To start, good luck to everyone taking part in the BookTubeAThon 2012, and thanks to Raeleen and Ariel for organising this.  I hope you’ll forgive my posting as normal text posts and not as YouTube video book reviews.

Further to my last post, I’ve made a few changes to my book lineup.  One of my favourite courses at university was my second year German literature course in which books of classic German literature were paired with more modern works.  For example, we paired Kleist’s Penthesilea with Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth which describes a meeting between Kleist and another author.  I found this to be a particularly interesting way of generating thoughtful discussion.  I would like to do the same for this year’s BookTubeAThon.

For my first pairing I will be looking at Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (416 pages) and comparing it to Austenland (206 pages) by Shannon Hale.  I will be listening to Pride and Prejudice in Audible format to complete the audiobook challenge as well a the classic challenge.  Pride and Prejudice is a wonderfully witty take on the mores of Regency England and I look forward to seeing how Austenland compares.  Can it match up to Austen’s wit?  Although I bought the Audible version of Austenland last week, the ebook has been in my library since the 5th November 2011, allowing it to fulfil the challenge of reading a book that’s been on your shelf for a while.

Next up I will be comparing George Orwell’s 1984 (336 pages) with Lauren Oliver’s Delirium (401 pages).  I have read 1984 before, so it will meet the re-read challenge.  1984 is a classic dystopian novel and, if I remember correctly, one of the themes is suppressing romantic interest for the good of the State.  It also has the most depressing first and last lines of any book I have ever read.  The suppression of romantic love is of course the main theme of Delirium and I look forward to comparing how the two writers handle it.  I also just really want to read Delirium!  I see several of my BookTubeAThoners are reading it or one of its sequels for their reads.

My final pairing is perhaps stretching things a bit.  I plan on comparing Fiona McIntosh’s Bridge of Souls (512 pages) with her Scrivener’s Tale.  Bridge of Souls will complete the 500 page plus challenge as well as the one to complete a series.  The link is a little tenuous; Scrivener’s Tale (527 pages) is about a Parisian psychologist who ends up in the world of the Bridge of Souls.  Bridge of Souls is one of McIntosh’s earlier works, and Scrivener’s tale one of her later ones, and is nominated for a David Gemmell Legend award.  It will be interesting to see how her writing has developed over the intervening years.

So, if I manage to complete all this I will have made the challenges as follows:

1. average 300 pages a day (my total will be 2,398 pages, meeting the challenge of 2,100 pages over the week)
2. read a book of over 500 pages (The Scrivener’s Tale)
3. reread a book (1985)
4. finish a series (Bridge of Souls to complete The Quickening Trilogy)
5. read a book that’s been on your shelf for ages (Austenland)
6. listen to one audiobook (Pride & Prejudice)
7. read a classic (Pride & Prejudice)

Good luck everyone and enjoy BookTubeAThon