2020 BFB 'hefty' haul x12 for frahealee

Returning for another year of 'great expectations' and determined endurance.

Last year, goal to actual ratio was 15:10. Five were left hanging but at least two of them had been started. The other three tack onto this year's list of hopefuls.

My pencil sketch monthly blueprint:

JAN2020 (4)
×Light in August by William Faulkner (1932) = Kobo/ebook; C/I paperback, 528p. (Knopf Doubleday edition)
×The Rainbow by DHLawrence (1915) = Kobo/ebook alongside 19h16m audiobook; C/I paperback, 544p. (OUP edition)
×Blonde: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates (2000) = 8h23m online audiobook; C/I paperback, 752p. (HarperCollins) (1001bymrbyd list)
×The House by the Churchyard by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1863) = Kobo/ebook; C/I paperback, 518p. (Wilder Publications, 2012)

FEB2020 (1)
×A Prisoner in Fairyland by Algernon Blackwood (1913) = Kobo/ebook; C/I hardcover, 532p.

MAR2020 (1)
×War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869) = Kobo/ebook alongside audiobook in portions; Oxford University Press paperback, 1440p.

APR2020 (2)
×The City of God by St. Augustine (4th century) = paperback, 903p.
×The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964, 1971) = paperback, 555p. (death from Lupus)

MAY2020 (1)
×The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila, (1515-1582) Volume Two: The Way of Perfection (1577), Meditations on the Song of Songs (?), The Interior Castle (1588) = paperback, 554p.
ICS Publications/Institute for Carmelite Studies, Washington DC, translated by Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh (both are Order of Carmelites, Discalced), published 1980

JUN2020 (1)
×Robert Louis Stevenson: Four Complete Novels: Treasure Island (1881), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1886), Kidnapped (1886) = hardcover, 583p. (1983 original publication, 1995 edition by Gramercy Books)

JUL2020 (2)
×Catechism of the Catholic Church = paperback, 826p.
×Holy Bible RSV-CE = imitation leather paperback, 1255p.
(OT 1005p./NT 250p. begun on the feastday of Saints Anne and Joachim 26Jul2019)

AUG2020 (2)
×Waverley by Walter Scott (1814) = mass market paperback, 688p. (Random House)
×Fools Die by Mario Puzo (1978) = paperback, 531p.

SEP/OCT/NOV/DEC2020 (nil)
+++++
Incomplete efforts: The Brothers Karamazov (1056p.), The Touch (624p.), Metamorphoses by Ovid (768p.), Anna Karenina (864p.), Middlemarch (880p.), Complete Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville (528p.), The Robber Bride (600+p.), The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (821p.), Dickens...
+++++
Lightbulbs: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, The World According to Garp by John Irving, The Portable Thoreau, The Arabian Nights (1000+p.), etc.
+++++
2019 total: 10-15 books... (surpass 1,532,000 words from 2019?)

Annual Rolling Goal: 15 books of 600 pages x 250 est.words/page = 2,250,000

2020 Achievement: 12:14, page count unknown
(aimed for one hefty book monthly, finished 14, so satisfied)
+++++
-- FYI -- Lightbulbs are options for potential consideration. Page counts are drawn from Chapters/Indigo online resources; hardcover, paperback, mass market paperback, large print, etc. depending on the version most appealing at the time.

Here is a cut/paste of accumulated ideas for this year from my 2019 thread:

I was happy to move four off of my old lightbulb list, with ten completed.

2019 incomplete attempts:
Holy Bible
War and Peace

2020 renewed attempts:
Anna Karenina
Metamorphoses
Middlemarch
The Arabian Nights
The Brothers Karamazov
The Touch
The Portable Thoreau
The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (500+p.)
Waverley

2021?
Infinite Jest (1000+p.)

Extra research:

The Arabian Nights (The Thousand and One Nights)

This is a spot for me to add or delete books of interest (lightbulbs!) that might qualify for this group. Some are CanLit, some 1001btrbyd, some miscellaneous classics that deserve a peek.

Owned: The Portable Thoreau, 610+p. (paperback)
Bought: 8 Russian Works (ebook)
Covet: Graham Greene x4-6

2020 POSSIBILITIES:
GASKELL, Elizabeth x2 (North and South/Mary Barton?)
LAWRENCE, D.H. (full collection including poetry)
MELVILLE, Herman (Typee, Omoo, Mardi/hardcover, 1333p.)
WHARTON, Edith (full collection including poetry)
&/or
DICKENS, Charles x6 (Dombey&Son/1004p. Penguin paperback, Little Dorrit/864p. Penguin paperback, Martin Chuzzlewit/768p. OUP paperback, Our Mutual Friend/880p. OUP paperback, The Pickwick Papers/784p.OUP paperback, Barnaby Rudge/752p. OUP paperback)
FIELDING, Henry (Tom Jones/976p. OUP paperback)
KING, Stephen (The Shining/Knopf m.m.pb, 688p.)
MCCULLOUGH, Colleen (The Thorn Birds/704p. HarperCollins m.m. paperback)
MISTRY, Rohinton (A Fine Balance, 604p.)
RICHARDSON, Samuel x2 (Clarissa in 1748, Pamela in 1740)
RICHLER, Mordecai (Solomon Gursky Was Here/paperback, 560p.)
RUSHDIE, Salman (Joseph Anton: A Memoir, paperback, 656p. / The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Knopf paperback, 592p. / The Satanic Verses: A Novel, paperback, 576p. / Midnight's Children, paperback, 560p.)

First book of the year was an accident. I started it last August and stalled on chapter 15. Faulkner is not the easiest source material to digest, with his Deep South sensibilities, but his writing style is pure poetry. I get absorbed in the beautiful language and the lolling pace with its incessant repetition, and then need to backtrack because some jarring circumstance occurs that I completely glazed over. Wait, what? Somebody died?! When did that happen? Most frustrating. Chapters 16 to 21 flew by. It became my second favourite Faulkner novel, behind Intruder in the Dust. The 'n' word will never get easier, just have to push that rising bile back down.

Light in August was not even on the BFB radar for last year, since it was under 600 pages. It's a nice reward for finally finishing the novel, to have it qualify for this group unexpectedly.

War and Peace was also started last year, but might take another few months to face the final chapter. Napoleonic wars are not really my forte. But the writing is exquisite.

Hi Francine my dear, hope you have a good year on here.

>6 johnsimpson: Thank you, John. So far so good. Lots of variety, shuffling, potential.

"Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime." (per Chapters/Indigo online description)

This will be another surprise entry along the way. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville rings in at 528p. (Knopf hardcover) and features an intro by John Updike (1997). I have read Bartleby previously and it will be a pleasure to revisit it here.

I will continue to immerse myself in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's collection of novels/novellas/short stories/poetry/memoir, but I am unsure which will qualify for this group. They will be assessed as I progress, as several have an awful lot of chapters but I'm unsure how that translates into pages. I am keeping track in the Gothic Literature Group, the Le Fanu 200th Birthday thread, for simplicity, so as not to duplicate details.