The Great Reading Competition
Introduction
Reviews
| List of Titles
| List of Authors
| Categories
| Overall Ranking
The Modern Library Top 100
The Great Reading Competition
Number of Books Reviewed So Far: 234
| Note: When searching, enter the full title of the book, a category name as it appears on this site, or the author's name in the format "last, first". | |
| Overall Scoreboard | |||
| WILL | 3 | DAVE | 2 |
Autumn, 2009: The Epic
The current leg of the Great Reading Competition is the largest and most epic to date. The subject: The Epic. We'll be reading national epics, epic poetry, quasi-epics, and possibly even romances that people sometimes refer to as epics. Pretty much the only stipulation is that Will and I agree it should count.
This time the competition will run from September 1st, 2009 to September 1st, 2010. Will should have more than enough time to compete, though Dave, still licking his wounds from the last leg of the competition, is determined to defeat his bitter rival.
Final Scoreboard
The Autumn, 2009 competition has been completed. The final scoreboard is posted below:
| WILL | DAVE | |||||||
| # | Title/Author | Date Read | Pages | # | Title/Author | Date Read | Pages | |
| 1 | The Artfulness of M'fa Jigi by Nyamoton Diarra | 1/20 | 68 | 1 | Forest of a Thousand Daemons by D.O. Fagunwa | 9/3 | 140 | |
| 2 | The Epic of Askia Mohammed by Nouhou Malio | 2/3 | 80 | 2 | The Divine Comedy: Paradise by Dante Alighieri | 10/12 | 155 | |
| 3 | Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism, Vol. I by Muhammad Husain Jah | 3/2 | 460 | 3 | The Theogony by Hesiod | 11/7 | 144 | |
| 4 | Somono Bala of the Upper Niger by Laminigbé Bayo | 5/30 | 38 | 4 | The Song of Roland by Anonymous | 7/27 | 224 | |
| 5 | The Lusíads by Luis Vaz de Camões | 6/27 | 228 | 5 | Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto | 8/31 | 630 | |
| 6 | Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory | 7/4 | 938 | 6 | — | — | — | |
| 7 | The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis | 7/24 | 776 | 7 | — | — | — | |
| 8 | Rama the Steadfast by Anonymous | 7/28 | 361 | 8 | — | — | — | |
| Total: | 2,949 | Total: | 1,293 | |||||
| Average Book Length: | 369 | Average Book Length: | 259 | |||||
* Note: It was decided mutually that books of non-epic poetry would count for half the number of their total pages, seeing as the text of many poems do not take up even half of a full page.
Results
The winner of the fourth leg of the Great Reading Competition (Autumn, 2009: The Epic), and the coveted Golden Egret, is: WILL. Congratulations to Will, who bludgeoned his opponent into submission with tome after weighty tome. Well done!
Note: Though this wasn't the least competitive competition, at times it sure felt like it. Here's a recap of some of the action:
- David triumphantly reclaimed some lost honor by striking First Blood for an unprecedented third time.
- Will claimed both the titles of Tome Swallower and Longfellow by reading the most books during this leg of the competition, and reading the longest book: Le Morte d'Arthur.
- It's worth noting that Will had an astounding seven book completion streak going during this competition. He still wasn't able to break his personal record (ten books [also the overall record]), but it's quite a feat, nevertheless.
- David, who's never short on excuses in a loss, wishes to point out that he spent the better part of this competition creating the Dothraki language for HBO's upcoming fantasy series Game of Thrones. That, plus translation work for the series, took up a considerable amount of his free time.
- And, to add to that, David also reread George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which totaled more than 2,000
pages— none which counted for the competition. - But, even so, as the competition drew to a close, Will was on the cusp of finishing Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which would have added another 1,000 pages to his total.
Though badly beaten, David avows that this defeat was not as sour as the previous, which seemed, right until the very end, like a sure victory. Up next, Dave and Will will revisit the previous four competitions, facing each other in a challenge as yet unseen in the storied history of the Great Reading Competition: The First Redux!
Previous Competition (German) | Next Competition (Pentad I Redux)
Current Competition
Great Reading Competition Main Page