Reading Challenge Updates

Well this is it: the final summary post for my 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge!  I made it through this with a little bit of time to spare, and I'm already looking at my challenge for next year.  I'll do a final wrap-up post with the complete challenge closer to the end of the month, as well as the planning post for 2018.

Completed
-A book of letters.  I tackled The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society as planned for this, and it was lovely.  Lighthearted while dealing with a few serious subjects, and a charming main character and setting to boot.  I'd say about half the book is letters from the main character, Juliet, and the other half comprises letters from the other characters to Juliet and to each other.  I'm not big on books written in this style, and this was a pleasant surprise in a category I had been putting off.

-A book that's becoming a movie in 2017. I picked Murder on the Orient Express for this.  I wasn't planning on seeing the movie (and haven't) but I'd somehow avoided knowing who was the murderer up until this point in my life, and this is a classic mystery, so it seemed like a logical choice.  Was this story vastly improbable?  Yes.  Definitely.  Still, it was fun, and it's one of those mysteries that, improbable as it is, you can still piece together from the clues the author sprinkles throughout, which I think is fun.

-A book set in the wilderness.  As a kid, I read the Illustrated Classics version of Robinson Crusoe, which was evidently significantly different from the original.  It made reading the original a really logical choice for this category.  It comes from a time when "plot" wasn't really so much a thing as "characters wandering from place to place and doing things" and so the pacing feels very slow, and the ending abrupt because this is apparently actually a series, which I didn't know.  But I was still happy to get another classic under my belt!

-A book with multiple authors.  I picked Mutiny on the Bounty for this one.  It's a great seafaring tale, but because of the time and narrative style in which it was written, it can sometimes seem a bit slow.  It's one-third of the authors' fictionalized account of the Bounty mutiny and its aftermath, and I do plan on reading the other parts and hopefully finding a good nonfiction book that covers these events as well in order to gain scope and perspective regarding them.

-A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read.  I really wanted to read a Stephen King book for this, because horror is a genre I don't read a lot of (though I do read some; there isn't really a genre that I straight-up don't read) and King is the, well, king of modern horror.  But ultimately, when I wanted to get this done, I just couldn't get one of his books from the library.  So I swapped in Final Girls, which is up for a Goodreads award in the horror category, is apparently "an international bestseller," and which I already had in my apartment courtesy of Book of the Month.  I enjoyed this, but the pacing for much of it was somewhat slow and the main character, who is really not a good person, didn't ultimately get the comeuppance she deserved, which disappointed me.

-A book recommended by an author you love.  Tamora Pierce has reading lists for different age ranges on her website, and The Lace Reader was one of the titles on the adult list.  I already had it on my Kindle, which was a bonus.  I liked the writing style and trying to untangle the truth and lies of self-professed unreliable narrator Towner, but at the end was left feeling befuddled as to why some things appeared the way they did, why people went along with some of these lies, etc.  I think I'd need to re-read it with the ending already known to me in order to truly dig into this one.


-A book based on mythology.  I ended up switching Olympos out for this, because Olympos is a sequel, and I really need to re-read the first book before I take it on.  Norse Mythology is Neil Gaiman's take on Norse myths, blending different tellings of them and forming them into a loose story arc.  I liked it, but it wasn't as breathtaking as his novels or short stories; I hope to see him return to his more traditional works soon.