A Gentle Challenge
I have never before set a broad reading goal. For the past five years my goal has simply been to read. For the past two, I have actually kept lists of the books I have read. While I enjoy looking back on the lists and am thankful for all I have read, I think I’m ready for a gentle challenge.
I unintentionally stumbled upon the desire to set a reading goal for the year; it was not a well-thought-out New Year’s resolution. At Christmas my brother left a section of his Financial Times lying around. An enticing picture of a stack of books loomed before me on the front page of the Life & Arts section. How could I resist? Before I knew it, I had read Alice Fishburn’s article, “What I learnt from reading a year of books by only women.” Setting a literary challenge was not new to Fishburn, and the idea appealed to me. With less than a week left of 2018, I was furiously brainstorming and rejecting ideas for my own reading challenge.
At the same time, my mom was eager to share a treasure she had bought for $.50 at a library book sale. “Something I would never have picked up if I hadn’t been going to these Charlotte Mason retreats with you,” she said. It was The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Fourth Edition. Her anthology lured me in. A quick search revealed there are now eight editions, and the book comes in both a standard edition (with over 152 stories from 130 authors) and a shorter edition (with 73 stories from 69 authors). I settled on the shorter sixth edition, as it was available in like-new condition from Better World Books for less than $4.
The Goal
My goal is twofold. First, I will read the anthology in a year, my plan being to read roughly six short stories a month. Then, I will choose a novel from one of the authors featured that month. Six short stories and a novel a month–a gentle challenge. I’m looking forward to the reading adventure of this year and meeting many new authors I would otherwise never have known.
You may learn more about Dawn on the CMER speaker page.
JANUARY
NOVEL
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe). I had to pick a novel before my anthology arrived in the mail. As it turns out, Stowe is not featured in the anthology, but that is OK.
SHORT STORIES
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe)
Bartleby, the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
The Death of Ivan Ilych (Leo Tolstoy)
LOOKING FORWARD TO FEBRUARY
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne). I chose this book for pragmatic reasons; it is the shortest. The other options I considered were Moby Dick (Melville), War and Peace (Tolstoy), and Anna Karenina (Tolstoy).
FEBRUARY
NOVEL
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
SHORT STORIES
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Ambrose Bierce)
Boule de Suif (Guy de Maupassant)
The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin)
The Lady with the Dog (Anton Chekhov)
The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
LOOKING FORWARD TO MARCH
Persuasion (Austen). You will see that Austen is not listed among the authors above. This is because almost none of the authors above have written a novel. The closest is Chopin’s The Awakening. In some places I see it listed as a novel and in some places as a short story. It is also a controversial novel. I have checked it out from the library, but I have not yet decided if I’m going to read it. I don’t mind reading about the topic, but I don’t know how racy the novel will be. So, having never read an Austen novel, now seems like the perfect time. Of all her novels, I have chosen Persuasion, because I think it is the shortest (are we seeing a pattern?).