Back to the Classics 2020 - Sign Up Post

The Back to the Classics Challenge is coming back for 2020, and I couldn't be happier! Once the categories were posted, I had a lot of fun thinking of what I wanted to read for it. I'm going to attempt all twelve categories again this year. Here's what I came up with:

1. 19th Century Classic: White Jacket by Herman Melville (1850) - Completed January 2020
I came across a copy of this novel in a huge used bookstore a few years ago. I had never heard of it before that moment, but I liked the cover, and I liked reading Moby Dick in high school, so I'm going to give it a try.

2. 20th Century Classic: The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (1915) - Completed April 2020
I don't know much about this novel at all. I picked it up several years ago when I was on a classics-buying spree and I ended up putting it on my Classics Club list. Now is as good a time as any to actually read it.

3. Classic by a Female Author: O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (1913) - Completed March 2020
I have heard a lot of positive things about Willa Cather over the years, but I have never read anything by her. This book has been sitting on my shelf since I was a teenager, so it's high time I got around to picking it up.

4. Classic in Translation: The Green Ray by Jules Verne (1882) - Completed January 2020

It's one of my traditions to start off each year with a Jules Verne novel. This will be how I start 2020.

5. Classic by a Person of Color: Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945) - Completed February 2020

I read Native Son last year and really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to reading more from Richard Wright.

6. A Genre Classic: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) - Completed June 2020

I'm a huge fantasy fan, but somehow, I have never read the most famous fantasy series of all time. I'm going to try and read the whole trilogy this year, starting with this one.

7. A Classic with a Person's Name in the Title: Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1886) - Completed March 2020

I already planned to read this novel for my Then Versus Now Challenge this year, so this prompt worked out well for me. I have loved all the other Burnett novels I have read, so I am anticipating loving this one too.

8. A Classic with a Place in the Title : The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall by Anne Brontë (1848) - Completed March 2020

This was one of the only books on my Classics Club list that I didn't already own. I recently picked up a very pretty edition of it, so I'm excited to get to read it.

9. A Classic with Nature in the Title: The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (1922) - Completed May 2020

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, and I have four different books by her on my Classics Club list. I've only read one of them so far, so I decided to read another one for this category.

10. A Classic about a Family: Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell (1864-1866)

I just recently read Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, and I had trouble getting through it. I'm hoping to like this novel better.

11. An Abandoned Classic: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855) - Completed August 2020

This category was tough for me, because it is extremely rare for me not to finish a book. After thinking for a bit, I remembered that I was supposed to read Leaves of Grass in college and I didn't really do it. I'm intimidated by this one, but I'm going to try and get through it for real this time.

12. A Classic Adaptation: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962) - Completed November 2020 

Out of all the classics I have sitting on my shelf, I believe this is the only one I picked up because the movie adaptation is so famous. That makes it the perfect pick for this category.

I've got an ambitious lineup this year, but I feel good about it. I'm looking forward to making my way through these books and participating in this challenge for the sixth year in a row.

Then Versus Now Reading Challenge

I've been maintaining a list of my favorite novels here on my blog for the past several years. Every time I read a book that I really like, I add it to the list and link up the review. However, there are quite a few favorites on my list that I read way before I started blogging, and it has always bothered me that I don't have reviews posted for those books.

I decided that this year, I would start rereading some of those older favorites. To make it more interesting though, I'm going to pair each one with a new-to-me book by the same author and compare how I felt about their books back then versus how I feel about them now. I'm mixing works from all different time periods and genres in this challenge, so there will be a lot of variety in what I'm reading.

I'm curious to see if I still feel the same way about my old favorites after reading them again. It will also be interesting to see if I like any of the other books by these authors even more than my original favorites. I picked 13 sets of books to read and I plan to read around one match up per month. I will return here to link up my posts as I go.

The Match Ups:

1. Stephen Chbosky: The Perks of Being a Wallflower vs. Imaginary Friend
2. Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus vs. The Starless Sea
3. Juliet Marillier: Daughter of the Forest vs. The Harp of Kings
4. Markus Zusak: The Book Thief vs. Bridge of Clay
5. Rainbow Rowell: Eleanor and Park vs. Carry On and Wayward Son
6. Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird vs. Go Set a Watchman
7. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden vs. Little Lord Fauntleroy
8. Jesse Andrews: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl vs. Munmun
9. John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men vs. In Dubious Battle
10. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein vs. The Last Man
11. E. Lockhart: We Were Liars vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks
12. Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin vs. Big Brother
13. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale vs. The Testaments

True Books 2020

As a reader, I don't discriminate much. I read from a variety of genres and enjoy most things that I try. When I'm choosing books off my shelf though, I definitely tend to gravitate towards fiction novels. I enjoy reading nonfiction, but I really have to make a conscious effort in order to actually read it. I did not make any special effort towards reading it in 2019, and the result was that I only picked up two nonfiction books all year.

