Yay! The Deal Me In Challenge is here again! Many thanks to Jay at Bibliophilopolis for hosting this challenge which has helped me to read many more Short Stories, Essays, Poetry and Children’s Books than I ever would have without it.
The rules are simple. Choose short stories to correspond to each card in a deck of cards. Then draw one card each week and read the story that corresponds.
What do you need for this challenge?
- Access to at least fifty-two short stories (or other …. see my altered challenge below)
- A deck of cards
- An average of perhaps as little as just thirty minutes of reading time each week
Each year, I’ve altered the challenge giving each suit a category to my personal tastes:
- Clubs – Short Stories
- Spades – Essays
- Diamonds – Poetry
- Hearts – Children’s Stories
Here is my list of titles for 2019:
Deal Me In Challenge 2019
Clubs – Short Stories
A – Signs and Symbols – Vladimir Nabakov
2 – Cabbages and Kings – O’Henry
3 – Love – Leo Tolstoy
4 – The Queen of Spades – Alexander Pushkin
5 – The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Gilman
6 – The Story of A Farm Girl – Guy Maupassant
7 – The Birds – Anton Chekhov
8 – The Hammer of God (Father Brown) – G.K. Chesterton
9 – The Diary of a Madman – Guy Maupassant
10 – Doubtful Happiness – Guy Maupassant
J – The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane – G.K. Chesterton
Q – The Honest Thief – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
K – The Mark on the Wall – Virginia Woolf
Spades – Essays
A – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – G.K. Chesterton
2 – On A Faithful Friend – Virginia Woolf
3 – A Note on Jane Austen – C.S. Lewis
4 – In Defence of Literacy – Wendell Berry
5 – The Tyranny of Bad Journalism – G.K. Chesterton
6 – The Hotel of a Total Stranger – E.B. White
7 – Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community – Wendell Berry
8 – Sense – C.S. Lewis
9 – An Apology for Idlers – Robert Louis Stevenson
10 – Reflections on Gandhi – George Orwell
J – The End of the World – G.K. Chesterton
Q – Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson
K – On Going A Journey – William Hazlitt
Diamonds – Poetry
A – Phoenix and the Turtle – William Shakespeare
2 – From Milton [Jerusalem] – William Blake
3 – Ode to the West Wind – Percy Bysshe Shelley
4 – A Sea Dirge – Lewis Carroll
5 – To A Mouse – Robert Burns
6 – Gesang Der Geister Über Den Wassern – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
7 – Ode III – Fray Luis de León
8 – Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas
9 – It Is A Beauteous Evening – William Wordsworth
10 – Love Sonnet XIII – Pablo Neruda
J – The Mad Gardener’s Song – Lewis Carroll
Q – Resolution and Independence – William Wordsworth
K – Sonnet XXIII – Garcilaso de la Vega
Hearts – Children’s Stories
A – City of the Golden House – Madeleine Polland
2 – Sprig of Broom – Barbara Willard
3 – Teddy’s Button – Amy Lefeuvre
4 – Just David – Eleanor H. Porter
5 – Beyond the Desert Gate – Mary Ray
6 – A Triumph for Flavius – Caroline Dale Snedecker
7 – The Story of the Treasure Seekers – E. Nesbit
8 – Detectives in Togas – Henry Winterfeld
9 – Shadow Hawk – Andre Norton
10 – The Spartan – Caroline Dale Snedecker
J – Three Greek Children – Alfred J. Church
Q – Red Sails to Capri – Ann Weil
K – The Bronze Bow – Elizabeth George Speare
Here are my other Deal Me In Challenges for previous years:
- Deal Me In Challenge 2018
- Deal Me In Challenge 2017
- Deal Me In Challenge 2016
- Deal Me In Challenge 2015
I can’t wait to get started for this coming year! If you want to join us, please sign up here!
Hooray! Glad you’re joining in again. I’ll advise our merchandise team to get that 5-year pin sent out to you soon 😉
Lol! Perhaps you can get them to send a kick-in-the-pants too, to get me going. I need to tally my count over 5 years and see if I’ve even reached 52. In any case, thanks for thinking of this wonderful challenge and all the best to you in the new year!
Thank you and same to you! I read my stories for 2018, but my blogging about them has slowed to a trickle this year. It’s one of my resolutions in the new year to get back on track as well. We’ll see how that goes…
good luck with the Phoenix and the Turtle… i found that to be a conundrum wrapped in an enigma…
Uh oh! You know who’ll be coming to for help when I read it …. 😉
Poetry schmoetry.
I would definitely fail that suit…
Oh, come on, Bookstooge. Poetry is so important. I sense a challenge in the works for you for 2019! 🙂 Or maybe not ….. 🙁 Here is a great post that helped me appreciate poetry’s power: http://journey-and-destination.blogspot.com/2015/02/poetry-as-means-of-intellectual-culture.html?showComment=1424885977676 I struggle reading it but I do believe in its importance.
I intellectually accept that some people are really moved by poetry. I just don’t don’t happen to be one of them. I get more edification from reading a soup can label than I do poetry.
I’ve tried enough times to read poetry to realize that it isn’t worth the struggle to me.
And honestly, the older I get, the less I like “challenges” in my hobby. Whatever label they get called, they become weights around my neck instead of something to spur me on. Now that I’ve got my reading rotation down to science, I’ve no need either 🙂
It’s so cool that you do this every year. I would really like to do it too, but I have too much already for 2019, given what my work schedule will be…and coming up with 52 short things to read is such a lot!
I really wish you’d do it one year. I’d love to see what you’d come up with.
Maybe in 2020!
That is one impressive list!! I may just follow you around on all your readings of Chesterton and Lewis! Just saying!!
That would be wonderful to have my side-kick back but knowing how busy you are I won’t hold you to it. But I’ll perhaps remind you … 😉
Please do!!
I might join this, but I have not figured out my list yet.
I loved Ode to the West Wind!
Oh, I do hope you join! You’re so well-read, your choices will be fascinating!
And I’m so glad I picked a good one out of thin air. 🙂
I’m impressed that you’ve attempted this challenge so often – I’ve found that it’s more than I can do, at least consistently. Or maybe it’s too restricting to me! 🙂 Good luck and I hope you enjoy all your selections.
Thanks, Amanda! It forces me to read excellent writing that is out of my comfort zone. So in that way it’s been enormously beneficial. Even if I only get through 20% of it!