annathecrow

(Almost out of time now... I have no chance of completing it, but I'd like to get at least a few books in before the year is over. Maybe even round it up to 30? We shall see...)
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Today in "oh, that's something that could go to the longform blog!": a todo list/tracking post for the Popsugar Reading Challenge I'm trying this year.

I was in a big read-more-books mood back in January, and someone on Tumblr reblogged the challenge in just the right moment for me to bite. So far it's going... I wouldn't say smoothly, but quite well, all considered.

The challenge list

(the damn bints only have it as graphics so I actually have to retype it. boo.)
purple = currently reading; green = done.

A book recommended by a librarian
A book that's been on your TBR list for way too long ✓ – Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino [Ancient celtic wicca bisexual metalheads from the 80s! It's... not really good. Amusing, but so full of cliches I could choke. But as a "holy shit they wrote WHAT?" it's priceless.]
A book of letters ✓ – Listy Hetér (The Letters of Hetairas) [ancient greek/byzantine fictional letters of hetairas (prostitutes or escorts). Interesting but also enraging - so many duchebros I could hurl.]
An audiobook
A book by a person of color ✓ – Tři mocné ženy (Three Strong Women) by Marie NDiaye [This was a pain to read. A PAIN. Very artsy, with magical realism and writing with repeating phrases, and the middle of the three stories has the most obnoxious PoV character I've ever read.]
A book with one of the four seasons in the title
A book that is a story within a story ✓ – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. [Welp, I did not expect that much naturalism in a book from the early nineteenth century! Clunkier and more moralizing then Jane Eyre (which I read right before it and inspired me to pick up ToW), but definitely more interesting, IMO.]
A book with multiple authors ✓ – Women of the Dark Streets: Lesbian Paranormal [I need to read Goodreads/Amazon descriptions more carefully, because I wanted lesbian romance and got porn And a mostly bland, same-y, plot-what-plot porn. As a spank bank, yes; as a book; lol no.]
An espionage thriller ✓ – The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth [Technically masterful - language, pacing, genre convention, everything - but the parts that involve politics read like a rant from your 70yo Conservative grandpa, and there is unfortunately lots of them. Ugh.]
A book with a cat on the cover ✓ – Žena se lvem, an anthology of SFF stories by Czech female authors. [Quality varies, as things usually go with anthologies. Some internalized misogyny, some tropes, and admitedly some jealousy on my part, because I'm a bitter bitch.]
A book by an author who uses a pseudonym ✓ – Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb, aka Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden. [I loved this one! It has sail ships and women being badasses, and really compelling worldbuilding. Only hurdle is the extreme brattiness of the two youngest women. Althea gets over it quite fast, but Malta is a pain. It's realistic and the story is worth it, but ugh.]
A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read ✓ – Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh [A multi-PoV story about gas mining. Really enjoyed this one.]
A book by or about a person who has a disability
A book involving travel ✓ – The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto "Che" Guevara [Mostly meh, but amusing - apparently, young Ernesto was a bro. I will never get over the blaséd attitude most young guys have at that age. Kind of jealous of that, but also holy shit, is this how evolution gets rid of surplus males or what.]
A book with a subtitle ✓ – Od Aristotela k virtuální realitě - víte, jak to mysleli? (EUREKA! What Archimedes Really Meant and 80 Other Key Ideas Explained) by Michael Marcone [I feel like I was going too easy on myself with this one, but I enjoyed it and learned quite a lot, so. Boo, impostor syndrome, go die in a ditch.]
A book that's published in 2017
A book involving a mythical creature ✓ – The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan [Childish, but fun.]
A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile
A book about food
A book with career advice
A book from a nonhuman perspective ✓ – A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. [Amusing little thing with talking dogs and cats and Sherlock Holmes in drag. But also Cthulhu and human sacrifices. It's that kind of a book.]
A steampunk novel
A book with a red spine ✓ – Vojákem pražského sboru (A Soldier of the Prague Division) by Egon Ervín Kisch [I maaaay have cheated on this one, because the spine was only maybe 2/3 red. But I gave myself an additional constraint that it had to be from our old-books family library, and this one was the most appealing. It's a diary written by a Jewish German-Czech journalist (yes, that's a thing) fighting in WWI on Austro-Hungarian side. Really raw, really interesting.]
A book set in the wilderness
A book you loved as a child ✓ – Masque by F. Paul Wilson and Matthew J. Costello. [The premise (genetically engineered humanoid morphs kept as slaves of warring corporations) could be a wonderful opportunity to question gender and capitalism and humanity, and the writers just... fail. How. How do you make a stereotypical postapocalyptic romp, with a hetero romance no less, from this? HOW.]
A book by an author from a country you've never visited ✓ – Kormidelník čtvera větrů by Alexander Grin. [Whatever I expected, THIS WAS NOT IT, OMG.]
A book with a title that's a character's name ✓ – Marketa Lazarová by Vladislav Vančura [The purple prose is atrocious and the Stockholm syndrome being paraded around as "power of love" makes me sick. Thank heavens it's so short.]
A novel set during wartime ✓ – Živí a mrtví (Alive and Dead) by Konstantin Simonov [Enjoyable read (as much as a war story can be enjoyable). And an interesting companion to the E. E. Kisch's book, because it essentially covers a very similar part of a war (even if one is WWI Serbia and the other WWII Russia). It's also surprisingly low on agitprop for a 50's book.]
A book with an unrealiable narrator
A book with pictures ✓ – Seeing Ourselves: Women's Selfportraits by Frances Borzello [So many interesting artists! I enjoyed this book a lot. ]
A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you ✓ – The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie. [Interesting worldbuilding, but... idk. For some reason it feels really shallow. I can't put my finger on it.]
A book about an interesting woman ✓ – Deník Niny Kostěrinové (Diary of Nina Kosterina). [Diary of a girl born in 1910s Russia, up to her death as a partisan in WWII. Not as interesting as I hoped, but still interesting enough.]
A book set in two different time periods
A book with a month or day of the week in the title
A book set in a hotel
A book written by someone you admire ✓ – Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire [Funny story, this - I've admired Seanan McGuire ever since I saw this performance of Wicked Girls, a song she (AFAIK) wrote. And I just. I wish I was this multi-talented and and active in fandom and popular and successful... I know, not exactly healthy, but well.]
A book that's becoming a movie in 2017
A book set around a holiday other than Christmas
The first book in a series you haven't read before ✓ – The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch [Okay, but not my thing. It reads like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of someone who really really loves heist stories, which I don't. Also, NOT ENOUGH WOMEN.]
A book you bought on a trip ✓ – Why it Does Not Have to Be In Focus by Jackie Higgins [Modern art photography intro explainer - selected works with commentary. Interesting, but most of it just doesn't speak to me.]

