Have you ever run into someone at the store or while out and about that you really wanted to avoid? Especially since you said you’d participate in something and then completely failed to finish or keep up? Well have I got a story to share with you.
During my six years of blogging I’ve been resistant to joining many reading challenges. Every time I have joined a challenge, inevitably, I fail miserably….take for example, traveling the world in books. I kind-of, sort-of, started with it but then forgot to keep up and now feel so embarrassed every time I read one of Tanya’s posts at Mom’s Small Victories. She was so encouraging…then I dropped off the face of the earth. Now it’s like the virtual version of crossing the street to avoid someone because you totally messed up on something and don’t want to have to face them…..please say you know what I’m talking about! and if you come across this confession, Tanya, then please accept this very public apology
With all that said, I’m attempting to turn a new leaf, and I need your help.
My friend Aloi at Guiltless Reading is pairing up with Tanya at Mom’s Small Victories {yup, same one}; along with Becca at I’m Lost in Books, Savvy Working Gal and Lucy at Fictional 100 to host a quick reading challenge. This one incorporates Read the Nobels and Travel the World in Books. Bam! Two challenges in one! Woohoo! and all over the course of one month! double woohoo! I don’t have any long-term tracking to keep up with and with my memory that’s a good thing!
So, where do you come in?
stay on me.
ask me in the comments how I’m keeping up with the April challenge.
call me out on Twitter or Facebook
email me; send me an owl or messenger pigeon….anything to remind me to complete. the. challenge. I’m determined this time. I’m pumped up. I’m ready. Cue the Olympic theme!
Help TNL choose a book!
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One other way I need your help is in choosing a book. I’ve narrowed the list of 100+ authors and their work down to five books. Please help me decide which to read by either leaving a comment or completing the survey in the sidebar. I really and truly appreciate your help!
Nobels selected:
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Laureate 2006) It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal and Sibel, children of two prominent families, are about to become engaged. But when Kemal encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation, he becomes enthralled. And once they violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie. In his pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress—amassing a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Laureate 1907) Kim, orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor white mother, and the lama, an old ascetic priest, are on a quest. Kim was born and raised in India and plays with the slum children as he lives on the streets, but he is white, a sahib, and wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism; while the priest must find redemption from the Wheel of Things. Kim celebrates their friendship and their journeys in a beautiful but hostile environment, capturing the opulence of the exotic landscape and the uneasy presence of the British Raj. Filled with rich description and vivid characters, this beguiling coming of age story is considered Kipling’s masterpiece.
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan (Nobel Laureate 2012) The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences.
My Son’s Story by Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Laureate 1991) When Will skips school to slip off to a movie theater near Johannesburg, he is shocked to see his father. An ordinary mishap, but his father is no ordinary man. He is a “colored” and revered anti-apartheid hero, and his female companion is a white activist fiercely dedicated to the cause. As Will struggles with confusion and bitterness, My Son’s Story unravels the consequences of one man’s infidelity as a new South Africa violently emerges from the apartheid.
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Laureate 2015): Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR―it was called by reviewers there a “slanderous piece of fantasy” and part of a “hysterical chorus of malign attacks”―Zinky Boys presents the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. What emerges is a story that is shocking in its brutality and revelatory in its similarities to the American experience in Vietnam. The Soviet dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins (hence the term “Zinky Boys”), while the state denied the very existence of the conflict.
Thanks so much for your help Lovely Readers. You are the best! I’ll let you know on April 1st which book won!
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