2020 Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

Oh, Beth of December 2019, you had no idea what was coming. You went and signed up for a bunch of challenges again, and then… well. Let’s round ’em up!

Back to the Classics (hosted by Books and Chocolate)
Goal: 12 books
Result: 5 (42%)

Yes, I did use the maximum of 3 children’s books. Still considerably better than last year.

  • 19th Century Classic (1800-1899): Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888) (12/29/20)
  • 20th Century Classic (1900-1970): Basil and the Lost Colony (1964) by Eve Titus (1/27/20)
  • A Genre Classic: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1/29/20)
  • Classic with a Person’s Name in the Title: Tales from Shakespeare by Charles & Mary Lamb (12/31/20)
  • Classic with a Place in the Title: Basil of Baker Street (1958) by Eve Titus (1/25/20)
  • Classic by a Woman Author
  • Classic in Translation
  • Classic by a Person of Color
  • Classic with Nature in the Title
  • Classic About a Family
  • Abandoned Classic
  • Classic Adaptation

Georgian Reading Challenge (hosted by Becky’s Book Reviews)
Goal: 4 books
Result: 1 (25%): Tales from Shakespeare by Charles & Mary Lamb (1807)

Victorian Reading Challenge (hosted by Becky’s Book Reviews)
Goal: 20 books
Result: 1 (5%)

  • JANUARY/FEBRUARY – JOURNEYS and TRAVELS: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
  • FEBRUARY/MARCH – LOVE and MARRIAGE
  • MARCH/APRIL – SECOND CHANCES
  • APRIL/MAY – NAMES AS TITLES
  • MAY/JUNE – LONG TITLE OR LONG SUB-TITLES
  • JUNE/JULY – ADAPTATIONS
  • JULY/AUGUST – FAVORITE AUTHORS, NEW-TO-ME BOOKS
  • AUGUST/SEPTEMBER – BACK TO SCHOOL
  • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER – CRIME OR TRUE CRIME
  • OCTOBER/NOVEMBER – HOME AND FAMILY
  • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER – COMFORT READS

Read Harder (Book Riot)
Goal: 24 Books
Result: 19 (79%)

  1. A YA nonfiction book: Flowers in the Gutter by K.R. Gaddy
  2. A retelling of a classic of the canon, fairy tale, or myth by an author of color: A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas
  3. A mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman: The Alienist by Caleb Carr
  4. A graphic memoir: Spinning by Tillie Walden
  5. A book about a natural disaster: The Thief of Worlds by Bruce Coville
  6. A play by an author of color and/or queer author
  7. A historical fiction novel not set in WWII: The Deep by Alma Katsu
  8. An audiobook of poetry: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage, read by Bill Wallis
  9. The LAST book in a series: The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) by Rick Riordan (This one was Maureen Johnson’s The Hand on the Wall, but then she announced a forthcoming fourth book!)
  10. A book that takes place in a rural setting: The Lost Man by Jane Harper
  11. A debut novel by a queer author: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
  12. A memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
  13. A food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before
  14. A romance starring a single parent: Courting the Countess by Jenny Frame
  15. A book about climate change
  16. A doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman
  17. A sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages): The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
  18. A picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community: Double Bass Blues by Andrea J. Loney
  19. A book by or about a refugee: Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
  20. A middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the US or the UK: Sherlock Sam and the Missing Heirloom in Katong by A.J. Low
  21. A book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non): Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly
  22. A horror book published by an indie press: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying by Grady Hendrix
  23. An edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical)
  24. A book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author: I Can Make This Promise by Christine Day

Reading Women (Reading Women podcast)
Goal: 24 Books
Result: 8 (33%)

