She Treads Softly: TBR Challenge

Sunday, January 4, 2009

TBR Challenge

12 books for the TBR Challenge:

The Known World - Jones, Pulitzer, TBR
Echo Maker - Powers,TBR, chunkster, 451 pages
The Kite Runner - Hosseini TBR
The Traveler - McLarty
These Granite Hills - Stonich
Ten Days in the Hills - Smiley
The Bounty - Alexander

English Creek - Doig

The Last King of Scotland - Foden

The Human Stain - Roth

The Manchurian Candidate - Condon

Seeing - Saramago

Alternates:

The Shepherd of the Hills - Wright

Cloudsplitter - Banks, chunkster, 758 pages

The Stone Raft - Saramago

Gold Bug Variations - Powers, chunkster, 639 pages

History - Morante, chunkster, 734 pages

Tying Down the Wind - Pinder

Their Father's Gods - Rolvaag

Peder Victorious - Rolvaag

Prairie Nocturne - Doig

Ride With Me Mariah Montana - Doig

The Last Ship - Brinkley, chunkster, 616 pages

A HeartBreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Eggers, chunkster, 437+48 pages

The TBR Challenge was a great success for me last year and I look forward to another year!

No comments:

Post a Comment

John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.