Reading Challenge: The Backlist Reader

Just so I remember:

Book need to be on my TBR list somewhere before signing up for this challenge.
Doesn’t metter if I own the book or borrow it from the library. Or buy it during the year as long as it was on my list.
Book publishing date needs to be before 2022 so 2021 downward.

  • Challenge Website: Link
  • Goal: 20
  • Challenge Post: Link

Pinocchio

LauraLeave a Comment on Pinocchio
Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino
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Puffin Books
1883
eBook
262
Italian
Gioia Fiammenghi
May 30, 2023 May 30, 2023
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A timeless classic to be read over and over.

This is the story of Pinocchio, filled with harrowing yet inspiring adventures. Carved by a poor man named Geppetto, Pinocchio is a wooden puppet that comes to life. He soon leaves his maker and commences a journey of misadventures.

Pinocchio has a good heart, but he is disobedient and lazy and often has poor judgment. And when he lies, Pinocchio's nose grows longer! Follow this mischievous puppet as he goes to the "Field of Miracles", where he plants gold coins to try to make his wealth grow. Thrill as he is pursued by assassins. And marvel as he becomes the unwitting star of a circus show and lives a life of ease in the "Land of Boobies," where boys can play all day and never have to go to school. Of course, Pinocchio gets into trouble along the way.

From the villainous Cat and Fox, who try to steal his gold coins, to the gigantic Dogfish, a terrifying sea monster that swallows him, Pinocchio encounters menacing characters who often lead him to trouble. But Pinocchio also befriends a good Fairy who loves him and wants to help him escape his misfortunes. She even promises the puppet that if he learns to be good, to study, and to work hard, he will become a real boy. Can Pinocchio turn his life around? And will he ever see his "papa," Geppetto again?

About the book

The actual book name should be: The adventures of Pinocchio. A Puppet’s story.

Everyone has seen the movie right? (well I hadn’t seen it until this year) so everyone knows what it’s about. The adventures of a puppet who wants to become a child.

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Anna Karénina

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Анна Каренина
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Shandon Classics
1878
eBook
904
Russian
Constance Garnett
April 1, 2023 May 25, 2023
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Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.

Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.

About the book

Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karénina” follows the story of two families and focuses on the love affairs of the characters. The book explores the “double standard” of society at the time and the strict morals women were forced to follow.

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Guarda o muori (Look and Die)

LauraLeave a Comment on Guarda o muori (Look and Die)
Ich sehe was, und das ist tot
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, Book # 3
Giunti
September 20, 2017
ebook
416
German
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May 14, 2023 May 17, 2023
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Monday 28 September, 00.17. The Düsseldorf police receive a strange call: someone has noticed suspicious movements in an abandoned factory in the port area. But when the agents arrive on site, they immediately realise that it is not trivial trafficking: this is a case for Homicide; this is a case for Georg Stadler. Awakened with a start and led to the scene, the commissioner is faced with a disconcerting sight: a pool of blood on the floor, a razor, a shattered mirror, but… no corpse. Just an obscure code drawn on the wall. An indecipherable mystery, except that a few days later, in a hotel room, the body of a woman is found wearing only a pair of briefs, her right hand resting on her chest in an unnatural pose. Her blood everywhere: on the white sheets, on the carpet, on the victim's neck and long hair. Two seemingly unrelated cases, yet Stadler can't free himself from a suspect: both crime scenes seem set up like a macabre film set. The Commissioner just has to resort again to the help of Liz Montario, the brilliant profiler to whom he is bound by a subtle attraction. But this time even Liz will have a hard time, because every progress in the investigation, every new discovery seems to converge on a single suspect: Commissioner Stadler himself.

This book doesn’t have an English version.

About the book

A killer who plays out the most famous Horror films, a new flame for Commissioner Stadler and a colleague resentful of a case involving a policewoman he was in love with. In this new chapter of the Stadler and Montario saga, the commissioner and the psychologist will have to capture a bleak assassin.

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One Way or Another

LauraLeave a Comment on One Way or Another
Todo modo

Carcanet Press
1974
Paperback
103
Italian
S. Rabonvich
April 26, 2023 April 29, 2023
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The novel, set in the seventies, has as its protagonist a famous painter, whose name is never mentioned, who needs a period of peace in solitude. Seeing a sign indicating a hermitage, the Hermitage of Zafer (not better defined geographically), the painter thinks of going there. He then discovers that the hermitage has been transformed into a hotel founded by the ambiguous Don Gaetano and that at certain times of the year it hosts people of high social class (ministers, politicians, bank directors...) for spiritual retreats.

About the book

What’s the argument of this book? I have no idea… really. I know we are in an unmentioned village (certainly in Sicily since Sciascia, if I remember correctly, wrote about Sicily), the protagonist, a painter, driving around sees a building that could be a hotel or a hermitage and that this is managed by priests. There are some strange meetings between the most powerful of the region or of the state, I didn’t understand it, and that there is a live rosary. Well, I managed to write something…so maybe I got the argument…

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Spy x Family 1➡8

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SPY×FAMILY 1-8
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, Book # 1
VIZ Media LLC
July 4, 2019
eBook
220
Japanese
Casey Loe
April 28, 2023 May 9, 2023
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Master spy Twilight is the best at what he does when it comes to going undercover on dangerous missions in the name of a better world. But when he receives the ultimate impossible assignment—get married and have a kid—he may finally be in over his head!

Not one to depend on others, Twilight has his work cut out for him procuring both a wife and a child for his mission to infiltrate an elite private school. What he doesn’t know is that the wife he’s chosen is an assassin and the child he’s adopted is a telepath!

About the book

A spy, an assassin and a little telepathic girl get together for a mission.

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