The Moonstone Giveaway (A Victorian Celebration).

I'm feeling quite a bit better about my progress for the celebration. I FINALLY finished Middlemarch the other night, so now I am flying through some smaller pieces!

I have to tell you that as we enter the second month of the Celebration, I am still blown away by the response. You kids just keep on reading, don't you?

And as long as you continue to read, I'm going to keep giving books away. :) I hope you don't mind!

This week's book is another that I haven't had a chance to read myself, but it is on the reading pile for the event. It is one that if I don't get to during the Celebration, I will definitely make time for it this fall.

Let's hear a little bit about it from Goodreads.com, shall we?

"The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night the priceless stone is stolen again and when Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate the crime, he soon realizes that no one in Rachel’s household is above suspicion. Hailed by T. S. Eliot as ‘the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels’, The Moonstone is a marvellously taut and intricate tale of mystery, in which facts and memory can prove treacherous and not everyone is as they first appear."

Today's giveaway is for a new Barnes and Noble edition of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. To enter, read and comment below:

• This giveaway will be open to any residents of the U.S. or Canada
• You MUST be a participant of A Victorian Celebration to enter.
• You MUST be 13 years or older
• You do not have to follow me or subscribe to qualify
• You MUST leave me your e-mail so that I contact you if you win
• The winner will have 48 hours to respond or I will pick a new winner.
• To enter, comment on this post and answer the following question: If scholars were to find ONE unpublished novel from the Victorian era, who would you want to be the author of it and why?
• The giveaway will be open until 11:59 PM on Friday, July 13, 2012 EST.

Good luck-and I can't wait to read your answers!

Author Focus: William Wilkie Collins (A Victorian Celebration).

 This week's Author Focus in on a Victorian writer I don't have a lot of experience with. In fact, he is one of 2 writers I added to my project list after I had been working on it for a few months. I had never even heard of Wilkie Collins until I started blogging.

In any case, I added two of his works to my project list and have read one to date (The Woman in White). The second, The Moonstone, is on my pile to read for the celebration. I'm hoping I get to it! From my reading of The Woman in White, I've found that I really enjoy Collins' writing style, so that is why I'm going to push you to give him a try.

William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824 in London, England. As a boy, he traveled with his family to France and Italy, which has a huge impact on him. In 1844, he wrote his first novel, Iolani, which was never published in his lifetime. He eventually went to school to study law in honor of his father's wishes, but when his father died in 1847, he began writing on a more regular basis.

In 1851, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. I can't imagine what kind of impact Dickens had on him-Collins was a young, fledgling writer and Dickens was a force to be reckoned with. I am sure that their friendship was something to see! They collaborated on a number of things and Dickens supported Collins' writing by helping it get published in Household Words and All the Year Round-Dickens' journals and magazines. The two also traveled Europe together in the 1850s.

Collins' first story, "A Terribly Strange Bed," was published in Household Words in April 1852 and it was the first of many. He also had stories published in The Leader which was run by George Lewes. Lewes might seem like a familiar name if you read last week's Author Focus, since he was George Eliot's "husband" for a number of years. Isn't that an interesting connection? Something I have found by researching these writers is how interconnected they all were. Makes me wonder what writers weren't in their "clique" and didn't get published because of it!

Keeping up with the scandalous lifestyle as done by Eliot, Collins moved in with Caroline Graves and lived with her as man and wife. The two didn't marry, but carried amidst a lot of scandal (I think the Victorians were quite fond of scandal, don't you?). During this time period (late 1850s into the 1860s), Collins published a whole slew of titles and was gaining more attention from the public.

And, keeping up with scandal, Collins met another woman, Martha Rudd, in 1867 and decided to settle down with her as well! He led a double life-living with Graves while in London, and Rudd in the countryside near London. He even used a different name when he was with Rudd to avoid being found out...but eventually Caroline discovered his affair, left him, and returned two years later. Collins lived the rest of his life taking turns between his two ladies o_O.

