Leni's new short (and longer) term challenges

[Leni]

Getting this ready for 2022.

I've been reading some Pulitzer (literature) and Booker winners (and nominees) lately, and I kind of want to read them all. But I don't think I have the stamina for such massive lists right now, I need instant gratification. (And I'm a bit worried about WASP overload.) So I'm going to start off with the International Booker list, and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Much shorter and more diverse.

I also have a sort of "Birth year through the centuries" thing that I'd like to do, so I'll start with that. Female authored books through five centuries of -78s

✓1978 The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (Read 2017) ****/*

1878 The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green

1778 Evelina by Frances (Fanny) Burney

✓1678 The Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette (read 2024) **/*

✓1578 The Lamentation of a gentlewoman upon the death of her late-Deceased Friend, William Gruffith, Gentleman (poem) by Isabella Whitney (read 2023)

[Leni]

Women's Prize For Fiction

✓ 2024 Brotherless Night (read 2024) ****/*

✓ 2023 Demon Copperhead (read 2023)****/*

✓2022 The Book of Form and Emptiness (read 2022)***

✓2021 Piranesi (read 2021)*****

2020 Hamnet

✓2019 An American Marriage (read 2022)***

2018 Home Fire

2017 The Power

2016 The Glorious Heresies

2015 How to Be Both

✓2014 A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (read 2023) ***/*

2013 May We Be Forgiven

2012 The Song of Achilles

2011 The Tiger's Wife

2010 The Lacuna

2009 Home

2008 The Road Home

✓2007 Half of a Yellow Sun (read 2019)*****

2006 On Beauty

2005 We Need to Talk About Kevin

2004 Small Island

2003 Property

2002 Bel Canto

2001 The Idea of Perfection

2000 When I Lived in Modern Times

1999 A Crime in the Neighborhood

1998 Larry's Party

1997 Fugitive Pieces

1996 A Spell of Winter

[Leni]

The International Booker Prize

✓2024 Kairos (read 2024) ***

2023 Time Shelter

2022 Tomb of Sand

✓2021 At Night All Blood is Black (read 2022) ****

2020 The Discomfort of Evening

2019 Celestial Bodies

2018 Flights

2017 A Horse Walks into a Bar

✓2016 The Vegetarian (read 2019)****

[Leni]

reserved for The Booker Prize in part or full

[Leni]

reserved for The Pulitzer Prize for Literature in part or full

[Leni]

50 by 50

Books that have been on my TBR for years, many of them more than a decade, that I want to push myself to read before I turn 50, sorted into meme and pop culture categories. The list is actually a lot longer, the selection process was agony. Some of the entries are actually whole series, but technically (for some value of technicality) there are 50 items.

Chonky Read
Anna Karenina
Cryptonomicon
Don Quixote
✓Crime and Punishment *****
Daniel Deronda

Damn boi (s)he thicc!
War and Peace
✓The Stand (read 2024) *****
A Suitable Boy
The Tale of Genji

O lawd he comin!
The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1 - 4

Little German boy
✓Siddhartha (read 2023)***
✓Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (read 2025) ***
Die Taube
✓Der Tod in Venedig (read 2025)
Gruppenbild mit Dame

All the World's a Stage
The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
The Bacchae
Clouds
Othello
✓King Lear (read 2024) ****/*

And all the men and women merely players
Waiting for Godot
✓An Inspector Calls (read 2025) ****
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
A Streetcar Named Desire
Under Milkwood: A Play for Voices

Uno uno uno dos (tres) quatro
Kristin Lavransdatter
The Gormenghast Trilogy
The Book of the New Sun
The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion
The Once and Future King

Into the Multivolume series
A Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 1: Spring
The Complete Chronicles of Barsetshire
Shōgun etc
The Young Hornblower Omnibus: Mr Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower and Hornblower and the Hotspur
The Jeeves Omnibus Vol. 1: Thank You, Jeeves / The Code of the Woosters / The Inimitable Jeeves

Plz, can I haz some moar
The Lottery and Other Stories
Burning your boats: collected short stories
The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Le Morte d'Arthur
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories

IRL
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Det annet kjønn
The Periodic Table
Plato: Complete Works(don't worry, I have read a good many of them already!)
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Essays and Leaves from a Notebook
Man's Search for Meaning
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Beyond Good and Evil

[Leni]

Wanted Dead or Alive

Revisiting the Dead

Wilkie Collins
Previously read: The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Armadale, The Haunted Hotel

George Eliot
Previously read: Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss

Ursula K. LeGuin
Previously read: The Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, The Dispossessed

Read 2024: The Word for World is Forest

Daphne du Maurier
Previously read: Rebecca, Frenchman's Creek, Jamaica Inn, The Birds and other stories

James Baldwin
Previously read: Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room

Angela Carter
Previously read: The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children

