The Novella Challenge

The reason behind the Novella Challenge:

I’m an avid reader (I don’t have time to be voracious, so avid will have to do) and in the beginning of 2008 I had two novellas that I would have put off if I hadn’t made myself read them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read the books, they were just so small, and I gravitate towards the chunksters.

So I said to myself one day, “Self, why don’t you host a challenge for novellas! Ew, wait…there’s already a short story challenge, but I think novellas and short stories are different. I better look that up.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about novellas:

A novella is a narrative work of prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. While there is some disagreement of what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000….Occasionally, longer works are referred to as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella‒novel threshold.

Sweet! I can host a challenge!

I’ve copied Wikipedia’s list of novellas:

• A River Runs Through It (1976) Norman Maclean
• Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell
• Anthem (1938) Ayn Rand
• The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) Carson McCullers
• The Bear (1941) William Faulkner
• The Beast in the Jungle (1903) Henry James
• The Alienist (1882) Machado de Assis
• The Bicentennial Man (1976) Isaac Asimov
• Billy Budd (18xx- first published in 1924) Herman Melville
• The Boy Who Heard Music (2005/6) Pete Townshend
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) Truman Capote
• Cascade Point (1983) Timothy Zahn
• A Christmas Carol (1843) Charles Dickens
• Daisy Miller (1878) Henry James
• The Dead (1914) James Joyce — a short story/novella that concludes Dubliners
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) Leo Tolstoy
• Debt of Bones (2001) Terry Goodkind
• Everyman (2006) Philip Roth
• Heart of Darkness (1902) Joseph Conrad
• The Golden Pot (1814)
• The House on Mango Street (1984) Sandra Cisneros
• Legends of the Fall (1977) Jim Harrison
• The Lifted Veil (1859) George Eliot
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Stephen Crane
• The Metamorphosis (1915) Franz Kafka
• Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) Nathanael West
• Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf
• Of Mice and Men (1937) John Steinbeck
• No One Writes to the Colonel Gabriel García Márquez
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
• Oroonoko (1688) Aphra Behn
• Plum Lovin’ Janet Evanovich
• The Pearl (1945) John Steinbeck
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) Muriel Spark
• Senso (1874) Camillo Boito
• Shopgirl (2001) Steve Martin
• Song of the Trees Mildred D. Taylor
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus
• The Turn of the Screw (1898) Henry James
• The War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells
• The Woman Who Waited (2006) Andrei Makine
• Visions of Sugar Plums Janet Evanovich
• Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (1986) Douglas Adams
• Death in Venice (1913) Thomas Mann
• Mario and the Magician (1930) Thomas Mann
• Klein and Wagner (1920) Hermann Hesse
• Pedro Paramo (1955) Juan Rulfo
• Seize the Day (1956) Saul Bellow
• Stardust Neil Gaiman
• I Am Legend (1954) Richard Matheson

And here’s some I know of:

• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• Stephen King’s The Green Mile (when it first came out it was 6 or 7 novellas)
• The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
• The Lost Boy by Thomas Wolfe
• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Before I continue, the other part about why I was so excited about hosting a novella challenge is because I thought it was something that anyone could participate in. Work full-time? No problem! Mom with kids? No problem! Going to school and working? No problem! Working full-time, working a second job, and planning a wedding? No problem! The chunkster challenge is something that is quickly becoming near and dear to my heart. The bigger the book, the better, and what better than a challenge to keep me motivated? But moms with kids? Oy, committing to reading chunksters might not be something they can do, but committing to read a lil ol’ novella is totally doable. Says the working-full-time-working-a-second-job-planning-a-wedding girl.

So please! Go ahead and sign up! The rules are easy:

1. Read six novellas between April 2008 and September 2008.
2. The novella needs to be between 100 and 250 pages (because who has time to count the words in a book, Mr. Wikipedia?). Some leeway is definitely allowed (some of The Green Mile novellas by Stephen King are 96 pages, and I would hate to exclude those. I’m a lover not a hater.).
3. Sign up! There will be prizes (yes to be determined). I’m a competitive and loves-to-win-stuff kinda gal, so I couldn’t resist offering prizes.
4. Please review or let people know what you’ve read. You can do that on your own blog (linking back to here) or you can post a comment here or you can post the review here. Whatever.
5. Need not have your own blog to play. Again, I’m a lover not a hater.

Coupla other things:

• I don’t have a graphic for this challenge!
• This is my first hosting of a challenge, so please be gentle.
• Seriously, let us know what you’re reading. I believe there’s a ton of untapped novellas out there just waiting for discovery.

Umm…I think that’s it. I’m really nervous and really excited, all at the same time!