Challenge Check In: Epics, Erotica, Westerns and Royalty

In January 2014 I took on four reading challenges: Goodreads, Mount TBR, Literary Exploration, and What’s In a Name.  The Goodreads challenge is simply to read a certain number of books during the year.  This has been the easiest of the four challenges, so easy that I have upped my goal twice already.  My goal now is to read to 80 books, leaving 8 to go.  Mount TBR has been the hardest of the challenges.  More than anything Mount TBR has shown how much I acquire new books rather than turning to my ever growing to-be-read pile.  Of the 72 books I’ve read so far this year, only 22 were books I acquired before 2014.  The rest were either bought this year or borrowed from a library.  Really need to focus on tackling the backlog. 

As for the Literary Exploration and Name challenges, by the beginning of September I was down to a book with a title that references royalty and three genres – epic, erotica, and western, four if cyberpunk is added as a bonus.  Part of the fun and confusion of the Literary Exploration is trying to define a genre and figuring out what book to read for it.  I’m still not sure why “contemporary” is a genre (it seems too vast a category, like calling fiction a genre).  Literary fiction is another hard one to define one.  Some genres I have a vague idea about but was otherwise unfamiliar with, like western.  For western and erotica I took the easy route.  For western I found a mystery, The Cold Dish.  For erotica I found a book with the name of the genre in the title, Best of Best Women’s Erotica 2.  Both were fun and interesting reads, and both genres are ones I would be willing to explore more.  Guess the Literary Exploration challenge is working.

That leaves two more books reads to complete the Literary Exploration and Name challenges, epic and royalty, but these shouldn’t be a problem, although they may take a while to get through.  For epic I plan to read A Feast of Crows.  For royalty I’m working on The Emperor’s Children.  With any luck these challenges will be completed by the end of November and I’ll have December to read whatever I want.  As much as I like doing these challenges it will be nice to be done and to be able to pick a book just because without thinking about the challenges I still have to complete.