Mount Vancouver TBR Checkpoint – October 2017

Wow, somehow I missed doing any checkpoints for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, but at least I’ll get one in before the end of the year. TBR stands for “To Be Read,” and refers to the mountain of books that have been sitting on my shelves or in my Amazon cloud that I haven’t read yet. It’s the middle of October, and I’ve read 22 books on my way to Mount Vancouver, leaving me with 6 more books to go. Here are my finished books so far:

1. The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux- Finished 1/1/2017
2. Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell – Finished 1/5/2017
3. To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey – Finished 1/11/2017
4. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell- Finished 1/14/2017
5. The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart– Finished 1/28/2017
6. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Finished 1/29/2017
7. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer – Finished 1/31/2017
8. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe- Finished 2/8/2017
9. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – Finished 2/11/2017
10. 4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie – Finished 2/13/2017
11. The Diamond Throne by David Eddings – Finished 2/20/2017
12. The Ruby Knight by David Eddings- Finished 2/27/2017
13. The Sapphire Rose by David Eddings – Finished 3/7/2017
14. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy – Finished 4/8/2017
15. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm – Finished 5/22/2017
16. The Trial by Franz Kafka – Finished 5/28/2017
17. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel DeFoe – Finished 6/17/2017
18. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – Finished 7/11/2017
19. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather- Finished 7/16/2017
20. Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen – Finished 9/16/2017
21. Emma by Jane Austen – Finished 9/27/2017
22. The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie – Finished 10/3/2017 (Review to come)

Bev, the Mount TBR Challenge host, has offered some suggested questions for this checkpoint and here’s the one I’ve chosen:

Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge without reading it all?

The Elenium series (The Diamond Throne, etc.) by David Eddings has been on my TBR mountain for about 25 years, and I think I would have enjoyed it more had I read it when I originally bought it. I’m glad I read it, but I’m a different reader than I was in the early 1990s, and it was not as interesting to me now as it would have been to my younger self.

I’m pretty confident that I’ll meet this challenge, and if I do it will be a huge relief to have made a dent into a TBR mountain that is still over 700 books tall. Scary thought: if I read 36 books off my TBR pile each year, then I’ll have them all finished in about 20 years. That is, if I don’t buy any more books. Yeah, right.