Yesterday, I finished The Brothers Karamazov, and, with that last page, completed  the Classics Club challenge.   I began the challenge in September 2015, and pecked away until late  2018, when I realized I had two years left and over half the stack still to tackle. Just for my own amusement, I  took a look at how my reading was dispersed, more or less*:

As you can see, I started making a concerted and deliberate effort only at the end of 2018, although this was interrupted by Red Dead Redemption 2 in late March and April of last year.  (That huge dive in Q2 2019? Allllllll Arthur Morgan’s fault.)  By way of wrapping up, here are a few highlights:

1. Favorite from the list:
   The Gulag Archipelago
2.  The Unfavorite:   The Sun Also Rises. I figured I would take to Hemingway, but the appeal of this one was lost entirely on me.
3. Books I would drop from the list were I do it  again:
   Most of the nonfiction (surprisingly, given my usual reading is 70% nonfiction).
4. Books that surprised me:
   The Gulag Archipelago (amazing),  The Gallic Wars (…not exciting), The Jungle  (more enjoyable than I’d anticipated)
5. Book I started and stopped the most times before I finished:
   Catch-22.  I’d tried the book three times before, once in high school and twice during the CC period.
6.  Book I’m proudest to have finished:  War and Peace, Bragging rights for life!
7. First and last read:  Emma (Dec 2015),   The Brothers Karamazov (Sept 2020).
8. Oldest and youngest (The Epic of Gilgamesh,  ~2000 BC;  2001:  A Space Odyssey,  A.D. 1968)
9.  Authors introduced to me from this series whom I’ll be reading more of:   Willa Cather (O Pioneers!),   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago),  and Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace).
10. Fastest and slowest reads:   The Picture of Dorian Gray (<2 days);  War and Peace (~ five weeks). Brothers K wasn’t too far behind War and Peace, though.

Will the Classics Club return?  Absolutely;  I’ve been keeping a word file with ideas, and will start the challenge again on January 1st, 2021, which is when the list is scheduled to go live.  So far I only have about twenty possibilies, but I’m shopping and adding.

*I stay more or less because I created it in late ’19, in anticipation of finishing Brothers K in December. For that graph to have remained accurate, I would have needed to add an extremely long tail to account for my farting around throughout all of 2020.