Skip to main content

Reading Challenge: And the Winner is...



Yesterday I posted results for the Foreign Language Challenge; now it is time to announce the winner of the Reading Challenge.

First, two honorable mentions go to a pair of students who both read three or more books and over 1,000 pages: Seth Greene (3.5 books; 1,030 pages) and David Kralt (4.5 books; 1,220 pages).

I myself read a whopping 10.5 books and 1,701 pages.  Could anyone beat that...?

Well, in fact -- yes!  Or partly.  No one managed to read more books than I did, so I have not been totally embarrassed.  However, one impressive student managed to read 7 books weighing in at a massive 4,100 pages.  Drum roll...

Congratulations to Adam Brown, who seized the challenge as motivation to read the entire Harry Potter series for the first time!

For those who are interested, I include below complete lists of the books read by all these students as well as yours truly.

Seth Greene
Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night (528 pages)
C.S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm (167 pages)
John MacCormack - Watch for a Cloud of Dust (193 pages)
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy (read 142/168 pages)

David Kralt
Christie Golden, Twilight (328 pages)
Nate Kenyon, Spectres (416 pages)
Christie Golden, Flashpoint (314 pages)
Chris Hadfield, You are Here (197 pages, about 40 of them text, the rest photos)
Stephen Leacock, Canada: The Foundations of its Future (122 out of 257 pages)

Adam Brown
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 309 pages
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: 341 pages
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: 435 pages
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 734 pages
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 870 pages
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: 652 pages
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 759 pages

Me
Jeremy Adler, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Critical Lives), 219 pages
François Grosjean, A Journey in Languages & Cultures: The Life of a Bicultural Bilingual, 180 pages
Gert Jonke, Schule der Geläufigkeit, 191 pages
Martin Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature), 112 pages
Arno Camenisch, Herr Anselm, 100 pages
Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, 154 pages
Serge Pey, The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, 135 pages
Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper, 102 pages
Friedrich Glauser, Wachtmeister Studer, 255 pages
Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther, 160 pages
Felix Philipp Ingold, Alias, oder Das wahre Leben, 93 out of 290 pages

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf!  I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink.  Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend  ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ).  This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor.  But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution.  Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal  has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic.  Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing.  (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting."  I thought they were quite interesting.  The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before.  Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week.  And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf!  On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben  ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold .  Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise.  It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent.  The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...