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	Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden	Mrs CW Earle
Sussex	Puck of Pook’s Hill	Rudyard   Kipling
Warwickshire	Scenes of Clerical Life	George Eliot
Westmorland
Wiltshire
Worcestershire
Yorkshire	The Land of Green Ginger	Winifred Holtby