Eccentric Musings (jakaEM)

I’ve been participating in the GR Challenge since its inception year, 2011, and have been publishing my own Year In Review since 2010. These are opportunities to structure and analyze my own reading in a way that makes the most of the too-little time I have to read and allows me to select the books that have the greatest likelihood of adding value to my reading experience.

While my Years In Review have always included reading commitments for the upcoming year, it wasn’t until last year that I brought the two - the Challenge and the YIR - together, committing not just to a specific number of books but also a specific set (or sub-set, as it turns out), organized around a central idea that emerged from my analysis of the year previous.

This at once brought a deeper level of structure to my reading plan and also took the “quantity” bias out of the Challenge, which was starting to be a drag.

My GR Challenge 2013 was to read to 12 honkin’ big classics, defined as:
1) at least 500 pages long
2) exemplars of the author’s work.

This year, I stumbled across a Classics Reading Challenge here on booklikes (and apologies to the originator, whose name has now been lost to me in the flotsam and jetsam of the feed here), and decided to model my 2014 GR Challenge along similar lines with my own twists.

I wanted 12 books – one per month – and I wanted to maintain gender parity. I also wanted to leave room for other books, so my GR Challenge is set at 48 which will include the 12 classics.

I will be reading these books:

If any of you would like to join me in participating in this Classics Challenge, feel free to drop a note here and identify your own lists – I would love to see them and also hear about your responses to them and to mine.

Happy reading to all in 2014!