Yearly reading challenge

 Every year I set a reading goal. Usually a 50 book challenge. This year, I set a 75 book challenge for myself, which I’m tracking on Goodreads. For the month of January, I read around 20 books. February wasn’t so productive but I still completed 7 books. My monthly goal for March is to finish all the books I’ve started but haven’t finished in the past 6 months.  Right now, I’m tackling the last few pages of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.  Ordinarily, I devour books but this one has been slow-going. However, don’t let my uncharacteristic schlep through the latter half of the book deter you. If you haven’t read this book, DO IT. It’s taking me a while to complete it, not because it isn’t amazing and chock full of the most fantastic and fantastical imagery I’ve ever encountered; it is taking me a while to complete it for precisely these reasons. So. Much. Imagery. I can’t even take it all in. Schulz is an indefatigable purveyor of sentences that a)make you cry because they are so beautiful b)make you cringe because they are so spine-tinglingly creepy or c)make you cry because he’s dead and for the most horrible and unfathomable reasons and he’ll never write another word again. 

 I'm reading the English edition, obv.

What else? My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (ed. Kate Bernheimer), a lovely Christmas present from my lovely significant other. 

For the most part, I’m enjoying this collection but with so many different writers contributing, the quality varies greatly from story to story. There are some that stand out (the tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Kelly Link are standouts so far) and others that fall flat . Even the ones that aren’t so great are still, I think, worth the effort if you are a fan of fairy tale retellings. Even when I haven’t liked the author’s style I find I still appreciate the attempt and the different takes on the stories that “scare, lull, and make mock” (with all necessary nods to Marina Warner).