honouring of Malala with the Nobel Peace prize saw the callous murder of 133 school children and many of their teachers by the Taliban in Peshawar. Now the shock has diminished somewhat the Pakistan government are finally determined to take action and with some elements of the Taliban apparently trying to distance themselves from the atrocity could this be a glimmer of hope? As many Muslims seek to remind their brothers and sisters that Islam is founded on a message of peace and to separate themselves from a fundamentalism that plays on ignorance and fear. http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/islam...
Perhaps the death of these innocents will not be in vain. I am reminded of certain IRA atrocities that proved to be the beginning of the road to peace and reconciliation.
I am glad that I seized the opportunity to read I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban earlier this year and found it a timely reminder that education must be recognised as a universal right for all children everywhere but also that women continue to be threatened, abused, maltreated and disenfranchised across the globe no woman is truly free until all her sisters are free. The Taliban's oppressive stance is doubly shocking given that Islam is a faith that embraced women's rights in at least some respects while many in the west were still arguing over what St Paul did or didn't say on the matter and going back a few centuries busy burning women for "witchcraft" in the name of Christianity.
Throughout history we have seen that one man or woman who stands up and speaks out for truth and justice can change the world. Malala is one of those courageous people. It seems timely to quote St John... " the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out."

Natural history has always been an important area for me and I worry that there is an over focus on "climate change " while the wholesale destruction and degradation of the natural environment itself seems to be allowed to continue unchecked.....some of which is in the name of fighting against climate change.... Such as the switch to the highly controversial biofuel. I find that Fortey's books Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution and Life: An Unauthorised Biography: A Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth , although I haven't finished either of these this year, help to put humanity in a proper perspective. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History reveals that man began on his destructive path pretty much from the dawn of civilisation and will be single handedly responsible, when he is finally done, for the extinction of hundreds of thousands of plants and animals from woolly mammoths on down the centuries. Even if we could motivate everyone now living on planet earth to think and act like a conservationist it seems highly likely that mankind has set in motion a pattern of extinction almost comparable with other mass extinctions that have occurred. The positive thing is that while mankind itself may pass away, life on Earth will go on. Our task I guess is to do our best, now we do understand finally the long term impact of our selfish actions, to minimise and reduce our impact wherever we can do so.
Meanwhile there is so much we do not know or understand. James Nestor's Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves blew me away with the extra-ordinary discoveries that are being made through deep diving and reminds me that however much we think we know there is always more to learn and discover.

[Bionic Jean]

A remarkable achievement. Hope your reading next year also provides you with such food for thought, Tweedledum.

[Tweedledum]

Thank you Jean, I was determined to find time to review my reading journey properly for 2014 and am glad I did. It's good to see that my butterfly approach is not as random as it sometimes seems.

[LauraT]

Great analisys Tweedledum

[Tweedledum]

Thank you Laura!