January 1, 2012 – December 31, 2012
Welcome to An Armchair by the Sea’s first reading challenge! Some of you may know about my love of/obsession with/totally crazed mania for all things fairytale and mythology based. While chatting with my sister Esther about our shared love of reading challenges and desire to set up a challenge of our own, we came up with an idea (inspired by the Once Upon a Time Challenge) for a challenge based around reading things to do with mythology, fairytales, legends and folklore, and so here it is!
The Telling Tales Reading Challenge 2012
Rules:
· Challenge runs from January 1st 2012 to December 31st 2012. You may sign up to participate at any point between these dates.
· In your sign up post you must mention the level of participation you intend to complete
· Any genre counts as long as it is related to fairytale, folklore, or mythology in some way. If you’re not sure if it counts – as long as you can make a case for why it should, then it does!
· You can re-read books for this challenge as long as the reviews you link are written during 2012, and the challenge can also overlap other challenges.
· Whatever you read must either be a version of a fairytale or myth, or contain fairytale or mythological characters, settings, or sequence of events.
· Every month there will be update posts either here or on my sister’s blog. Please link up your reviews for that month on this post.
That’s it!
Now, the important bit.
The Categories
Each category contains five levels, which are as follows:
Level 1: Read 5 books
Level 2: Read 10 books
Level 3: Read 15 books
Level 4: Read 20 books
Level 5: Read 25 books
You can sign up for as many or few categories as you like, and after you’ve signed up you can always change your level to a higher one!
Categories:
Twisted Fairytales – retellings or modern interpretations of fairytales or myths. For inspiration, look here.
Classics – Myth and fairytale from the classics genre (e.g. Homer, Grimm, Virgil, Hans Christian Andersen)
Graphics – Graphic novels and comics based around or containing elements of mythology and fairytale. Examples include Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and Bill Willingham’s Fables series among others.
Poetry & Drama – We’ve put this in because we’re sure there must be some, but currently neither Esther nor I can think of any (Homer aside!) Any suggestions please let us know!
Non- Fiction – Anything about myth, fairytale, folklore or fantasy in general that doesn’t belong to the fictional genre.
Adaptation Amalgamation – Watch a film and read the book it is based on. This category can incorporate as many other categories as you like (i.e all your films do not have to be based on graphic novels, but some can be, and some twisted fairytale, some non-fiction etc)
Mix n Match – Exactly what it says. Sign up for a level and pick that number of books from any or all of the other categories.
As you can probably tell, Esther and I like to make lists. If this seems incredibly convoluted and off-putting, we apologize and take solace in the fact that we have each other, so neither of us will be doing the challenge alone! We do hope that other people will join us though, as it’s always fun to find out about new books, and the more people that do it, the more likely we are to finish it!
For more information and to sign-up, please see this post.
