A few more... Literary Points of View

Here it is, in to February already! The month of love. It is also turning into a month of even more reading challenges and assignments! We’ll talk about those and here too is a sort of a January wrap up from the Literary Hoarders.

Has it really only been one month that we took on all these reading assignments and challenges for the New Year? Did we keep to any of the goals we listed here at all?

The first challenge we took on was the same as last year – the Goodreads 2012 Challenge. This year we each added on and came up with 65 books as our goal(s). To date, we are all on track and each of us has included audio books to help achieve this (lofty) goal.

Secondly, we joined on to HarperCollins Canada’s 50BookPledge and since we’re on track with Goodreads, we’re obviously on track here too. :-)

Then, we signed on to Random House Canada’s Random Reader Challenge, which was to read any or all of the titles from their Historical Fiction list. We have until the end of February to achieve the goal of winning a snazzy little spice set. So far, (and while they tell us The Virgin Cure won’t count because we read it before the challenge started :-() we have read The Paris Wife, The Winter Palace, and right now Jackie will start reading Madame Tussaud. Not too shabby in our opinion!

Then it just started to get ridiculous and we signed on for another challenge, this time it was the Netgalley “all you can read in January challenge.” (They’ve since changed it to challenge you to read as many titles from Netgalley for the year.) I think we were quite successful in that challenge!

We read, courtesy of Netgalley: The Last Romanov; Obedience; Arcadia; Alif the Unseen; and The Winter Palace. Again, not too shabby for the month of January!

It was around the middle of January that the decision to sign on to any more challenges should just cease and desist. We made original goals to read from our shelves and for myself, I only read Faith. Which I hadn’t even included in my original list. But no matter, because it was simply wonderful and I’m still shaking my head that it was not brought more to everyone’s attention as much as it should have been!

For our Wink 3 and Opinionless Book Clubs for January, we were to read 1Q84 (Opinionless) which turned out to be a bit of a stinker generally, but would not trade it in for anything as our online discussion was a total riot. The term “tourette’s of the pen” still has me chuckling! And for Wink 3 it was American Dervish, which Jackie and I have just reviewed. An intense read! Surely to bring about much discussion on our Thursday night’s meeting as religion is a VERY touchy subject no matter amongst whom you’re discussing it with! We’ve already had one member weigh in with the opinion that it wasn’t as great as we considered it to be – still, a very good book overall in her opinion.

The rest of February and in to March is shaping up to be a very busy reading month! We have plenty of Opinionless Book Club books and Author Chats lined up! Very exciting!

The Snow Child arrived a couple of days ago, and hopefully Wink 3 accepts it as February/March’s choice! It looks soooo good!!

Here’s the Trailer for The Snow Child. Can’t wait!!