I want to do better in 2020, so I'm bringing back my True Books Challenge! I tried this challenge in 2018, and ended up reading more nonfiction in a single year than ever before, even though I didn't quite finish all that I set out to do. This time, I'm changing my rules. Instead of trying to read all the nonfiction on my shelves, I'm going to pledge to read one nonfiction book each month.

Here is what I plan to read. I will come back to this post to link reviews as I complete them:

1. The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller Completed January 2020
2. Truevine by Beth Macy Completed July 2020
3. Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi - Completed September 2020
4. Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser Completed April 2020
5. The Witches by Stacy Schiff - Completed October 2020
6. The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater Completed January 2020
7. I Will Always Write Back by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda with Liz Welch Completed March 2020
8. Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal Completed August 2020
9. They Called Us Enemy by George Takei Completed February 2020
10. The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller - Completed June 2020
11. Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton - Completed November 2020
12. Educated by Tara Westover Completed May 2020

Bonus Books:
13. Black Boy by Richard Wright Completed February 2020
14. Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka Completed February 2020

Reading Resolutions: 2020

Happy 2020 everyone! We are at the start of a new year, and that means I have a whole new set of reading plans to tackle.

My Goodreads goal will be the same as the previous few years. I aim to read at least 50 books in 2020.

I will also continue to participate in the Classics Club Challenge. Last year, I was successful in catching up with where I need to be in order to finish on time. This year, I must read at least 20 books from it to stay on track. I'm hoping I can read a bit more than that though, so I can get a head start for 2021, which will be my last year of the challenge.

I will be participating in the Back to the Classics Challenge again this year too. My sign up post with my TBR list is here.

In 2019, I read a grand total of two nonfiction novels. This is unacceptable, so I'm bringing back my True Books Challenge. In 2020, I plan to read one nonfiction book each month.

My final challenge for 2020 will be my Then vs. Now Challenge. Each month, I will reread one of my favorite novels and compare it to a different book by the same author.

I'm excited and ready for my reading plans! I spent a lot of time crafting something that I think I will really enjoy. My goals are centered around broadening the types of books I read and revisiting some old favorites. I hoping that this year will turn out even better than the last.

Reading Reflection: 2019

2019 is over and I'm happy to say that I had quite a good year in reading. I'm finally starting to settle into my new home and I'm getting more comfortable with my job. It's been a long journey to get to this point, and my books have been a great comfort to me throughout it. Here is what I managed to accomplish.

My goal this year was to read a total of 50 books. I far surpassed that with a total of 81, and this included some monsters like Don Quixote (940 pages), Shirley (624 pages), The Goldfinch (771 pages) and The Pickwick Papers (756 pages). The only thing that bugs me about my Goodreads year in reading is that it only gives me credit for 79 books, because I read the three books in the His Dark Materials series in one volume. Goodreads counts that as one book, but it was really three!

I made a crazy amount of progress in my Classics Club Challenge this year. I fell behind on this in 2018, and needed to read a total of 27 books from it to catch up to where I should have been by the end of this year. I managed to read 29, meaning that I not only caught up, but pushed a tiny bit ahead. I've got two years left to finish the 38 remaining books.

I finished the Back to the Classics Challenge for the fourth year in a row this year, reading 12 classic novels to fit various prompts.

My Finally in 2019 Challenge really morphed into something else this year. It started out as a small challenge to encourage myself to read six books that I had been meaning to get to for ages. I got into a good reading groove and ended up finishing those six books by the end of February. After that, I just kept adding on books to the list that I picked up solely because I wanted to. I ended up reading a total of 49 books by the end of the year.

The Book Junkie Trials were a sweet summer surprise this year. This challenge had readers take a personality quiz to determine their team and then set off on a quest across a magical realm. I finished a total of 17 books throughout the month of July to fit the reading prompts.


I am very satisfied with the amount that I managed to read in 2019. I'm so glad that I got myself back on track from the reading disaster that was 2018. I'm hoping to do even better in 2020, and I have a whole bunch of goals in mind. This year has affirmed that reading is the best thing I do, and I'm excited to see what new stories I discover next year.

