Reading January 2nd

So yesterday I started the Iliad. It's going to be a challenge and I thought the reading group for it would go a bit slower, but we're supposed to have more than I was expecting finished by the 9th. So I decided to get started on it.

First, I'm big on finding a good translation. Especially for such a classic as the Iliad. So that took quite a bit of time yesterday, but I think I found my match in Lattimore. This translation is apparently as close to the meter and structure of the original as possible, while still being simple and poetic, and is highly regarded as one of if not the best English translation. It was really a no-brainer for me once I'd found enough info on it.

I spent so much time on that, and as mentioned yesterday I'm always slower going into a book at first, so I again didn't get to 37 pages yesterday nor get near the 74 pages I should be at by the end of two days. Skipping the long intro for now, I started the Iliad on page 77 and made it to 94, so rounding down I made it to 17 pages yesterday.

Adding that to yesterday, I'm at 37 pages so far, exactly half of the 74 to be perfectly on track.

I thought the Iliad would be pretty difficult, and was shocked to find it as easy as it was so far. I know they say that Homer (who I've never read before) wrote in a very plain and simple style, but I didn't realise it would still seem that way (with a good translation of course).

I definitely prefer it to Black Rain so far, and good thing since it's about twice as long. It also just makes me feel good that I'm finally tackling Homer. It's so easy, in fact, that I'm not even reading the notes for now. This version has accompanying notes for each book (chapter) and I sampled them at first but found them too spoilery. I know some of the story already of course, but I'd rather first read it all in the actual story rather than the notes. So I expect to go through the notes later.

Of course I've been annotating and taking lots of notes. And using google on some things. It's a bit annoying that the included maps are too small to read well (if I zoom in it becomes blurry, and same thing happens trying to read it on my computer) and no googled map has all the locations I'm looking for. I have found some good maps online though and bookmarked them and have been referring to them a lot to get and idea of where the many (many) places they mention in the book are.

Google has also helped me with the names and pronunciation. First, apparently ancient Greeks love to use about a hundred different names for a person or group, often all in the same breath. If one didn't know better, it'd seem like they're talking about a different person or group each time. So google has helped me realise that Achaians are also Danaans, that Smintheus is Apollo and so on. And pronunciation-wise, I quickly corrected that Achaians are not pronounced "A chee ahns" but rather "Ah ky ahns", and so on. Actually I've found in my google searches a few sites that have audio pronunciation of words and I played around there for awhile, trying to think of rare words I wasn't quite positive how to pronounce just right.

All in all I'm very excited about this read.

January 1st What I Read

So, to kick things off I decided to start reading Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse. It was chosen as the January selection for the general mobileread book club. January is a second-chance month where every book that came in second each month of 2011 are the nominees.

If you didn't keep track of the January vote, let me say, I was not a fan of Black Rain winning, to say the least! :p Modern war and its dire aftereffects are among my least favourite subjects, and this one didn't appeal to me from the start. I remember the month it was first up I was so happy it didn't win. I just feel like I hear about modern war and its destruction all the time. I don't mind depressing or grim stories, but a story about radiation poisoning from the Hiroshima bombing during WWII sounds as interesting as a rash of poison ivy.

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but I'm overexposed to stories of war and destruction through the news and our culture. I feel like this book will be about teaching a harrowing anti-war lesson and I don't need to be taught a harrowing anti-war lesson.

In fact, I even considered the idea of giving myself one veto for book club selections for my reading challenge, just so I could veto this one off of my list!

Some know that I am no fan of Storm Front but I wonder if I may have even rather it had won the month (it was also in contention).

So why am I reading it then, you ask? Well, I just feel compelled to as part of my challenge already laid out. I know many wouldn't bother with a book they object to so much, but I feel compelled to soldier on and see what I get out of it.

So, with all that in mind, I began yesterday.

