Challenge Complete: Dread & Read

J.G. over at Hotchpot Cafe came up with a nifty idea for a challenge for 2018--it sweetens the deal for readers who have books that they keep planning to read (for challenges that demand, personal growth, a need to read all the things, it's a book that everyone has read, etc.) and for whatever reason we just keep putting them off. It's the DREAD AND READ CHALLENGE. This challenge encouraged us to move past the avoidance by adding a sweetener--a little prize for reading that bad book that keeps scaring us off.  

I signed up with books on my Dread list:

1. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin (7/22/18)
2. She by H. Rider Haggard (7/17/18)
3. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler changing out for 
     Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett [same hard-boiled genre] (11/12/18)

The first two books were classics that I kept putting down for challenges that require various classics and then I would chicken out and replace them with something else. The third was a hard-boiled detective novel that I kept telling myself that I was going to try--because Chandler is supposed to be so good. And....I put it off again--trading it out (as J. G. allows us to do) for another hard-boiled novel by Hammett. She was pretty good. Melmoth was down-right awful. and Red Harvest was....well...pretty much what I expected: a hard-boiled, murder-fest. The body count was unbelievably high. But Hammett can write, so it wasn't too terribly awful and I will take it over Melmoth any day.

Thanks to J. G. for coming up with this idea! It really helped me clear off some books that I probably wouldn't have read this year (or possibly ever at the rate I was going).