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

With 2019 winding down, I decided to tackle one more classic before the new year arrived. Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell was the next on my list. Unlike most of the other classics I have read this year, I literally do not remember how I ended up purchasing this book or why I put it on my list. The price sticker on my copy was from Borders though, so I presumably purchased it there before the chain closed. I still miss that place so much. I remember then having a lot of classics that I couldn't find in other stores and a fun assortment of junk to look at too. I'm drifting off topic though. Let's get back to Ruth.

This novel was published in 1853 and is classified as a social novel. The social issue it deals with is the stigma suffered by women who have a child out of wedlock. The plot follows Ruth Hilton, a young woman who is about to turn 16. As the novel begins, Ruth is working as an apprentice for a seamstress. She is an orphan without any friends or family to help support her, and this loneliness makes an easy target for Henry Bellingham, an upper class 23-year-old man with an eye for pleasure. At the beginning of the story, Henry seduces Ruth and lures her away from her apprenticeship to a small inn in Wales, where they live together for a few months. Eventually, he abandons her there without a word and returns to his normal life. Ruth is left on her own, devastated, friendless, and pregnant.

Fortunately, for her, a kindly pastor and his sister take pity on her and offer to let her live in their home under an assumed identity. As she is out of options, Ruth agrees to pretend to be a young widow distantly related to the pair. She lives with them for several years, repenting for her past choices and trying to raise her child to be a good Christian. Eventually, however, Bellingham comes back into her life and her secret is revealed. Shut out of society and afraid for her child's future prospects, Ruth must find a way to support her family and move on with her life.

I did not enjoy Ruth very much, for a lot of reasons. However, there were some elements of it that were interesting. One of those things is Gaskell's advocacy for unwed mothers. Having a child out of wedlock in the Victorian period essentially ruined a woman's life. Once their situation was known publicly, they would be shunned from respectable society and denied employment. Even their child, once born, would suffer these same consequences. Through Ruth's example, Gaskell advocates for these women to be forgiven and allowed to redeem themselves. While I don't necessarily love Ruth as an example of a "fallen woman," I do like that Gaskell was using her work to support women and was unafraid to advance a view that was quite controversial in its time.

I also like the juxtaposition of Ruth's story with that of Richard Bradshaw's. Towards the end of the story, Richard, a man thus far characterized by his irresponsibility, steals a significant amount of money from another character. His actions are completely illegal and wrong. There is no ambiguity or mitigating circumstances to confuse the issue. However, instead of being arrested, his friends, family, and even the man he stole from bend over backwards to help him out of his difficulties and hide his crimes. He faces no legal consequences and his friends find him another job in a new city so he can have a fresh start. His former business partner even starts to set aside money for him for when he proves himself worthy of it again.

This stands in stark contrast to Ruth's position. For the social crime of allowing herself to be seduced by an older man, she is made to suffer tremendously. Once her secret is revealed, she is immediately fired from her job, insulted, shamed, and rejected from polite society. While the family that took her in stands by her, there is little they can do to help her situation. She essentially becomes a depressed hermit for years before eventually being hired to do some nursing work that no one else is willing to do. Her eventual redemption is only partial and comes at great personal cost. These contrasting stories do an excellent job showing the double standard that existed between men and women who violated rules in this time period. Gaskell never comments on this inequality directly in her narration, but the difference in the two characters' experiences speaks clearly to the reader. This gross injustice is what I think I will remember the most about this novel.
 
Unfortunately, this is where the enjoyment of this classic ended for me. I had a lot of issues with the pacing, characters, and ending of the novel. The story moved slowly, Gaskell's paragraphs were over-long, and the plot got bogged down with too many characters suffering from fainting spells and vague illnesses that all required a lot of nursing and hand-wringing to get through. The combination of these factors meant that the book acted like a sleeping pill on me. I started nodding off almost immediately every time I picked it up. I had to rely on large amounts of coffee and reading sections out loud to keep myself engaged and awake. I read old novels all the time, and I don't usually have this much of an issue making my way through them. Something about this story just didn't work for me.

Part of the problem was that I never really connected with Ruth. She is a good character with extremely admirable qualities, and that's actually a problem here. She's not a convincing example of a "fallen woman" working towards redemption. At the start of the story, Ruth is an extremely naive 15-year-old orphan girl. She is seduced by a wealthy 23-year-old man who engages in a focused campaign to sleep with her. She is more of a victim than anything else. In an effort to create a sympathetic protagonist, Gaskell made her too blameless. This weakened her point that women in these situations are deserving of forgiveness--there's simply not enough to forgive Ruth for.

The ending of the story was also very disappointing. Without spoiling anything specific, it causes Ruth to revert back to some feelings that I hoped she had left behind forever, and paying dearly for it. It was a shame to see her go backwards right at the end and it clouded Gaskell's overall message. I'm not sure what the theme of the story was meant to be now that I've finished reading. Obviously, there are some lessons presented regarding forgiveness, hypocrisy, and sexism, but I could not detect one unifying idea that I was supposed to take away from the novel.

