VT Christian Reading Challenge discussion

Happy New Year! Anyone lined up their books for this next year’s challenge?

I'm definitely going to start off with the shortest books on my list to pretend like I accomplished something and hopefully get some momentum going.

Book of 100 Pages or Less: Four Quartets
Book about Heaven: Heaven Is a World of Love
Book from a Library: The Lilies of the Field
Book about Mental Health: Encouragement for the Depressed
Book by an Author is Who No Longer Alive: Godric

I like the new prompts!! I wasn't going to - but maybe I will do this again, so much as I can.

Love the idea of starting small! I’m focusing on favorite authors and rereads right now so I might revisit The Prince and The Art of War for “A book about leadership “ and “A book about war.” Amy Carmichael also has one called “God’s Missionary” which is short, but oh so good!

And Linda, yes! I love the new prompts as well!

I am going through a bunch of random books that I have and will find a slot for them.

The prompts are a change: more geared at non-fiction and explaining things to kids. I might struggle this year.

Ian wrote: "I am going through a bunch of random books that I have and will find a slot for them.

The prompts are a change: more geared at non-fiction and explaining things to kids. I might struggle this year."

I am going to find it hard to read the prompts and the amount of fiction that I like/need just because of life. I miss the multiple book of my choice options.

Sara wrote: "Ian wrote: "I am going through a bunch of random books that I have and will find a slot for them.

The prompts are a change: more geared at non-fiction and explaining things to kids. I might strugg..."

Yes once I saw how non-fiction heavy the prompts were, I tried to fit fiction anywhere I could and still only ended with 24 at Rare Reader level (78).

I'm possibly going to have a hard time of reaching my goal of 73 books because (elsewhere) I'm doing a "read what you own" challenge meaning I'm not buying any more books until I've read 100 of what I already own. I will do my best to do both of these challenges. My goal is 73 because that's how old I'll be at the end of the year.

So far I've read:
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressman Taylor (100 pages or less)
His First Bible by Melody Carlson (book about Jesus for kids) - there's also an OT section but the NT section was all about Jesus...

Both these books were very short of course. I reviewed them both here and on YouTube. I want to do that with every book I read this year.

Read Parenting by Paul Tripp for my Christian Living and Iron Gold for the 400 pages or more. Currently working through Becoming Beatrix for the biography.

Happy February! Ya... kind of late but whatever.

Best: My Stubborn Heart by Becky Wade. Just a fun love story that was a good start to the new year

Worse: The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk. A boy with the ability to see the future goes to rescue his dad from a Ottoman Sultan in a steam punk setting but I got so lost as the steam punk struggled with the author's lack of history being explained.

Surprise: Calculated by Nova MvBee. Young Woman with a dark past who has super ability to read and see numbers and patterns gets hired to prevent a company going bankrupt just to find out that there is a New Great Depression looming on the horizon. Also, turns out this is a retelling of an OT story. No I am not going to say which one as it would be spoilers.

My hats off to you, Linda! I have a very hard time sticking to books I already own. And 73 sounds like a very good goal, for life as well as for books. Does “End of the year” mean you just had a birthday recently? 🙂

How you doing on your goal, Chelsea? 400 pages always seems daunting! But if it’s a good book it goes quickly.

My best was Humility by Andrew Murray. It was reread, but one I gain so much from!

Worst: Nightmare Alley. The end of it I kinda skimmed through.

Surprise: Uglies. I thought the themes were really important for this day and age. I look forward to talking them over with my teens.

No recent birthday - I'll be 73 in July. (My goal is to read 73 books this year.)

I forgot to mention that though I'm not going to buy anymore physical books until after I read 100 of them, I have excepted audiobooks. I get those through an annual subscription to Audible or from Libby. So there's room for some good old fashioned mood reading. The author was also a surprise. I'd never heard of Buddy Levy before, but I enjoyed his writing and will read more of his survival books.

Here's the January book awards:

Best:
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Journey, by Alfred Lansing - ★★★★★

I've been reading a lot of nonfiction survival literature lately. This one was very inspiring.

Worst:
Several People Are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke - ★

This was so, so terrible. The author likes profanity. I read it because it was written all in Slack messages between co-workers, but the plot was lame, the sub-plots were worse, and the language was just not my style.

Surprise:
Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition, by Buddy Levy - ★★★★★

I guess the only real surprise was that I'd never heard of this expedition before, and didn't even know about Ellesmere Island or where it was. It was a very tragic nonfiction survival story that hit me hard. (Very sad.)