  1.  Book by an Author from the Caribbean or India
  2. A Book Translated from an Asian Language
  3. A Book about the Environment
  4. A Picture Book Written/Illustrated by a BIPOC Author: Sulwe by Lupita Nyong’o, illustrated by Vashti Harrison
  5. A Winner of the Stella Prize or the Women’s Prize for Fiction
  6. A Nonfiction Title by a Woman Historian:  Flowers in the Gutter by K.R. Gaddy
  7. A Book Featuring Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism: The City We Became (Great Cities #1) by N.K. Jemisin
  8. An Anthology by Multiple Authors
  9. A Book Inspired by Folklore
  10. A Book about a Woman Artist: The Anatomist’s Wife by Anna Lee Huber
  11. Read and Watch a Book-to-Movie Adaptation
  12. A Book about a Woman Who Inspires You
  13. A Book by an Arab Woman
  14. A Book Set in Japan or by a Japanese Author
  15. A Biography
  16. A Book Featuring a Woman with a Disability
  17. A Book Over 500 Pages
  18. A Book Under 100 Pages: What is Given from the Heart by Patricia McKissack, illustrated by April Harrison
  19. A Book That’s Frequently Recommended to You
  20. A Feel-Good or Happy Book: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
  21. A Book about Food
  22. A Book by Either a Favorite or a New-to-You Publisher: To Fetch a Felon by Jennifer Hawkins (Berkley Publishing Group)
  23. A Book by an LGBTQ+ Author: Spinning by Tillie Walden
  24. A Book from the 2019 Reading Women Award Shortlists (Nonfiction | Fiction) or Honorable Mentions
  25. BONUS: A book by Toni Morrison
  26. BONUS: A book by Isabel Allende

I suspect I read some things that satisfied a couple more of those Reading Women tasks.

Overall, I did way better than last year, which actually surprised me a little bit. 2020 was quite a year, y’all.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On May 30th, 1887, Julian West closes himself in his sleeping chamber, a hermetically sealed, asbestos-coated underground vault. He has such difficulty sleeping that even in this dark and quiet space, on occasion, he calls in a hypnotist to put him into a trance, with the expectation that in the morning, his servant will bring him back to full consciousness.

This time, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Julian West is woken up by strangers. They inform him that is now September of 2000, and the world is a very, very different place from the one he knew. All industry is run by the government, which pays every worker conscripted into its industrial army at a set rate. Goods for purchase, too, are standardized, distributed across the country to stores where citizens use a “credit card” instead of cash.

It’s an interesting vision of a possible world, rooted in Bellamy’s own philosophical convictions about “Nationalism” (read: socialism) as the way for society to move forward.

There are plenty of flaws in this “utopian” world, most of which are immediately glaringly obvious to anyone who isn’t an able-bodied white Christian male, but I was struck not only by how different our current 21st-century America is from Bellamy’s construction, but more so by how familiar Julian West’s description of nineteenth-century America is:

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were so many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

p. 38-39

That comes near the beginning of Julian West’s narrative, which is presented as being a book about the past America that the advanced 21st-century industrial army folk have difficulty believing was real. He imagines them asking if his fellows had no compassion and says:

Oh, yes, commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. […] It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers’ sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before.

p. 39-40

The metaphor is still depressingly applicable these hundred-plus years later.

I read the novel back in September as my Classics Club Lucky Spin. I then went back to read Dr. Cecelia Tichi’s introductory essay, which takes a look at Bellamy’s life and philosophy, and how those are reflected in his writing. (And now I’ve gone and added Dr. Tichi’s Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us) to the TBR, because I’m interested in seeing what she has to say about some other figures of the time who got brief mentions in relation to Bellamy.)

I’m almost certain I read the book once before. I took a class on Utopian Thought in college, in 19-mumble-mumble. I really wish I had a copy of the reading list from that class. Not least because there was another book we read that I remember a fragment of, and not knowing what it’s from is really annoying. But all that stuff is long gone, and I don’t even remember what my 22-year-old self thought about this book, if it happened to be on the syllabus. Which is probably for the best, really.

Source: Purchased at my local used bookstore.

Challenges: Back to the Classics (19th Century Classic (1800-1899)); Classics Club

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.

Chapter 1: Introduction

So begins Wells’s classic “scientific romance”, published serially in The New Review in 1895 (and in revised novella editions after that). Over drinks with some gentlemen friends, including the narrator, the unnamed adventurer shares his theories on the nature of time as a fourth dimension in which one can travel. His friends are skeptical, even after seeing a demonstration using a model he has constructed.

For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied with the trick of the model. That I remember discussing with the Medical Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar thing at Tübingen, and laid considerable stress on the blowing-out of the candle. But how he trick was done he could not explain.

Chapter 3: The Time Traveller Returns

A week later, the narrator is again at the Time Traveller’s home for another dinner party. The Time Traveller appears after his guests have arrived, and the details of his adventure form the main narrative. He has gone hundreds of thousands of years into the future, where he encountered the Eloi and the Morlocks, apparently the two strains of humanity left at that time.

