And speaking of challenges...

Taken yesterday.

Having just got my 2013 Challenges together this week, it seems the right time to look back over my 2012 Challenges. I've put off doing this for the past week to be honest because I think it may take a while! I'm going to try to keep this fairly matter of fact; I'd really prefer writing about my favourite books of the year in another post. Consider this a stats post!

Firstly, I set myself the goal of reading 101 books, which I changed in the summer to 150. I'm now on my 163rd book. My own challenges were to complete Ted Hughes Collected Poems, which I did in the spring, The Bible, which was completed in summer, and finally the novels of Charles Dickens: I am about half way through Little Dorrit, which I expect to finish in a week or so.

Aside from these, I signed up for eight challenges, and, with some alterations in September, I completed them all. 

Firstly - 'War and Peace in 2012' was completed in March, as was 'Les Misérables in 2012'.

Next, Back to the Classics Challenge:

1. Any 19th Century Classic: I can't begin to count how many I read this year, but for Allie's Victorian Summer in June - July I read twenty three. 
2. Any 20th Century Classic: Again, so many! The ones that spring to mind are The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, Nineteen Eighty Four and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, the magnificent Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust... And quite a few more!
3. Reread a classic of your choice: I re-read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
4. A Classic Play: I read, I think, only a few plays: Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and Medea and Other Stories by Euripides.
5. Classic Mystery/Horror/Crime Fiction: Again, there were a few... M. R. James springs to mind straight away, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and finally The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (which I loved). But, unfortunately, I never got around to writing about them.
6. Classic Romance: I think I pledged to read Persuasion by Jane Austen for this, which I read (and hated) in January.
7. Read a Classic that has been translated from its original language to your languange   - Many. So many. Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sagan, Euripides, Flaubert, Nietzche, Turgenev, Chekhov, Virgil, Dumas, Hugo, and, of course, Monsier. Zola, to name a selection.
8. Classic Award Winner  - I read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and I was not amused.
9. Read a Classic set in a Country that you (realistically speaking) will not visit during your lifetime  - For this, Tales of Angria by Charlotte Bronte.

The 'Chunkster Challenge':  

A chunkster is 450 pages or more of ADULT literature, whether non-fiction or fiction. A chunkster should be a challenge.

I signed up to read thirteen, but I read:

1. Collins, Wilkie - The Woman in White
2. Dickens, Chares - Bleak House
3. Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield 
4. Dickens, Charles - Dombey and Son
5. Dickens, Charles - Martin Chuzzlewit 
6. Dickens, Charles - Nicholas Nickleby
7. Dickens, Charles - Our Mutual Friend
8. Dickens, Charles - The Pickwick Papers  
9. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Devils
10. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot
11. Dumas, Alexandre - Count of Monte Cristo
12. Eliot, George - Middlemarch
13. Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
14. Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
15. Hugo, Victor - Les Misérables
16. James, Henry - Portrait of a Lady 
17. Joyce, James - Ulysses
18. Murdoch, Iris - The Sea, The Sea  
19. Proust, Marcel - Remembrance of Things Past 
20. Thackery, William - Vanity Fair
21. Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
22. Trollope, Anthony - He Knew He Was Right 

There's possibly one or two more in there, but these are the ones that jumped out at me from my list.

Next, Jean's Greek Classic Challenge. I pledged to read four, which I did:

1. Aristotle - The Ethics of Aristotle 
2. Euripides - Medea and Other Plays (Greek Challenge)
3. Plato, The Republic (Greek Challenge)
4. Plato, Symposium (Greek Challenge)

Ireland Reading Challenge: again, four out of four -

1. Joyce, James - The Dubliners
2. Joyce, James - Ulysses
3. Joyce, James - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 
4. McCourt, Frank - Angela's Ashes 

For the New Authors Challenge, I aimed for sixteen but got a few more in besides:

1. Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
2. Byatt, A. S. - Possession 
3. Dumas, Alexandre - Count of Monte Cristo 
4. Forster, E. M. - Howard's End 
5. Foucault, Michel - Discipline and Punish 
6. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - Love in the Time of Cholera 
7. Sartre, Jean Paul -  Nausea
8. Thackery, William - Vanity Fair
9. Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
10. Trollope, Anthony - He Knew He Was Right 
11. Twain, Mark - Adventures of Tom Sawyer
12. Virgil - Aeneid
13. Walker, Alice - The Colour Purple
14. Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
15. Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Grey
16. Zola, Émile - Germinal

European Reading Challenge:

1. Denmark: Anderson, Hans Christian - Fairy Tales
2. Italy: Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy 
3. Greece: Homer - Odyssey 
4. France: Hugo, Victor - Hunchback of Notre Dame
5. Norway: Ibsen, Henrick - Ghosts

And, finally, the big one: a combination of 'Mount TBR' and 'Off The Shelf'. I aimed for fifty one (why the odd number I don't remember), and here is what I read:

1. Aesop - Aesop's Fables 
   
2. Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
3. Anderson, Hans Christian - Fairy Tales
4. Arnim, Elizabeth von - The Enchanted April 
5. Austen, Jane - Emma
6. Austen, Jane - Persuasion
7. Baudelaire, Charles - The Flowers of Evil 
8. Brontë, Charlotte - Villette
9. Byatt, A. S. - Possession
10. Cleland, John - Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
11. de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater
12. Defore, Daniel - Moll Flanders
13. Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield
14. Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations
15. Dickens, Charles - The Pickwick Papers
16. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Devils
17. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot
18. Eliot, George - Middlemarch
    
19. Elliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
20. Elliot, T. S. - The Wasteland and Other Poems
21. Fitzgerald, F. Scott - Tender is the Night
22. Forster, E. M. - Howard's End 
23. Foucault, Michel - Discipline and Punish 
24. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust Part Two
25. Hardy, Thomas - Far From The Madding Crowd
26. Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the D’Urbervilles
27. Hawthore, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
28. Heller, Joseph - Catch 66
29. Homer - Odyssey
30. Hughes, Ted - Tales from Ovid
31. Hugo, Victor - Hunchback of Notre Dame
32. Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables
    
33. James, M. R. - Collected Ghost Stories
34. Joyce, James - The Dubliners
    
35. Joyce, James - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 
36. Lawrence, D. H. - Women in Love
37. Mansfield, Katherine - Selected Stories
38. Murdoch, Iris - The Sea, The Sea
39. Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty Four
40. Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way 
41. Radcliffe, Ann - The Mysteries of Uldolpho 
42. Richardson, Samuel - Pamela 
43. Sartre, Jean Paul -  Nausea
44. Smith, Zadie - White Teeth 
45. Thackery, William - Vanity Fair
46. Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    
47. Twain, Mark - Adventures of Tom Sawyer
48. Virgil - Aeneid 
49. Walker, Alice - The Colour Purple
50. Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
51. Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Grey 

So there it is, despite my fears, I finished my challenges. And, as I say, this is quite a cold "listy" kind of post. I'm going to write more next week about favourite books and the like. This is simply my "stats" post!