“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
A butler, Stevens, has dedicated his life to a large country estate. After prompting by his employer, he takes a “motoring trip,” deciding to visit an old friend, Miss Kenton, in the West Country of England. While driving through the “marvelous” English countryside, Stevens reminisces about the past, reflects on lost opportunities, and ponders his future.
(more…)January 16 marks one of the most important milestones in my life. On this day in 2009, I got sober.
As I prepare myself for the Read Harder 2020 challenge, I try to buy a bunch of books upfront, to capitalize on the momentum I’m feeling at the start of the new challenge. Here are some of my most recent additions, fresh from my front porch.
Goodbye, 2019. Hello, 2020!
So that’s that. I’ve done a lot of reading this year, some of it great, some of it really, really not great. But it’s over. 50 books done and dusted.
Here’s a look back at everything I’ve read in 2019.
Happy New Year!
Every year I set a goal for myself for how many books I’d like to read throughout the year. I started doing this in earnest in 2015, about a year or so after I had joined Goodreads. Goodreads encourages its users to set a goal and makes tracking your stats very easy; what books you’ve read, how many pages in total, which book was the shortest, which was the longest, the average length, etc. are all laid out in My Year of Books. This year, I my goal was to read 35 books. As of this writing, I’ve read 50. Nearly 11,000 pages. The shortest book I read was 15 pages. The longest, 461.
(more…)I’ve finally selected the books I’m planning on reading for the 2020 Read Harder Challenge. As I’ve said before, I’m not too excited by this year’s categories, so I may end up choosing other books to read depending on how this goes. But here’s what I have so far.
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It’s that time of year again! And I don’t mean Christmas. Book Riot has released their categories for 2020’s Read Harder Challenge. This will be my fourth year participating in the challenge, out of the six total challenges to date.
I’ve had a chance to go through the categories and so far, I’m only mildly excited. I read a lot of the categories for this challenge throughout 2019 (has Book Riot been following my Goodreads?), so I’m going to have to do a bit of digging to find something that really interests me. The link to the challenge is below. I’ll post my final list when I figure out what I want to read.
Every year since 2016, I’ve participated in Book Riot’s Read Harder reading challenge. The challenge involves reading a total of 24 books from a set of categories provided by Book Riot. The categories are designed to push you outside of your typical comfort zones when it comes to book genres. They also prioritize reading books that are written by authors of color, authors from marginalized groups, or authors from (or books set in) diverse locations around the world.
I’ve just started reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon by Anthony Marra. I’m 87 pages in and I’ve cried twice, sobbed twice, and, on multiple occasions, felt like I was punched in the gut. This book absolutely heart wrenching. It takes place over 12 years in Chechnya, between the two wars that ravaged the area during its push for autonomy from Russia. Everything I’ve heard about the book has said that it is outstanding, magical, will make you believe in miracles. But so far I feel completely overwhelmed. Marra is an excellent writer. He writes with a pregnant sparsity. His prose is so carefully worked, with an economy of words that somehow is as tangible to the reader as if it were happening in front of them or to them. I’m blown away. He has an uncanny insight into the human experience that he’s able to distill down into these magical passages that take your breath away. The New York Times likened his writing to Jonathan Safran Foer’s voice in Everything is Illuminated and the comparison is spot-on. This book is incredible so far and I already know I’ll only be able to read this book in small sections. I can’t handle the weight of his writing for longer than that.