2023 Reading Challenge (and it's still November)

On and off over the last few years, I've engaged in a year-long "reading challenge" as part of my regular reading. Sometimes, this is of my own making: I'll choose some books or set a target of reading a certain number of books on a theme, and try to get through them by the end of the year.

In other years, I came across a reading challenge from a book blogger and followed along. Typically, this kind of challenge consists of a list of categories, about a dozen, say, and the goal is to read a book from each category: a biography, a book of poetry, a book written by a woman, and so forth.

2023's challenge was the latter kind. I came across the list on Ramona Mead's blog, While I Was Reading. (In August, I noticed the site was offline. I've periodically checked in since, and it has returned a variety of error messages. I've seen no explanations elsewhere. Apart from the technical issues, I hope everything's all right.)

Normally when I do a year-in-review post at the end of the year about my reading habits, this is the kind of thing I would tack on the end. Why would I summarize a year of books when the year still has a month left? But since I filled in the last category this morning, I thought, why wait? It gives me something to write, too.

Rather than deliberately select a book to match each of Ramona's categories, I just filled in the list with any book I read that happened to fit. Of course, many books will fit multiple categories, so a few got moved around as the year went on. As it turns out, doing this kind of challenge isn't hard even if you don't plan ahead.

Here are Ramona's 12 categories for 2023, and my own brief comments on the books I read to fill them.

1. A book with a protagonist over 40.

   For this category I chose An Artist of the Floating World by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. The protagonist is a retired Japanese artist and grandfather. This novel was part of my Science Fiction-Free September reading, and I posted my thoughts about it a few weeks ago.

2. A book considered a classic.

   I read about a dozen of these, if by "classic" we mean something like "a book published before 1950 that's still widely read or studied today." Of these, I chose Charles Dickens's Bleak House.

   To be fair, I read most of Bleak House this year, but not all. I pay a weekly visit to a friend, and it's been my habit for several years to listen to an audiobook on the walk home. I was listening to the Librivox recording by Mil Nicholson before the pandemic put an end to everyone's social life for two years. So the majority of Bleak House was left unread until this year. Still, as it is a very long novel, in my mind even half of it counts.

3. A graphic novel.

   I read the entirety of Ranma 1/2 by Rumiko Takahashi. Technically, it's a manga rather than a graphic novel, but 38 issues makes for a pretty hefty volume. It's about a teenage martial artist who is engaged, against his will, to the daughter of his father's friend. His love life is complicated by the considerable number of girls who think they're engaged to him, his putative fiancée being tomboyish and violent, and—having fallen into a cursed spring—turning into a girl whenever he gets wet. After watching the anime series, I wanted to read the manga it was based on. It was well worth the time.

4. A book that has been banned or challenged.

   Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry created a furor in 1927, being denounced from pulpits and banned in Boston. Since 2009, I have been tempted to read this novel every time the violent "faith healer" Todd Bentley got any attention. In fact, it was his endorsement of the so-called Asbury revival in February that finally got me to crack it open.

5. A book set in a place on your bucket list.

   The thing is, I really don't have a bucket list. There are only two countries that I've ever really felt a strong desire to visit: England and Japan. Alias the Saint, a 1931 collection of crime novellas by Leslie Charteris about master criminal Simon Templar, aka the Saint, is mainly set in London. This was the last blank to be filled.

6. A book published before you were born.

   For obvious reasons, there are an awful lot of these. I've read 24 this year to date that are older than me, and The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, published in 1926, was the fifth (including the aforementioned Elmer Gantry). The Blue Castle is one of Montgomery's only two adult novels (along with A Tangled Web), and the only one of her works not set on Prince Edward Island. I wanted to read something of hersin which the protagonist was named neither Anne nor Emily.

7. A book related to a goal you have for 2023.

   As I said earlier, I don't have a bucket list. I'm not big on setting yearly goals. I made one New Year's resolution for 2023: to eat a can of soup, and that can is still sitting on the shelf. My only other stated goal for the year was to read 50 books. The 50th one was A. J. Quinnell's thriller Man on Fire, about a washed-up mercenary turned bodyguard who seeks revenge on the criminals who kidnapped and murdered the young girl he was hired to protect. Goal accomplished.

8. A book by an author of color.

   My first novel of 2023 was A Pale View of Hills, the debut novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, an English author of Japanese descent. This short novel is the reminiscences of a middle-aged Japanese woman now living in England.

9. A book with a clever title.

   Stephen King's novel Revival begins with the protagonist meeting the new, enthusiastic pastor of his family's Methodist church. There's a kind of revival Methodists are generally known for; by the end of the novel, I understood the title wasn't talking about that kind. Elmer Gantry meets Frankenstein.

10. A book by a famous author you’ve never read.

    Charlie Chan is best known as the protagonist of many old mystery movies starring Warner Oland or Sydney Toler. I had seen a number of these movies, but never read any of the novels by Earl Derr Biggers that he appeared in. The first one, The House Without a Key, has him only as a secondary character. However, he was so popular, Biggers made him the protagonist of the rest of the books in the series.

11. A non-fiction book about a topic you love.

    I chose Strange Fire by John MacArthur. My love is of reading sound theology. Years ago, around the onset of the "Toronto Blessing," I read Charismatic Chaos, his 1993 book on the same topic. I re-read that book just before Strange Fire. It struck me how much more the Charismatic world had blown up in the mid-1990s and 2000s. The earlier book predates the Toronto blessing, Brownsville and Lakeland revivals, the New Apostolic Reformation, Todd Bentley, Bethel Church, John Crowder, "holy laughter," and "toking the Ghost." The 1990s and 2000s were certainly a cesspool of Charismatic excess.

    However, Strange Fire, published 20 years after Charismatic Chaos, covers nearly all of these. It's a pity the two books have different publishers, because I think they'd do well as an omnibus edition.

12. A novella.

    The number of novellas and shorter novels I've read this year may be at least partly responsible for my meeting my 50-book goal in October. The first was the debut volume in the Sword Art Online series of light novels by Reki Kawahara. As with Ranma 1/2, I had seen the anime series first and wanted to read the source material. This series is about a gamer trapped in a virtual-reality fantasy game where being killed in-game means dying in real life.

Thus ends any official goals in my reading plans for 2023. I'm not going to stop reading, of course. There are still eight books on my list for the year, and five weeks left to read them.