Later on in his life, he suffered from gout and used a lot of opium to deal with the pain. He also struggled to maintain his success after the death of Charles Dickens in 1870. Many feel that once he lost his best friend and mentor, his novels lost their passion, which is why many of his later novels aren't as acclaimed as his earlier titles. Many of his novels were deemed "sensation" novels that were meant only for entertainment and shock. They were also the precursors to later detective novels, like Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Another notable aspect of his novels is the focus on his female characters and their plights in Victorian society-something I definitely noticed in my read of The Woman in White.

Some of his more famous works include:

• Antonina (1850)
• The Ostler (1855)
• The Frozen Deep (1857) Co-written with Dickens
• The Woman in White (1860)
• No Name (1862)
• Armadale (1866)
• The Moonstone (1868)
• Poor Miss Finch (1872)
• The Law and the Lady (1875)

Collins died in 1889 at the age of 82. He has left behind a great legacy and certainly was a large part of the surge in literature during the Victorian event. He is definitely a writer I need more exposure to and I can't wait for the opportunity to explore more of his work.






There is no giveaway with today's Author Focus, but I will be giving away one of Collins' novels later on in the celebration-so keep an eye out!

*Information taken from wikipedia.org and wilkiecollins.com*

Changes and Goals.

While I have been away from here, I have been reflecting a lot on the blog, the books I have chosen to read, and my goals for this coming year.

To start with, I simply planned on chronicling my reading of a set list of books that were predetermined in advance. Based on everything I researched, I simply selected 250 of the most recognizable classics. Even as I was making the list I was questioning myself. I wasn’t sure if I should slim down the list to a more “manageable” number (like 100), or if I should cut out all dramas, which slim the list down even more. It was a hard task, and inevitably, some books didn’t make it on the list while others did.

In the time since then, I have come to realize that there are 2 authors NOT on the list that should be. Both of these authors are considered among the “classics” and their work is from the same time period. I feel like it is only fair to myself and the credibility of my list that they be added. However, I didn’t want to add more numbers, so I decided, after a lot of indecision, to remove 5 books from the list.

Choosing which books should be removed was difficult. I honestly just wanted to remove the entire remaining Dickens novels….but I figured that would not be a good thing in regards to my goal of reading the classics (classics and Dickens seem to go hand in hand). I eventually decided to remove some of the few volumes of autobiographical work, as well as a few nonfiction titles. Pretty much everything on my list is fiction or drama, so those few volumes seemed to stick out.

So, here are the new changes.

Titles I will be removing:
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
Utopia by Thomas More
Autobiography by Malcom X

With the exception of Origin of Species, I have read all of these books in college, so I won’t be missing out on too much.

Here are the authors and titles I will be adding in their place:
Wives and Daughters, Cranford, and Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell (I am leaving North and South off the list since I have watched the BBC mini-series more times than I can count and know nothing of her other work).
The Woman in White and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

I am also going to give myself 5 free passes to take a break from this list to read something NOT on the list. I am doing this for a few reasons…but mainly because there are a lot of great concluding novels coming out in the next year or two to series that I have been following. I don’t want to have to avoid reading other book blogs for a time period because of reviews on those books. Also, I will need that opportunity for a break.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading these classics, but they take a lot more brain power than a fantasy novel, or a young adult read. My reading pace has slowed considerably and it is hard not to get discouraged.

I am also going to be networking a little more than I was. I kind of “Gave up” on reaching out to other bloggers in the last month or so (the wedding being the main reason), so I want to really pick that up and discover some other new blogs to read.

As a personal “book” oriented goal, I really want to hit the magical 100 again this year, since I only hit 90 last year (a huge disappointment), so I will be trying to pick up some more things, or trying to switch between a few things if I get into a rut.

Anyway, that seems to be all of my thoughts on the blog and blog details for now. I am updating the book list (which was posted back in August) to reflect my new changes.

Happy reading everyone!