required reading

Spend enough time lurking around book blogs, and you'll find strange little icons in the sidebars:

They  indicate that the blogger is participating in a reading challenge. This might be to read 13 Canadian books in 2008, one for each province, or the "To Be Read" challenge which invites participants to read one book every month from their overflowing shelves.

The advantages are obvious:  the fun of participating in something with others, a sense of achievement, and the satisfaction of reading something you perhaps wouldn't otherwise have read. I've identified two challenges to take part in in 2008. The first is this one:

The challenge is to read four books by Russian authors, or books about Russia, in 2008. Four is definitely manageable. So much so that I've decided to up the stakes a little and I'm composing a little tour of the Golden Age of Russian literature, taking in novels, short stories, and some non-fiction. I'll be posting up a list of the chosen books in the next few days.

I love Russian literature, and at one point in life I was threatening to become almost well-read in it, and this was despite taking an English degree that fairly well excluded reading anything from outside of the British Isles. I'd notched up some Gogol short stories, for example, and I'd started both Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I can't recall if I finished either. I read Anna Karenina when I was 17, at the urging of an older brother, and the influence of friends who studied Russian at university led me on to Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and The Double. I'd seen The Cherry Orchard once, and The Seagull twice, and read Chekhov's Uncle Vanya as well, though I've forgotten the plot. Then comes the 20th century, and things become a little hazier. I've read Zamyatin's We, the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984. Like a good adolescent I'd read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and I later added Cancer Ward to my reading of Solzhenitsyn. And that's it. No Bulgakov, no Babel, no Pasternak, no Platonov. No War and Peace, despite the fact that a friend once came back to university with the report that she'd read it whilst on her holiday job of working in a Tourist Office! I've got some gaps to fill in, and I'll be concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian Literature. I might even give War and Peace a go!

So, what about all of these other bloggers; what challenges are they filling their time with?

Wendy at A Novel Challenge must be one of the most committed readers in the blogging community. She posts every reading challenge she can find, and joins a fair few as well, signing herself up for 8 Decades (8 books, from consecutive decades), Russian Reading, Celebrate the Author (12 books, chosen because of a link to the month in which they are to be read), Dystopian Novels, and Every Month is a Holiday (in which participants read a novel related to a holiday or celebration held in that month). Whew! Even more ambitious is the 888 challenge, which requires a minimum of 56 books, over 8 distinct categories (8 overlaps are permitted), in the space of a year. Since I only read around 50 novels a year, I would doubt my ability to stick to this for more than a few weeks, though as soon as I saw the challenge I had the urge to join, and to read 8 'Classics', 'Re-reads', 'Booker Prize Nominees', 'Woolf novels', 'Debut novels', and more. I can still feel the tug of desire to sign up... But I'm more tempted by the challenge Victoria at Eve's Alexandria joined - that of reading Don Quixote in the Summer of 2007. I don't think she has finished yet, but the signs are all good. So if only I can find an equivalent group for Ulysses, I might finally get beyond page 67.