So, as it turns out, Ruth was definitely not the book for me. While it raised some worthy points and taught me about the plight of unwed mothers in the 19th century, its style, pacing, and especially its ending all took away from my reading experience. This was a big surprise to me, as I read Mary Barton in college and really enjoyed it. I'm  not giving up on Gaskell though; I'm still interested in reading some of her other work. Wives and Daughters is on my Classics Club list, and I want to get around to North and South one day too. It's a bummer to end my 2019 reading on a book I didn't like all that much, but hopefully I'll enjoy the rest of her work more in the future.


Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#73 on my list): 62/100 


Total Books Read in 2019: 81

Girl Made of Stars by Ashley Herring Blake

After spending most of December reading very long classics, I found myself wanting something a little bit quicker to read. While perusing my shelves, Girl Made of Stars caught my eye first. I heard about this book through a YouTube review a while back, and it sounded very sad and very intriguing. Young adult books tackling social issues are my guilty pleasure, so I decided to spend a few blissfully lazy mornings of my winter break making my way through it.

The plot of the novel centers around Mara McHale, a high school student in Tennessee. At the beginning of the story, her twin brother Owen is accused of raping a girl named Hannah at a party. Mara, who has always been very close with her brother, has an extremely difficult time processing this event. She can't believe that her sweet, caring brother would assault anyone. At the same time, Hannah is one of Mara's best friends, and she can't imagine that Hannah would make something like this up either. Her inner conflict over the situation begins to take a serious toll on her relationship with her brother and her parents, who believe Owen's version of events unequivocally.

The accusation also stirs up some past trauma in Mara's life that she has been keeping secret. Watching Hannah struggle through the ensuing investigation, and then suffer the shame of not being believed, start to bring her own repressed emotions bubbling up to the surface. Somehow, she must find a way to support her friend, deal with her brother, and take care of herself. Girl Made of Stars is a gut-wrenching story about surviving trauma, supporting victims of assaults, and finding the courage to ask for help when you need it. 

I very much enjoyed this novel, It's a quick read that packs an emotional punch. The writing was pretty and the plot was well-paced. Obviously, it deals with sensitive topics, and I felt like the author handled them in a realistic and thoughtful way. The pain of the characters is palpable and unsettling; their struggles leap off the page as they attempt to renegotiate relationships with people they thought they knew. This is especially true of Mara, who must grapple with a complex knot of emotions arising from both past and current events in her life. As the novel progresses, interesting questions emerge about how you can come to doubt people you have adored and trusted for your whole life, and how you can reconcile yourself to living beside someone that might have done something unforgivable. The novel places its characters in impossibly painful situations, and watching them try to sort out how to move on and heal made for extremely engaging reading. I wanted to see what would happen next, and if the real truth of the situation would ever come out. 

The novel does a good job of discussing several social issues as well. Of course, ideas related to feminism and rape culture are explored, but LGBTIQA+ topics are well-represented too. Mara is bisexual and has relationships with male and female characters throughout the story. Another major character is genderqueer, which allows for helpful discussions of what that identity actually means and how a young person that identifies that way might struggle with it. It's so important for diverse characters to be present in young adult literature. It helps normalize different kinds of people for readers who may be unfamiliar with them, and it also allows readers of varying identifications to feel seen. I appreciated the inclusion of these topics alongside the main story.

Where the novel is a bit weak is in the interaction of the teen characters with their parents. Simply put, these kids have too much independence. They move around their neighborhoods like adults, going wherever they want at any time they want without any authority figures asking them any questions or setting any real limits for them. As they are older teens, you would expect them to be somewhat self-sufficient, but the ability they had to just roam wherever they pleased was not realistic. They even skipped school multiple times throughout the text without anyone knowing or caring. From time to time, a parent would pop up and make a comment or ask a question, but for the most part, the teen characters had way too much freedom. This issue gives the whole story a vibe of being unbelievable, even though most other aspects of the story are fine in this regard.

Overall, Girl Made of Stars was an emotional and thought-provoking read. It dealt with tough issues in a realistic and respectful way. This is the kind of novel that is very beneficial for young people to read. It contains a nice diversity of characters and competently educates readers about the important issues associated with consent and sexual assault. This is definitely not a fun read, but it is an important and engaging one, and one that I will be remembering for a long time to come.


Challenge Tally
Finally in 2019: 49/6 Books Read - Complete!

Total Books Read in 2019: 80