My goal was 37 pages for the day but I didn't get that far. I'm in Chapter 2 now. The book starts on page 11 and I made it to page 31-32 (in ebooks some pages are displayed as multiple page numbers since epubs count pages by words I think). So rounding down, I read 20 pages yesterday!

Good start in my opinion. Not 37 but hopefully I'll catch up another day. It was slow going; I'm usually always the slowest reading in the beginning of a book while I'm getting used to the author and style. I also made a lot of annotations and notes.

The book is nice enough so far, and I want it to surprise me and make me like it. It's nicely written but so far is exactly the kind of thing I was expecting. It's starting out as a story about an older working girl and her aunt and uncle who all happened to be near Hiroshima when the bomb fell. Close enough to get radiation poisoning but far enough to survive. They go back to the little town they're from and live. After a few years, people talk about the uncle, one of the few left who is surviving radiation poisoning, gossiping about how he should work harder even though that's what usually kills those afflicted. If the afflicted work hard and pimples break out, they will die if they don't rest heavily and eat lots of good food. And he's survived so long by taking it easy in a culture obsessed with working hard, leading to gossip of laziness and taking advantage of his situation.

Their niece though seems to be the main character. She is unmarried and though she was close enough to Hiroshima to get radiation, she hasn't shown signs of poisoning. But nevertheless rumours have spread around town that she was closer to Hiroshima during the bombing than she really was and has radiation poisoning, rendering her lonely and unable to marry.

All I see in the future for this book is a slow boil of suffering for this family. Well, we'll see what happens!

Why a blog?

If you've come here from mobileread, you're probably wondering, "Why a blog?" Well, I thought I'd do a post to explain why.

First, I thought it'd be fun to try. I've never really done one before so why not try it out.

Second, I thought it might help me out in my challenge. My plan is to try to blog at least once a day or once every other day at the least about my progress and what I'm reading and thinking. I just think it'll be a nice fun way to keep track. If it gets too tedious or boring or it distracts me too much from actual reading, then I'll just close it down! But I'm hoping that instead it will enhance my reading.

I don't expect this blog to be very popular at all. After all, it's about a personal reading challenge, lol. I may be blogging to myself mostly, heh. But if anyone does want to look around and comment, then I'm sort of laying a little piece of me out there for people to read about. My reading side. Really, this blog will be mostly a reading diary for the next year. My progress, my thoughts, whatever pops into my head. I may post about things other than reading sometimes too if I feel like it, but the general theme is reading 2012.

Since I'm so new to this, I just picked a theme I thought looked a little nice and haven't done much yet. But hopefully soonish I'll spend a little time sprucing the place up a little bit and changing the pic and some colours and stuff.

The List 2012 The Beginning

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• The Annotated Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner
• Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
• Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
• The Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
• Iliad by Homer
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll
• A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
• Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carrol
• Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll
• A Tangled Tale by Lewis Carroll
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• 12 more whims
• 23 more book club selections

Hectic Day or two or three

These first days I'll be posting a lot of the background stuff about the challenge to get it all laid out. Once that's over, I expect to settle into something a bit easier.

The Challenge

So, at mobileread my challenge is already laid out, but I thought I should lay it out here as well!

Basically, my goal is to read 50 books this year.

I am going to count by page number though, at 260 pages per book. That equals 13,000 pages as my goal for the year.

But I want a simpler count that counting to 13,000 page by page, so I'm still counting by "books", and every 260 pages I read will be a "book". So long books can count as multiple ones (a 520 page book would count as two) while short stories can be counted in this manner as well.

I've used a calculator and figured that on average the goal will basically be about 37 pages per day (technically it was 36-point-something, so I just rounded up). This way I can easily keep track of how I'm doing at any point in the year. For instance, by tomorrow, January 3rd, I know that the goal will have been to have finished about 111 pages so far this year (37 times three) and I can measure my progress against that. Maybe I can get a ticker to put on this site that automatically updates every day to tell me how many pages would already be finished if I'm reading 37 pages a day. I'll see.

