Challenge Confessions

O.K. it's confession time. I have been an abject failure at meeting my reading challenges for 2014.

A Year in Reading started out well; January, February and March have ticks beside them. But then things went to pieces. By April I was trying to make Mary Poppins do double duty - as a book that has been made into a movie (already checked off in March) and a re-read from childhood. Cheating on my reading challenges - that's what it came to.

There were some books I did read, but not in the month assigned to them:

• A book from another country - Sydney by Delia Falconer. (I think Australia counts as another country).

• A selection from a local book club - We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. (My book club is local).

• An award winner - Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (actually it's only been nominated for the Costa so far, but if there is any justice in the world it will win every literary prize going in 2015.) Cheating again - it's a slippery slope.

Reading Bingo was marginally better, but again with the cheating.

• A book with more than 500 pages - All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard

• A forgotten classic - South Riding by Winifred Holtby

• A book published this year - Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now by Marom Malka

• A book written by someone under 30 - The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

• A book with non-human characters - Lost Cat by Jason

• A book of non-fiction - The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald

• A book you heard about online - Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty

• A book with a blue cover - Middlemarch by George Eliot. Double cheat. Also June A Year in Reading - read that classic you have never read.

• A book from another continent - We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. Double cheat - October A Year in Reading - read a selection from a local book club.

• A book that is more than ten years old - Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Double cheat - January A Year in Reading - a book that was published in the year you were born.

• A book that became a movie - Mary Poppins. Actually a triple cheat. There are no depths to which I will not stoop.

What challenges will I fail in 2015 I wonder? Should I make not reading Ulysses an annual non-event?