The challenge
For the first time ever I´m joining a reading challenge and I´m so excited about it!
The challenge, called #thereadingquest, was organised by Aentee @read at midnight, and you can find all the information about it here. It will run from August 13th till September 10th. While it runs, I´m going to put up a small post about my progress, the books I´ve read and the Exp and Health Points gained every Monday, while tweeting about the current book at least once daily @beneaththestarligh.
I´ve been long interested in doing a reading challenge and the setup of this one, inspired by an RPG style of levelling up characters and having different character classes taking up different paths looks like so much fun. It´s quite a different idea and I love to think about this as taking on a personal quest, or living through a story.
The board
As you can see on the Quest board, there are four paths available, as well as some side quests in the middle. I´m going to play as a bard, since the idea of storytelling, tying up books with different mediums as in the first field, or different contexts as in the last, spoke to me most, seeing as my blog deals with different styles of storytelling. I was tempted by the mage path also, so maybe I´m going to try my hand at this characters path, if I manage to finish my own before September 10th.
My character
As said, I´m going to play as a bard, so here is my character card:
The cute and amazing artwork for this, as well as the Quest board, and everything else, was created by CW @Read, Think, Ponder, so shout out to her for the beautiful work.
My stats are still pretty low, as expected when you first start out on a quest, with Level 1, 10 ExP and 10 HP. But I´m sure that´s going to change soon.
The books
Given that my tbr pile is mostly composed of books only coming out over the course of the next month’s I´m going to improves a bit and use this challenge as a way of discovering new books and reading some I´ve been thinking about for a while, but never truly got around to put them on the tbr list. Also, as an extra challenge for myself, a way to protect my purse, which is suffering under my book buying ways anyway and to support my local library all the books are going to be library books. With that said, here they are:
A book that has a TV/Movie Adaption: “Tschick” by Wolfgang Herrndorf
This German book was and instant bestseller in 2010 and got turned into a movie in 2016. Researching the dates for this, I discovered to my surprise that there is an English translation available for this book (which happens so rarely for German books that it´s noteworthy and confirms its status as being considered an important book: “Why we took the car” is what it´s called in English. It won three German literary prizes, despite being a young adult novel and got translated not only in English but 24 other languages as well.
The story deals with two boys, both outsiders, going on a road trip though the sun heated German province in a stolen car. Two boys, no compass, no plan, that can only be fun. Also, I´ll try to get my hands on the movie, to watch it in comparison to the book.
A fairy tale retelling: “Uprooted” by Naomi Novik
Surprisingly this was one of the hardest books to pick out, since I usually love fairy tale retellings and read a lot of them. Problem was, most of the ones that interested, I´ve already read, or am currently reading, and the library was sorely lacking in most book titles I searched for using list recommendations.
But it has got “Uprooted” and since it´s both based on “Beauty and the Beast”, one of my favourite fairy tales ever, and available, it easily became my choice. Also, I´ve been eying it for some time now, interested in the use of Slavic mythology which I heard should turn up in it. Oh, and it won a nebula award, so that´s a recommendation all of its own
A book cover with striking typography: ????
Yes, I´m still looking for a book to fit that one…but I will find it in time, never fear.
A book translated from another language: “Chronik eines angekündigten Todes” by Gabriel García Márquez
How I picked this book (originally “Crónica de una muerte anunciada”, in English “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”) is kind of a funny story. I´m currently reading “Because you love to hate me: 13 Tales of Villainy” edited by Ameriie, and in one of the collected short stories “Shirley & Jim” by Susan Dennard, Jim, a modern day young Moriarty, gives this book to Shirley, a modern day young female Sherlock Holmes, to read. It sounded interesting, and I´ve wanted to read something by Márquez for a while so here we are.
A banned book: “Die satanischen Verse” by Salman Rushdie
Again, this ( “The Satanic Verses”) was a hard pick, mostly because I was unsure, if any books banned once a time, even for the most ridiculous reasons (not that there are ever good reasons for banning a book) or just banned in one particular high school in America count, but in the end I settled on Rushdie. Mostly because I wanted to read something of his already and this book is notorious for being banned, as Rushdie was put on some hit lists of this, lived through a failed assassination attempt and had to go underground, all because of having written this book.
Side Quests
I´m not yet sure if I´m going to have time for the side quests and if so, which books I would pick, but I think Expansion is quite likely, as I´m getting a new short story collection next weak, and maybe I´ll have time for Mini-Game also, but we´ll see.
´m looking forward to this quest, May it be a successful one!
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