I'm not going to worry about different types and lengths of pages. Whatever the paper book or ebook tells me, that's how many pages I count. Keep it simple.

As far as a TBR list, I am having one this year. I thought about not having one, to keep it simpler, but I find I like the idea of having some books that I want read by year's end.

First, I'm part of the mobileread literary book club which should have around 12 selections this year, and I'm part of the mobileread general book club which should have around 12 selections this year. So there's already 24 of my 50. The January book for the general book club, Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, has already been chosen, so I have that and 23 more to-be-determined books on my list. If a book is selected I've already read, I won't read it, but otherwise I'm going to try to read all the selections this year, whatever they may be...

Of the remaining 26, I split it in half and want to pick 13 now and leave 13 open to my whims. The 13 I picked now come from my longer TBR list. One goal I have separate from this reading challenge is to read the complete works of Lewis Carroll, so I'm including six now. I've already read The Annotated Alice which included both Alice books, so you won't see that on my list. Of the rest, I chose his novels and then his earliest and most well-known other books to round out the list. After I read those, I'll eventually get to the rest of this writings, including possibly his letters and diaries.

With six thus chosen, that left seven to still be picked now. This last year, trying to keep up with the book clubs, I've left off reading quite a few books to work on newer selections instead. :p So I've accumulated a bit of a half-finished pile. Of that pile, I'm adding A Room with a View and Anna Karenina to my TBR list for this year. I would love to finish everything half read this year, but I thought it prudent to stick to two for now from the book clubs.

There is also another half-read book, Middlemarch by George Eliot, that I've been working on for years! I'm almost exactly halfway through and have been meaning for over a year now to get back to it and finally finish it. It's not the only one older than a year that I haven't finished, but it's the one I want to tackle this year the most, so it's also on my list for this year.

Next comes Ulysses by James Joyce. There may be books I've not finished yet for various reasons, but there is rarely a book I stop reading because it's too perplexing. Well, Ulysses is one of that rare list, actually I think the only book on that list, heh. I tried to read it years ago, got about 50 pages in, and just had to put it down and say to myself that I'll tackle it again after some years and maybe I'll be more in a position to absorb it better. I didn't used to have a TBR list per se. Ulysses changed that and was and has been book #1 on the list ever since the list was started. It's now time to try it again, and this time I may get either a companion or study guide to read along with it if need be. But either way I'm determined to read it this year!

Finally comes fantasy. I didn't plan it that way and I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but the last three are all fantasy. The first is the second in the Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire. I liked the first one alright, it was a nice light read, and with the film coming out soon I thought it'd be nice to finish the series before someone accidentally tells me what happens in the last two books. Also, my TBR list is pretty heavy, lots of heavy books and classics, so it's nice to include a lighter, faster and newer read to keep things diverse. I actually wanted to put more than one lighter book on my list, but with so few slots it didn't happen. Well, there's always the book club selections and my whims!

The last two are A Game of Thrones and the second book of the Kingkiller chronicles, The Wise Man's Fear. I wanted to read A Game of Thrones last year before I watched the series, but it never happened (it was so so close to winning a book club month, but ah well...). I never watched the series, still waiting to read the book first. I have read the first chapter and liked it.

The first Kingkiller chronicle was a book club selection that I wasn't very excited about (actually I think it was the book that barely beat A Game of Thrones!) but I slogged through and fell in love with it. I thought it was just a great, great book and so I want to read the sequel sometime this year.

So that makes 13. I would be done now, except that I had forgotten that some of us at mobileread had said we'd do an Iliad read this year, actually this month. Woops! So, there's one of my whims.

Whew! That was a post! :D

First post; new year; new challenge!

Hi and welcome to my little blog! This is my first real blog ever and I'll be learning as I go. I've set it up to help keep track of my reading challenge and progress this year. This is basically an extension of my mobileread challenge, and most of you will probably come here through a link in my signature or profile on that site. Next post will outline my particular reading challenge this year. Thanks for visiting, feel free to comment and I'll be back later!