Reading Challenges

So many reading challenges out there on the internet and so little time to read!

I really want to sign up for a dozen of them, but a realistic look at my free time compels me to be selective. The 19th Century Women Writers Reading Challenge for 2008 looks fantastic and would allow me to combine rereading old favorites with actually getting to some titles that have been on my must read list for well over a decade perhaps even two decades. So really high time I read them.

At the moment I am considering the following titles:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Wives and Daughters by Mrs. Gaskell
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant*
Cranford by Mrs. Gaskell
Persuasion by Jane Austen*

*These two titles will be rereads for me.

I have attempted to read Middlemarch before and not gotten very far, Wives and Daughters I once bought with the idea that I would read it in my copious free time during my maternity leave. Hah!

I am not the biggest Bronte fan, but somehow have always felt that I ought to read Villette, so fingers crossed that I can get through it... Cranford looks short being under 250 pages!

I really loved Miss Marjoribanks when I read it almost 20 years ago, so time for a reread to see if it holds up.