♝ Welcome to the Newgrounds Reading Challenge ♝

- Like mensa but for cool people since 2017 -

If you've got a longing for the literary in 2024 then this is the thread for you. New year means new opportunities to get those habits in check or just pick up a fruitful new hobby, or rekindle an old one, or maybe you're already the second coming of Dewey (Mr Decimal that is) and just want to flex on all the slowpokes.

If you're interested just drop a post stating the number of books you're aiming to read in 2024. I'll add you to the roster and each month you'll get a ping to log your progress. In the meantime you can сhill out, talk about books, get sweet recommendations, argue which author is the cutest, eat hot chip and lie.

To first time goalers: consider setting a goal a little lower than you think you can achieve - we've been going seven years now and every time people radically overestimate what they can do. Start with a goal you can definitely hit and then aim to go beyond it.

Q: Do audiobooks / manga / comics / etc. count?

A: If you want, yes.

And that's it. Start flicking those pages, homie.

Past threads: ★ 2017 ★ | ♥ 2018 ♥ | ♜ 2019 ♜ | ♚ 2020 ♚ | ♣ 2021 ♣ | ♛ 2022 ♛ | ◈ 2023 ◈ / Part II

First!

20 books for me this year.

Thanks @Jackho!

Put me down for a tenner again babe

Put me down for 12 books again.

Thanks again for doing this!

This year I'll put my goal as 1 book per week: 52

YEAH!!!!!! IM SO EXCITED

*flips a table*

Gimme 25 again. I had a harder time reaching it than I thought I would, so it's a good goal to push toward.

sweet! my goal is 9 for this year!

let's do this!!

Haven't participated since 2020, where I missed my goal of 10 by one book.

I will endeavor to read 6 this year!

Let's go with 10 again. I think I'll make it this year.

Going for 10 again this year!

shootin for 40!

Put me down for 25 books again. I'll actually do it this time, I swear.

Last year was a terrible year for me. Hopefully I can turn a new leaf (and page) this year. Ten books for me.

Put me down for 30 ,I'm curious what kind of material I can find

I'll lower my goal to 45. I don't want to rush through a book again.

Let's go for 17 book this year, I can do it.

My goal this year is 6.

One every two months seems completely fair. I'm still in the thick of it with getting the house ready to move into and then I've got a wedding to plan. I would love to read more than last year but let's be realistic lol. I'm not counting audiobooks towards my goal still because it doesn't personally hit the same buttons that reading does. Of course if I listen to anything good I'll mention it. Neil Gaiman's self-read audiobooks are a fucking delight.

After barely reaching my goal last year, let's just go for a standard "one book per month" this year again.

So, put me down for 12.

I haven't joined in on this in some time. Started a book on the first so I might as well join up. I'll shoot for 12 books this year.

I have my GoodReads goal at 30. So I'll do the same here. And now my books.

1-7) Vampirella/Red Sonja Issues 6-12

When I left off, Red Sonja and Vampirella got zapped from the current time - 1969 - and sent elsewhere. First Vampirella got sent back and saw some moments from Sonja's past which involves this special stone she's carrying. In turn, Sonja got sent back and saw some things from Vampirella's past; namely on Earth.

They eventually reconnect but a snafu occurs and Vampirella got stuck in some medieval-like location with fire breathing dragons for 75-years; Sonja didn't experience this and was just as confused as the readers at this point. From here onward, the two travel thru time and dimensions doing a variety of things.

Did I mention that at some point Red Sonja gets turned into a vampire...and is happy about it? I don't even know how to describe the rest of the story that takes place in these issues as they're quite confusing but intringuing. Even more so toward the end when everything wraps up and resets (still confused even though it was explained).

One of the things I did notice with this Vampirella that contrasts with the one featured in Feary Tales is that this one doesn't mind eating food. There's a lot to take in with Issues 1-12. Even more so with Issues 6-12. In fact Imma have to go back and relook at some things in the first issue because the last issue touched backed to something I might have overlooked.

I think I'll up my goal from 20 to 30 this year 📈

This will be my first time doing this challenge, so I’ll do a manageable 5. My general rule will be that each manga volume counts as 1 book, but any omnibus will also count as 1 book, regardless of how many volumes it contains. Most if not all of my books will be manga.

I'm already working on research for a book I'm writing. I need to read more. Put me down for 12 books. I'll look to a book a month. I may surpass this number, but we'll start with 12.

1ST BOOK

Dungeons & Desktops

By: Matt Barton

I've been failing this challenge for the last two years, it's time to make a change!

I'll read 10 books, and then work my way up.

For Christmas this year, my girlfriend got me a collection of short books on various historical figures. They're not long by any means. The one I read was about 60 pages overall, but I want to get an easy start, and this was one that was very interesting to me. My first book completed this year is:

Ashley, M. (1996). The Life and Times of King Arthur. Paragon Book Service Ltd.

To make a short story even shorter, King Arthur is a man who may have lived in the 5th or 6th century in the Britain of the Dark Ages. So this figure conveniently does all this amazing stuff at a time where history and mythology get intermingled a lot.

He wasn't actually written about until centuries after his death. He may have been real, or he may have been a combination of the reputation of various small kings and warlords in the area over the course of several hundred years.

There was one bit about one of his knights, I believe, where they were in a battle, and in said battle, went and grabbed a spear which turned out to be the spear which was stabbed into Jesus on the cross.

The adventures of King Arthur fall into that kind of broken up and mystical story telling where there's not really one single narrative about who King Arthur was and what he did, but rather many separate tales told by different people over time.

