Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge discussion

What books are you reading in this category?

I'm struggling with this one so if anyone has any recs, please pass along!

For this, I'm picking one of the books which I added to my to-read list on Goodreads the longest time ago (well, when I set up my account).

You could choose a book that you have had for a long time, but haven't read yet.

I agree with Heidi. Reading something you kind of want to read but other things keep taking priority or there's some reason you've been putting it off. I may try to read "One Hundred Years of Solitude". I've had it for years meaning to read it but it intimidates me for some reason. I've also had "Tithe" by Holly Black sitting on my nightstand for over a year but for some reason I just keep skipping right over it.

Great ideas, thanks!

I'm planning on reading Cloud Atlas. I bought it years ago but never actually read it because it looked long and complicated/hard to understand. I've been dying to watch the movie but I refuse to do so until I read the book, so I'm gonna go for it this year!

started reading Wuthering heights as book over 100 years old...it's now on my bottom of to read list lol

I read "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time" by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, it was wonderful and very poignant at the moment. We need to remember that radicals don't represent the masses and religion is not something we should fight over but respect other peoples choices

I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime by Mark Haddon.

Nicole wrote: "I'm planning on reading Cloud Atlas. I bought it years ago but never actually read it because it looked long and complicated/hard to understand. I've been dying to watch the movie but I refuse to d..."

Did you ever read it?

I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five. I didnt like it. But after reading the reviews I see it was mostly me. And I feel a little bad because Vonnegut was actually at Dresden. But I cant help it if it bored me to death. It was at the bottom of my TBR list for a reason.

I read A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley for this one.

I made a list of books before I found out about the challenge and the last book on that list is Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern. My to-read list changes almost daily on here which was making it difficult to pick!

Planning on reading "Life on the Mississippi" by Mark Twain. It was one that was given to me by a relative, which I have no desire to read. Hence why it's at the bottom of my list.

I read the book that was literally at the bottom of my list- Beyond the Storm by Carolyn Zane. My books are listed by author, and this book was the last book on my list.

Mine's probably going to be 'All the Light...'because I'm wait-listed for it at the library and the list is lonnnnng.

I listened to the librivox recording of The Wings of the Dove. It was tough and I think I'll actually have to read a paper version someday to judge what I really thought of it. Right now, I feel like it was just ok. It was one of the very first books I added to goodreads, so I'm glad that I finally have heard the story.

Just finished Arthur Conan Doyle "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes"

For this topic I wanted to read a book that I didn't particularly have any interest in reading, but felt that I should read for like cultural reasons. I ended up going with Looking for Alaska by John Green. The characters were interesting enough and the writing was fine, but it definitely wasn't something in which I was particularly interested. I think mostly I'm just tired of a book being about how men discover that - SURPRISE - women are human beings and not ideals.

read The Lying Game be chilling on my tbr since 2013...

That prompt was a bit difficult for me since I don't keep a reading list. Somehow, the idea seems mildly obscene to me - just like making a list of, say, people you plan to make love to.

Anyway, I decided that a book qualifies, that I purchased more than ten years ago with the firm intention to read it promptly and which, for some reason, have stayed untouched since. Unfortunately several books qualify in that way...

So anyway for that prompt I read The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. Quite a depressing book, which suited me fine; a good novel once you get into it.

And by the way I was quite surprised by the number of reviewers on Goodread that stated they didn't like the book because the main character wasn't likable. Wow! 19th Century called; they want their reviewers back. Is the requirement that all characters be likable? Only the main one? Only the narrator because since he says "I" it's just like I was him? Or what..?

Lol! I think a lot of people have different expectations when reading a book. Some people do want to feel like they could be or could be friends/lovers with the protagonist. I generally feel like that is more commonly associated with genre fiction and not with literary fiction, as escapism and identification are historically an integral part of the growth of most genre fictions (I.e. Fantasy, scifi, detective) due to their plot based nature.

Though of course the book you read is a literary character study (from what I can glean from the Goodreads page). It's possible people who typically like reading sports genre fiction - books about athletic heroes - were misled by the title of the piece. They came looking for a read about the glamour of sports writing to find a meditation on life by a not so glamorous protagonist. Or maybe they just didn't like the guy. Sometimes a work isn't interesting enough to people to justify the actions or tone of the characters. If an unlikeable protagonist doesn't seem to be saying anything new or important with his unlikeablenesss than he's just kind of a jerk for no reason. Sometimes authors can pull off characters like that and sometimes they can't, and even so your mileage may vary based on your own personal experiences interacting with people and stylistic proclivities.

But I also totally get what you are saying. Sometimes people definitely dismiss books or characters too easily. They don't peel back enough layers of the onion.

I've just finished Never Look Back by Clare Donoghue