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Who’s ready to talk about books that intimidate them? I hope you are, because that’s the 2018 Reading Challenge theme for the month of April! A few intimidating books on my shortlist:
Les Miserables
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Counto of Monte Cristo
Atlas Shrugged
Notice anything those titles have in common? I recently realized that the criteria most likely to land a book on my intimidation list is length. But as you will see in a moment, the book I selected for this month is of average length, not a novel, and not on the list above. When I started to consider which book to choose, I was initially leaning pretty heavily towards Les Mis, but fellow book blogger Allison from Mind Joggle gave me a great suggestion. Because of her, I decided to go with a book of poetry.
Poetry is a genre I usually don’t even consider, because it confuses me. I don’t feel like I’m qualified to know whether a poem is ‘good’ or not and I always wonder if I’m reading it the right way. That made me think that poetry would probably be a great way to stretch myself this month, so I chose Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
I feel like that one is probably a pretty safe bet since it’s a classic beloved by many, so we’ll see if I can develop a taste for poetry this month. Hopefully I’ll enjoy it and come out a better reader on the other side! I should also note that if you think you might be interested in reading Leaves of Grass along with me, this version is free for Kindle. Gotta love those Kindle deals.
Yay! I’m looking forward to hearing what you think! I’m not much of a poetry reader either, but I bet that one will be good for spring. I think I might pick up Middlemarch. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while but have just never gotten to it–and classics always take a little gearing up to read (for me) since they usually take longer to read.
Middlemarch is a good choice! And I get what you mean about classics being a little more challenging to get through. Even when you are enjoying them, the language and writing are so different from what we’re used to that it takes more brain power to compute, at least for me.
I’m not terribly into poetry, but I LOVED the unit we did on Walt Whitman in college! I actually painted a Walt Whitman quote on my graduation cap like a true English major–ha!
I must be taking the opposite of your current reading approach right now though by going back to read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books again because they were my favorites as a kid!
I’ve been wanting to revisit those, but I’ve been holding out so that my kids can get just a little older and we can enjoy them together 🙂