Nifty lil book, next one I'm going to read is going to be about Lawrence of Arabia.

I would like to join! My goal is 12 books.

I finished these books so far:

1. INFINITUM - Die Ewigkeit der Sterne (To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars), Christopher Paolini, 960 pages

2. Tagebuch eines sentimentalen Killers, Luis Sepúlveda, 96 pages

3. Das Netzwerk, Markus Kompa, 224 pages

4. GIER - Wie weit würdest du gehen? (Greed), Marc Elsberg, 448 pages

To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars:

When biologist Kira Navarez is exploring the environment of a foreign planet she falls down into a cavern - and some sort of seemingly sentient spacesuit attaches to her - and lashes out against her spacecrew, killing most of them including the man who she planned to marry. Ridden with guilt, Kira is kept in an isolated tank to get experimented on but the spaceship gets wrecked and Kira finds herself with two tasks - finding a way to either control the suit or detach from it and secondly, help humanity against a variety of aliens that have entered the scene, all seemingly eager to get their hands (or tentacles) on the Xeno-spacesuit.

Book is overall decent. The action scenes did nothing for me, overall very little of the backstory on how humanity has explored space and developped as society is explained, considering the page count, although some small summary of that is added in the glossary after the book. The author also wrote about how the book was rewritten and restructured multiple times in a year-long process, as feedback from test readers ammounted to the whole thing not working.

I would say the rework was mostly a success, although the book feels repetitive at times.

Tagebuch eines sentimentalen Killers:

An aged hired gun accepts one more mission: for a six digit monetary reward, he needs to kill one more person. But the hired gun is suffering from a broken heart, as he broke up with the woman he planned to enjoy retirement with. As such, the mistakes pile up and the question of why his client wants to see the man dead send the hired gun across the globe.

Pretty good short story.

Das Netzwerk:

Ellen Strachwitz, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has mastered every crisis thus far but now several groups seem to plan to intervene into the next election by manipulating the press or using fake news. One such group that is allegedly involved calls itself deanon (basically german anonymous just smaller in scale) and worse than that, there also seems to be a person that tries to faccilitate a terror attack to sway public opinion.

Good political thriller.

Greed:

The economy is in shambles, world wide. Herbert Thompson, former winner of the economic Nobel prize, plans to attend a summit in Berlin, where he wants to hold a speech that proposes a solution for these economic voes - but his car gets hacked and run against a tree, killing him and heavily injuring the other passenger who also worked with him on the scientific paper.

Jan, caretaker and basically just a normal guy, sees that agents set the crashed car on fire and take documents with them - the slowly arriving police misses that key event and think that Jan is the main suspect in a possible murder.

As such Jan has no choice but to flee the scene and try to find the man whose name the dying car passenger managed to utter : Fitzroy.

Decent book. The economic theory stuff is very interesting but gets kinda lost in the action heavy, fast paced story.

1: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Read it last year, read it again this year. It just might be my favourite book of all time.

As much of a masterpiece as the movie was, and it's also one of my favourites, the book is better yet with all the added nuances and side stories that were taken off of the 3 hour long movie. I cannot recommend it enough if you liked the movie.

I started this book in 2023 but spent most of my time reading it in 2024 and finished it this year so I'll include it.

1. Sourdough Culture by Eric Pallant

I had the pleasure of taking part in a press conference-style interview with the author since he is a professor at my college. Seems like an interesting character and after reading his book he became even more of an interesting character.

The book is an exciting academic paper essentially. It explores the beginnings of sourdough baking, attempts to find the origin of one of his sourdough starters, and has small vignette-style stories mixed in from his travels across the world. The book also contains numerous recipes for sourdough breads, pancakes, etc that he has learned from bakers all over the world. He's retiring after this coming semester. I'll have to stop by his office and have him sign my copy.

10 days in and got a book checked off the list, not too shabby. Might try to squeeze another one in during the winter break even though it's only six more days, we'll see.

Went back and re-read-ish Issue 1 of the series (Vampirella/Red Sonja). Did confirm that the touch back in the last issue was hinted at in the first issue but it didn't add to anything as there were still questions that went unanswered.

8) Simply Knitting Issue 246

It's been a while since I read anything from the Simply magazine collection so this was a neat treat. Saw some amazing projects and read some interesting articles. I'm still a longs way away from tackling majority of the projects but I do have my eye on this lace sweater that's featured. Need to plan a shopping trip for some yarn.

9) Simply Crochet Issue 144

Haven't been this excited about this magazine in a while; even though I haven't been keeping up with it since who knows when. Any who, lots of interesting projects and interesting articles as well as book recommendations (all related to crochet). I'm currently in the process of creating a yarn shopping list. Had to find some substitutions for the required yarn and it's a lot harder than it looks. Not only do you have to find a suitable match, you have to find one with an expansive collection of colors.

10) Crochet Scoodies by Magdelena Melzer

The patterns featured in the book are either scarves with hoods or wide and long infinity scarves that can be worn in a similar fashion (the equivalent is the snood that's featured in the show Wednesday). Only found one pattern that I like but stopped part way while working on the first row. The scrap yarn I'm using isn't cutting it so I converted the work in progress into a lap blanket in the making.

11) Simply Sewing Issues 114 and 116

Was kind of hoping for something amazing but I wasn't feeling a lot of the projects. There are two promising sections that peaked my interest: festive makes and 30 project ideas for fat quarters or scrap fabric.

My Solo Exchange Diary 2 by Nagata Kabi