Reading England 2015

 
Reading Challenges are rather fun, but I said this year I wouldn’t join any, because don’t like feeling I’ve ‘got’ to read something, and I’m so disorganised that I end up falling way behind, or dropping out completely. But Reading England 2015 (which you can find over at Behold the Stars) sounds such fun, and I have books in the TBR pile that would fit the brief quite well, and it’s an amazingly flexible challenge, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.  

Basically, the aim is to travel round England from the comfort of your armchair (or wherever else you like to read), pausing on your peregrinations to read a book in each county to read a book set in that area. There’s lots of scope with this challenge, because your chosen volumes can be fiction or non-fiction, and can include poetry, plays, biographies, autobiographies and all sorts of other things, as well as novels. Re-reads are allowed (which is good if you want to immerse yourself in an old favourite), and so are foreign authors – for example, Henry James is American, but The Turn of the Screw is set in Essex.  

According to the rules, the idea is to read a different book for each county, but books can count for more than one county if the setting moves from place to place, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which moves between Kent and Yorkshire

The only other criterion is that all your books should be classics, but the organiser has left it to individual participants to decide what constitutes a classic, which gives you a lot of leeway. However, perhaps we should all be prepared to defend our choices if other bloggers question our judgement! To help, she has compiled an excellent list of titles on her blog, and has also set up a board on Pinterest with suggestions for each county, which will be updated throughout the year. But you don’t have to stick with her recommendations – you can select some or none of them, and are free to make your own choices, and you can plan ahead, or pick books as you read them. 

I must admit I’m bending the rules a bit, because a few of my authors have strong connections with a county, although their books are not set there, and would in any case be difficult to categorise geographically, so I hope that is OK. And I’ve altered the list of the counties. I’m sorry about this, and I don’t want to offend anyone, especially the organiser, who has worked so hard on this challenge, but I’m using the 39 regions generally regarded (in the UK at any rate)  as being the old, traditional counties. It means I’ve ignored recently created places like Cumbria, and reinstated disbanded ones such as Cumberland, Huntingdonshire and Middlesex. I haven’t included London because technically it was never a historic county. To be honest, there have been so many boundary changes over the centuries that it is almost impossible to draw up a definitive list of counties.

There are four levels, and I opted for Level Three, because when I signed up this seemed achievable, but now we’re almost halfway through the year I’m not so sure! The levels are:  Level One, 1-3 counties; Level Two, 4-6 counties; Level Three, 7-12 counties; Level Four, 12+ counties.

I started off all enthusiastically back in February with Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, by Mrs CW Earle, for Surrey, then kind of forgot about it and got side-tracked by other reading.  Now I'm panicking, so I decided a little organisation is called for. I’ve created a 'Master Plan', with a chart to keep track of where I am,  and links to published posts - just click on the link and it should take you to the right post! And I’m trying to put together my own list, though entries may be replaced by other titles as I go along. If anyone has any suggestions about books connected to specific counties I would love to know, and would be grateful if you leave a comment.


COUNTY
BOOK
AUTHOR
Bedfordshire
 
 
Berkshire
 
 
Buckinghamshire
 
 
Cambridgeshire
 
 
Cheshire
 
 
Cornwall
 
 
Cumberland
 
 
Derbyshire
 
 
Devon
Lorna Doone
RD Blackmore
Dorset
Moonfleet 
J Meade Faulkner
Durham
History of the English Church and People
The Venerable Bede
Essex
 
 
Gloucestershire
 
 
Hampshire
 
 
Herefordshire 
 
 
Hertfordshire
 
 
Huntingdonshire
 
 
Kent
 
 
Lancashire
 
 
Leicestershire
 
 
Lincolnshire
 
 
Middlesex
 
 
Norfolk
 
 
Northamptonshire
 
 
Northumberland
 
 
Nottinghamshire
 
 
Oxfordshire
 
 
Rutland
 
 
Shropshire
 
 
Somerset
 
 
Staffordshire
 
Samuel Johnson
Suffolk
 
 
Surrey
Mrs CW Earle
Sussex
Puck of Pook’s Hill
Rudyard   Kipling
Warwickshire
Scenes of Clerical Life
George Eliot
Westmorland
 
 
Wiltshire
 
 
Worcestershire
 
 
Yorkshire
 Winifred Holtby

 

 

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