Why on earth do I think it's a good idea to host a challenge?

When I started Wuthering Expectations, I participated in a single challenge, subject: Russian literature. Read four Russian books, you bet. Lermontov, Gogol, early Dostoevsky. This challenge was actually mentioned in Newsweek.  The challenge as such, aside from reading the books, which I would have read anyway, was entirely unsatisfying.

A couple of dozen people read entirely different, unrelated books, and had nothing to say to each other.  Nothing resembling a conversation developed, and how could it?  I got, and get, so much more out of anything posted at Lizok's Bookshelf.  And I hated writing for the Challenge weblog.  I had no idea for whom I was writing.  Every so-called "review" was a constricted botch.

So I turned against challenges a bit.  My reading is plenty organized as it is.  But over the last year I have paid more attention and have changed my mind.  Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge, soon to enter it's fourth year, was instrumental.  As of this writing, 227 books have been read in the past year for the challenge, many of which would not have been read without prodding.  The enthusiatic, insightful response of Mel U at A Reading Life has been especially impressive.  He has developed his own conversation with modern Japanese literature, and he lets me listen in.

So simply pointing the way does have some value, even though the review format is deadly and readers will have a hard time really engaging with each other.  I wholeheartedly endorse the Clover, Bee, and Reverie, challenge which wants to encourage the reading of poetry (read 2+ poetry books during the year).  I'm not participating, though - I read 30 books of poetry last year, write about poetry often, and do not exactly need the encouragement.  I don't see how any discussion can develop, either, but the pointing and nudging has its own value.

So what if everyone reads the same book?  The Woolf in Winter readalong (Mrs. Dalloway all linked together here) seems to be working well, although it's interesting to see the delicacy with with commenters treat each other.  Better than the other extreme, that's fer sher.  Rebecca Reid's Classics Circuit, in which readers concentrate on authors or movements rather than single books (Gaskell, Collins, now Wharton), has gotten a good response, too.  I'm going to participate in the Harlem Renaissance edition next month, with a post about Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Women (1899), although, I pray I'll come up with something better than a review for an unknown audience.

Maybe readalongs are the way to go.  But one wants people to be free in their reading - we want many readers and many books in the conversation.  How do we square the circle?  I've come up with a possible solution, one that is just slightly nuts.  Tomorrow, I officially launch the Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Reading Challenge and Caber Toss.  You may not, you are thinking to yourself, give a tinker's dam about Scottish literature.  Me neither!  Nevertheles, peruse the rules, and wish me luck.  We'll see.