TBR Challenge Wrapup

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I'm done with Adam's TBR Challenge, and sadly this is the last one he will host; he's retiring it.  But, excelsior!  Onward and upward to better things, right?  OK, so I'm happy to have finished this list.  I put some real toughies on it, and I wasn't at all sure I would be able to finish.  In fact, I must admit to have failed with TWO titles, but luckily we get two alternates for just that problem! 


Here's my list, with links to posts:
  1.  The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
  2. The Travels, by Marco Polo
  3. Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene Genovese * (DNF fail)
  4. Muhammad: Prophet of God, by Daniel Peterson (this is a secular biography)
  5. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichio Tanizaki *
  6. The Gulag Archipelago (abridged), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn *
  7. The History of the Renaissance World, by Susan Wise Bauer
  8. Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens *
  9. The Secret History, by Procopius
  10. Eight Pieces of Empire, by Lawrence Scott Sheets
  11. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
  12. Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  1. Crotchet Castle, by Thomas Love Peacock (DNF fail)
  2. Fairy Tale as Myth, by Jack Zipes
I'd been looking forward to reading Roll, Jordan, Roll, and when I picked it up I was very interested in the first chapter, which talked about the dynamics between slaves, overseers, and slaveowners.  It sounded exactly like the relationships between serfs, barons, and the king in medieval England, before the Tudors came along.  But then the book dove into a lot of talk about the bourgeoisie, and I realized it was going to be waaaay more Marxist than I could really deal with.  So I grabbed an alternate title, Crotchet Castle, by Thomas Love Peacock.  He was a funny satirist and I had previously liked his Nightmare Abbey, which pokes fun at the Romantic poets and Gothic literature.  Crotchet Castle, however, pokes fun at political economists.  Let me just tell you, 200-year-old political economic ideas are boring and incomprehensible, even when--possibly especially when--satirized.  Unreadable books, both of them.  I was really sad to fail at Roll, Jordan, Roll, though.

So thanks to Adam for hosting the challenge!  I really feel like I won a bit of a victory with this list.

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