Thursday, October 20, 2011

Todd (the husband), came up with a great idea on how to make my choices after the preliminary selection.
For each letter, I will choose ten titles (he believes that having to choose a set number each time will make this challenge more structured) and list them along with their rankings on GoodReads.com.
These rankings will be significant only if your posts, suggestions and the overall discussion don't stir me in some other direction. In other words, it is your 'job' to try and convince me to read something other than the title ranked highest by GoodReads.com.
And your motives may vary--from recommending your favorite book to making me read something really hard and challenging, to suggesting a novel you've always wanted to read but never had a chance to. So please, do argue with the GoodReads community (by the way, I'm currently working on making the users of this great website involved in this project, too).

Also, I promise I make my preliminary selections without looking at any rankings in advance. I find out how a particular book is ranked only after it makes it to the final ten.

Below you'll find the 'A' list updated to ten positions with each titled followed by its GoodReads ranking (on a 0.00 to 5.00 scale with 0.01 increments):

1. Edwin A. Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions 3.75
2. Andy Adams The Log of a Cowboy 3.66
3. James Agee A Death in the Family 3.86
4. Sholem Aleichem Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son 4.41
5. Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre Fantomas 3.71
6. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim 3.83
7. Mulk Raj Anand Untouchable 3.55
8. Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio 3.78
9. Henry Adams Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres 4.04
10. Aristotle Poetics 3.70

And let the real festivities begin!
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6 comments:

  1. LFARUOLOOctober 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM

    Honestly... I don't think this a good way to figure out which books to read.

    First, there are like what? 80+ Penguin Classics? You could literally spend your whole life trying to read through all of them. Especially when you hit the Greek and Ancient Greek philosophy section.

    Since your life and attention span are finite things, I would make a list of the books you are interested in, the "Must" books like the absolute classic/keystone books, and the books recommended to you. Then I would figure out some structured way to sift through those (like Todd's suggestion).

    Its not about "Yea! Finished another one (but God that gave me a headache)." Its about "damn. This was really good and I've always wanted to read that. Yay me!"

    Good luck!
    By the way, check out the Bruised Apple in Peekskill. It was my high school cave hangout spot lol. And then grab a couch at the Peekskill Coffee House where I also spent my angsty teenage years brooding over books (before the place was cool and noone knew about it. Might be too busy now-a-days).

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  2. aniaOctober 21, 2011 at 11:40 AM

    Thanks for the Bruised Apple suggestion! I'll make a trip up there in the coming days.

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  3. joshOctober 22, 2011 at 8:38 PM

    Since Good Reads agrees with my recommendation, I have no further advice ;)

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  4. AlexOctober 23, 2011 at 9:29 AM

    I disagree, LFaruolo; I think this is a fun way to expose oneself to books one might not have thought about before.

    I don't know about you, Ania, but I'm obsessively goal-oriented. It's not enough to just read books that look fun; I have to make a whole Thing out of it. (My thing is reading the classics in chronological order; I've been doing it for years.)

    Anyway, I'm the guy who voted for Fantomas. Why not start with something super fun? And how could this not be? Check out the description:

    FANTOMAS is the Emperor of Crime, the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the villainous anti-hero of a series of sublime pulps, books brimming with motifs of the "marvellous": nuns, coffins, severed hands, daggers, masks, bleeding bells, corpses, poison flowers, lunatics and labyrinths.

    That is straight balls.

    It's gonna be one of the first books I read when I start the 20th century next year. I've been looking forward to it for ages. I love weird genre stuff.

    By the way, your GR group is marked as "secret," so no one can join it right now.

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  5. aniaOctober 23, 2011 at 4:32 PM

    @Alex: Thanks for supporting my selection method. I read a lot already, without even without committing to any challenges. But all the fun of this one is not only to read and read great books but, above all, to read things I otherwise wouldn't have read. And choosing the Penguin Classics collection as a starting point is pretty much a guarantee that no matter what I end up reading, it won't be some Paulo Coelho-type nonsense.
    'Fantomas' sounds amazing and I hoped more people would follow in your footsteps and vote for it. But as of now (and it's 7:30pm on Sunday), Sholem Aleichem is still in the lead.
    By the way, where did you vote for 'Fantomas'? Up until now, I somehow missed your vote... Sorry about that.
    I also checked the GoodReads group. According to my profile, the group is public. Just to make sure I re-saved the settings. Please, let me know if you still have problems accessing it.

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  6. AlexOctober 25, 2011 at 11:33 AM

    Oh, I get it.

    I voted here:
    http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/326961?page=3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant#comment_38761163

    And I also found the link to your group in the same place. It's not that your group is set up incorrectly; the link is just wrong.

    I did join your group, although I doubt I'll be very active since our projects are unlikely to overlap very often.

    ReplyDelete

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