Thread: Summer Reading Challenge

My goal is to read ten books by August 30th, which is the day we go back to school. If anyone else wants to partake, keep a log in this thread.

Book / Date Finished / Personal Rating

By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz - June 6th - 9/10
Pendragon: The Rivers of Zadaa by D.J. McHale - 6/10
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling - July 22 - 9/10

Fortune's Rocks - June 5th - 9/10
Neither here nor there - June 23rd - 7/10
The Catcher in the Rye - July 5th - 8/10
A long way down - July 24th - 10/10

I've read nothing, but I want a top spot so I can come back and edit

craiglet, are you still doing this??

I'll start today - July 12th.

To read:

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Cocksure by Mordecai Richler
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby
The Tao of Pooh by whoever the fuck (I have to read *something* light)
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

Maybe substitute something by Camus in there. Not necessarily in that order.

*Edit: On second thought, I might not even finish half of these, but it's worth a try

Book / Date Finished / Personal Rating

The Castle

Why not join in, right?

American Gods - Neil Gaiman - 8/10
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson - July 17 - 7/10

All Tomorrow's Parties - William Gibson - July 20 - 7/10
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow - July 23 - 8/10
Omega - Jack mcDevitt - July 28 - 8/10
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett - Aug 2 - 7/10
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow - Aug 4 - 8/10
Superluminal: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War - Tony Daniel - Aug 15 - 5/10
Angels and Deamons - Dan Brown - Aug 22 - 8/10
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling - Aug 31 - 8/10

And Manga (which I'm not counting as books):

One Piece 1 + 2
Kill Me Kiss Me 1 + 2 (I finally found #1)
Kare Kano 1 - 4
Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind 1 - 4
Revolutionary Girl Utena 1 + 2
Chobits 1
Negima 6
Genshiken 2
Love Hina 2

---
Aaannnnnd... we're done.

August is practically over, and I just managed to make ten books. Not always the easiest thing to do while keeping up with everything else life throws your way. It was fun though.

Originally Posted by strangedaze

I'll start today - July 12th.

The Tao of Pooh by whoever the fuck (I have to read *something* light)

that's a pretty funny book... not as stupid as I thought it would be!

Starr,

I was thinking either the Plague or the Outsider, since the used bookstore has both of them. Your thoughts?

I read a lot over the summer. Last year I read a novel a day at the cottage (longest being Timoty Findley's Spadework). I'll create a summer reading list by the end of the summer and post it.

Let me think...


Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut – May 10/10

Prey, Michael Crichton – May 9/10

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury – May 8/10

The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien – May 8/10

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss – June 6/10

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein – June 10/10

Voice of the Planet, Michael Tobias – July 8/10

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke – July 12 9/10

Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut – July 15 10/10

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut – July 21 8/10

The Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut – July 22 10/10

Dragons of Darkness, ed. Orson Scott Card (it's an anthology) — August 3 8/10

Originally Posted by starrwriter

Originally Posted by Craiglet

My goal is to read ten books by August 30th, which is the day we go back to school. If anyone else wants to partake, keep a log in this thread.

Book / Date Finished / Personal Rating

By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz - June 6th - 9/10

Jesus on skates! Read something besides Koontz and his ilk. Such as real literature. If you like the dark side, try "Notes From Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky and "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Both books are very short.

Come on now. I've tried to read "real literature", but it just plain sucks usually. I'd much rather read a fiction author I enjoy. I think this quote sums it up well.

To loosely quote Aristotle, as storytelling goes bad, so goes the neighborhood. The contemporary literary establishment routinely confuses literary fiction with literature. What we’re sold as literature these days is usually (again, with a few exceptions) little more than an attempt to mask an inability to tell a story with disdain for those who can, to replace substance with a frequently pompous style of—equally frequently—questionable beauty, and to pretend that it’s not boring unless one is a “philistine” who sees only a blank canvas where only a blank canvas is hanging.*

Literature is and always has been a form of storytelling, not of art. If a novelist doesn’t have a story that he absolutely must tell, and tell coherently, there’s no reason to read his self-aggrandizing drivel. If a novelist doesn’t have a story to tell, then all he is doing is posturing. And posturing is best kept to chat rooms.

The whole “literary” fad, with its fashionably unpopular authors, intellectual-wannabe critics, and logrolling literary award committees, has gone beyond just thinking outside the box. This fad has climbed out of the box and walked all the way around the bend from the reader who still remembers that reading a novel is supposed to be a pleasure, not a chore. It’s time to get back in the box and figure out that literature is no more and no less than a well-written work of fiction that tells a compelling story about characters who come alive in the reader’s mind, and leaves behind a slightly expanded perception of the world. Kind of like what Tom Wolfe does. Which is why he is popular.

http://www.encpress.com/opinion.html

dont remember the exact dates but i'v read so far
NeverWhere by Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Flights(it's an anthology of short stories)
Path to Savagery by Robert Edmond Alter
American Gods by Neil Gaiman

"The Stranger" (which is sometimes translated as "The Outsider") is his best book

The stranger is awesome. But I read that along time ago. Cant quite remember much, but I rememver really liking it.

I should be partaking, though I think I lag behind already. I work in a library and I carry home pretty much everything that has words on it, but after a long day I have no energy to read. One advantage is though that I don't have to pay any reservation fees (so I reserve every good DVD I can remember of )

Blah, if we include all the books I've read this summer, I'd tack on:

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler
The Shipping News by E. Anni Proulx
Hey, Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland
Crash by JG Ballard
Kilter: 55 Fictions by John Gould
Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

Hmmm maybe I should include these, since I'm not even going to come close to finishing ten other books by Augusrt 30th I'm such a bum.