Kurt Vonnegut
Previously read: Slaughterhouse-Five

Iris Murdoch
Previously read: The Sea the Sea

Dead Writers First Encounters

Anna Katherine Green

Patricia Highsmith

Doris Lessing

Hilary Mantel

Evelyn Waugh

John Wyndham
Read 2023: The Midwich Cuckoos

Revisiting the Living

Margaret Atwood
Previously read: The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid's Tale, The MaddAddam trilogy, The Penelopiad, My Evil Mother, Angel Catbird vol 1 (will not continue that one)

Louise Erdrich
Previously read: The Sentence

Stephen King
Previously read: Firestarter, Pet Sematary, Fairy Tale, Misery, Mr. Mercedes
Read 2023: Misery, Different Seasons, The Bill Hodges trilogy, The Outsider, If it Bleeds, Holly, The Dark Half, The Green Mile, The Shining, Doctor Sleep
Read 2024: The Stand, 'Salem's Lot
Read 2025: The Gunslinger

Annie Proulx
Previously read: The Shipping News
Read 2024: Close Range - the Wyoming Stories

Kim Stanley Robinson
Previously read: Mars trilogy
Read 2023: The Ministry for the Future

Amor Towles
Previously read: A Gentleman in Moscow

Elena Ferrante
Previously read: My Brilliant Friend

Making New Acquaintances

Ngaio Marsh

Fredrik Backman

Joanne Harris

Zadie Smith
Read 2024: The Fraud

Elisabeth Strout

[Wobbley]

You have such ambitious goals! I too really liked Piranesi. I hadn't heard of Anna Katharine Green's detective fiction before, so I'm glad to have run across that in your post. Good luck with your reading challenges!

[Leni]

Thanks, yes, I might be more ambitious than realistic, but I have given my way a few years to get through this list. And the Wanted Poster is more of a wish list. I hope that I have as many good reading years ahead of me as I have behind me, but I guess I'm still feeling my mortality more now than I did just a decade ago. There are more good books than are possible to read in a human lifetime, and I can't just keep postponing the long ones. lol

I think I heard of Anna Katherine Green from someone else in this group. The tbr list grows ever longer!

[Kathleen]

Well you're adding to my tbr here, Leni. "There are more good books than are possible to read in a human lifetime" is a truth I refuse to accept!

I like a lot of these authors you're focusing on, and am resisting the urge to push you towards a few of the new ones (Mantel, Waugh, Smith, Strout). You'll hit on the right ones at the right time. Happy reading!

[Leni]

Kathleen wrote: "Well you're adding to my tbr here, Leni. "There are more good books than are possible to read in a human lifetime" is a truth I refuse to accept!

I like a lot of these authors you're focusing on, ..."

Thank you! A bit of a nudge is fine, especially if you have opinions of which book to start with where it isn't obvious. For the authors you mention I am thinking Wolf Hall, Decline and Fall or Brideshead Revisited, White Teeth, and... really not sure about Strout. I have Olive Kitteridge, Amy & Isabelle, and My Name is Lucy Barton (I keep grabbing kindle daily deals, but do I read them?)

[Kathleen]

You will read them! (Like I said, I live in a dream world.)

For me the firsts were Wolf Hall, Brideshead, White Teeth and Olive Kitteridge, and I thought they were all great. I'm so curious what you'll think of Wolf Hall. It seems to divide folks, but I couldn't have loved it more.

[Sara, Old School Classics]

It is a stellar list, and I also choose to believe you will have plenty of time to read them all. Of course that is coming from a person who hears "time's wing'd chariot" all the time now.

[Leni]

Sara wrote: "It is a stellar list, and I also choose to believe you will have plenty of time to read them all. Of course that is coming from a person who hears "time's wing'd chariot" all the time now."

Thank you Sara. Maybe we all have many good reading years left. Assuming I get through this lot by 50, I intend to start on Proust and search for lost time. One volume per year.

[Darren]

re your 50 by 50
I can recommend Cryptonomicon, War & Peace, Tale of Genji and Kristin Lavransdatter, but I appreciate they're all of daunting size
so if you want a "quick tick" I'd go for Death In Venice which is a little gem :oD

[Leni]

Darren wrote: "re your 50 by 50
I can recommend Cryptonomicon, War & Peace, Tale of Genji and Kristin Lavransdatter, but I appreciate they're all of daunting size
so if you want a "quick tick" I'd go for Death In..."

Thanks Darren. I think I'll start on Kristin Lavransdatter soon, as it's a three on one, which seems less daunting than the all-in-one War&Peace. I'm afraid none of the German books will be quick ticks as I intend to read them in German. For some of them I'll probably double up with a translation as well. My German is steadily improving, but I am far from fluent yet.

[Leni]

Posting to keep the thread from being archived. And to remind myself to put on some real work on my 50by50 in 2025.

2025 Game plan, (in order of my categories, not necessarily chronology) :

Daniel Deronda
The Tale of Genji
A Suitable Boy
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts
Der Tod in Venedig
At least three plays
Kristin Lavransdatter (or bust)
The Once and Future King
At least one Barsetshire volume
The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
At least two of the non-fiction

I read enough that this should be doable as long as I remember to read the specified books and not just whatever captures my interest :-/