The Eloi are small, delicate, and child-like. They spend their days playing in the sunshine, picking flowers, and eating fruit. They do no work, the genders appear nearly identical, and there is little difference between the children and the adults. They sleep in groups in large structures. They seem to be unafraid, in the way of those who have never encountered anything of which to be afraid.

“Seem to be unafraid,” because the Time Traveller eventually learns that the Eloi are scared of the dark. They stay away from shadows and refuse to venture out at night. After nightfall, the Morlocks – pale, large-eyed, and ape-like – come out their underground tunnels, and they are on the hunt.

Now, indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except during my night’s anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks — a something inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them.

Chapter 10: When the Night Came

My first encounter with The Time Machine was with a Moby Classics illustrated abridged edition when I was in elementary school. I mostly remember the Morlocks being very, very creepy and scary. Having read the full text, I still think the Morlocks are very, very creepy, but also very sad. As a child, the life of the Eloi was appealing: play all day and eat lots of fruit. Aside from, you know, the terror of what might happen at night, it looked ideal. As an adult reader, I was struck by the horror of the exact circumstances under which the Time Traveller meets Weena. (No details, because I’m still glad it came as a surprise to me.)

The entire vision of the future of humanity presented here is disturbing. There is the vacuous beauty left above ground and the terrifying existence below. No wonder the Time Traveller was delighted to find himself back at his own table. And yet, he clearly still has questions. He clearly still wants to explore. So, maybe, he even still has hope.

The narrator asks us to deny the implications of the narrative he has just recorded. It is a striking way of ending this little puzzle of a book, an appeal that seems to throw into doubt everything that we have just read. What a perverse start to a literary career!

Roger Luckhurst, Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition

For this reading, I borrowed the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Time Machine from the library. The supporting material is excellent. The “Chronology of H. G. Wells” includes significant personal events and world events, as well as noting the publication of various influential works, giving context on multiple levels. The expanded version of the chapter “The Further Vision” is included as an appendix, as are two scientific essays published by Wells in 1891 and 1893.

Roger Luckhurst’s introduction expands on some of the ideas Wells engages with in the novel. Evolutionary theory – both biological and social – was very much in the public consciousness. Would people and society forever march toward perfection, or would both reach a zenith and then inevitably deteriorate? The utopian fiction of Bellamy and Morris get satirical jabs in the Time Traveller’s description of the future. Luckhurst provides pointers to further reading on all of these and more. I appreciated the very helpful and engaging explanatory notes, as well as the fact that the introduction begins with a note that there will be spoilers, so newcomers might want to read it as an afterword, instead.

Source: Checked out from my public library

Challenges: Back to the Classics (6: Genre Classic); Classics Club; Read Harder 2020 (#17: A Sci-fi/fantasy novella); Victorian Reading Challenge (January: Journeys & Travels)

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Reading Challenges 2020

The Reading Challenges haven’t gone so well for me the last two years. But I’ve once again succumbed to the promise of a brand new year and brand new challenges. Here’s what I’ve got lined up for 2020:

  • Back to the Classics is hosted by Books and Chocolate. I read two out of 12 last year (and failed to post about either one). Some of the titles I’ve picked for this year are carry-overs from last year’s list.
  • The Georgian Reading Challenge is hosted by Becky’s Book Reviews. The goal is a minimum of four books – fiction or non-fiction – related to the Georgian era (I’m using the 1714-1830 period – sorry, William IV). I’ve earmarked some possible titles, mostly the same as last year, since I read exactly zero books from the list in 2019.
  • The Victorian Reading Challenge is also hosted by Becky’s Book Reviews, and she’s switched it up with bimonthly themes, plus a year-long bonus theme. I’ve picked some books to match.
  • Classics Club is a multi-year challenge. I have a list of 50 books that I plan to read before the end of 2023. I read two of them in 2019, but I never posted about them. Whoops.
  • Read Harder comes from the fab folks at Book Riot. Some of the 24 tasks are going to be more challenging than others.
  • The Reading Women challenge comes from the Reading Women podcast. It also has 24 tasks, and some of these will definitely be challenging.

How about you? Are you doing any of these challenges? Or different ones?