Advanced

(I don't think I'm getting this far, but whatever)

A book recommended by an author you love
A bestseller from 2016
A book with a family-member in the title
A book that takes place over a character's life span
A book about an immigrant or refugee
A gook from a genre/subgenre that you've never heard of
A book with an eccentric character
A book that's more than 800 pages ✓ – The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon [It's like Joan of Arc if she started as a common soldier and didn't die in the end. The religious aspect of this story makes me itchy, because I'd rather have my fantasy without Christianity, thank you very much... but I still can't help but love this.]
A book you got from a used book sale
A book that's been mentioned in another book
A book about a difficult topic
A book based on mythology

Ohhhhh damn, I Have Opinions about a lot of those books, but also don't want to break the layout and also am lazy and know that when I start I'll end up writing thousands of words. I need to think about this.
EDIT: I'm trying to conquer the LJ cut function for this, lets see how that goes.

EDIT #2: ...badly. Now all inside a cut, because it was insanely long. Complicated formatting is complicated.

I'm taking this pretty losely, so I'm trying to fit a lot of the prompts to things that are already in my TBR pile, or pick things that are appealing over things that fit the prompt "better". But I do challenge myself - I'm trying to read more books in Czech, go through my TBR pile, and generally dare myself to get through books that aren't as gripping as I usually prefer. Not always fun, but it makes me feel accomplished and clever and whatnot, which does wonders for my self-confidence, let me tell you.

EDIT: Ohhhhh gross, DW, the fuck even is your WYSIWYG editor? No semantic style picker (if I want headings I need to dig into HTML like heathen), enter creates line-break tags instead of paragraphs (and Shift+Enter does make paragraphs just to mix it up), the cut function is okay but it's miserably visualized. I'm not talking about the no-sane-image-hosting thing, because that one I at least understand (hardrive space is expensive). But the missing semantic styles are a travesty. *quiet grumbling of It's New And I Don't Like It*