Library Loot Leads To Joining Chunkster Challenge

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva at A Striped Armchair and Marg at Reading Adventures that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Today I had a look at the classics shelf of the local library to see if anything appealed to me for Our Mutual Read or the 18th and 19th Century Women Writers’ Challenge.  Here’s what I found:

This one appealed to me because I liked the first paragraph:

Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation, – in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills, – and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, ‘I should like to live there,’ – ‘I could be very happy in that pretty place.’  Transient visions pass before his mind’s-eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of a city.

The copy I checked out has this same cover and it appears to have suffered some rough treatment!  The back cover was half torn off and has been stuck back together and some of the pages in the front are not far from coming out.  I just hope I can finish it before it falls to bits!

Then I had a look for something by Trollope, preferably something relatively short.  I have enjoyed his chunksters in the past, notably Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now, but I don’t feel like I can cope with one in the near future.  The first Trollope I ever read was a short one, Kept In the Dark, and it was a good introduction to his work.  The longer books can be a bit repetitive.  Anyway, the shortest one on the shelf was this one:

Which, if you can read the title, is Dr Wortle’s School.  It didn’t sound promising, but the jacket copy promises a ‘dreadful secret’ and a ‘scandalized community’ so I took it home.

And unexpectedly, the brand new copy I had ordered of When Christ and His Saints Slept, first in the Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy by Sharon Kay Penman, had come in!

Talk about a chunkster.  This one is 909 pages long.  That’s more than twice the 450 page starting point a book needs to qualify for the Chunkster Challenge.  And it’s not large print either.  Oh no.

So – and this was always going to happen – this doubles as my official sign-up post for the Chunkster Challenge 2010, which runs from 1 February 2010 to 31 January 2011.  I’m signing up for…level 3, Mor-book-ly Obese, which requires 6 books of 450 pages or more or 3 books of 750 pages or more.  Can I do it?  Well, I read at least 12 books with more than 450 pages last year and at least two of them had more than 750 pages.  So probably, yeah.  Length never puts me off, a book is a book to me.

Deerbrook would count as one of the other two – it’s 600 pages.  As for the third one, maybe this will be the year I finish Dombey and Son.  Or Little Dorrit.  Or Pendennis.  Really, Victorian novels have this challenge written all over them.  Books finished this month don’t count, but there’s no way even Moppet can finish any of these before the 31st.

Back to When Christ and His Saints Slept.  Here’s an excerpt from the jacket copy:

Twelfth-century England, a land of treachery, high passions and shifting allegiances, is plunged into chaos as the Empress Maude and her cousin Stephen become locked in a bitter struggle for the throne lasting twenty years.

Juicy or what?  But I can’t get to this one straight away so what I have to do is restrain myself from dipping in it in advance and spoiling myself.

I might have to put a rubber band on it.

Tags: anthony trollope, deerbrook, dr wortle's school, harriet martineau, sharon kay penman, when christ and his saints slept