The aim of the Chunkster Challenge was to read 4 books over 450 pages long from 7 January to 20 December.  

I read one of the books that I initially chose:

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusack (584 pages) which I did read. See here.

But I didn’t manage the other three, although I still intend to read them sometime:

• The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (598 pages)
• The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower (575 pages)
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (529 pages) 

Instead I read:

• Winter In Madrid, C J Sansom (530 pages) See here.
• Revelation by C J Sansom (546 pages) See here
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton (645 pages) See here
• The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates See here

It’s hard to decide which of these I enjoyed the most as they’re all so different, but the one that is most memorable is The Gravedigger’s Daughter; Joyce Carol Oates has been a favourite for a long time and this book is one of the best. C J Sansom has to be one of my favourite authors, with two books by him in the challenge but I didn’t think that The Forgotten Garden lived up to Kate Morton’s previous book The House at Riverton. I had hoped to finish the longest book I’ve ever read but I still have 174 pages left of Les Misérables to read, and that’s without the appendices – on The Convent and Argot!

The biggest drawbacks with reading chunksters are of course their weight and size. Les Mis is the worst to read in bed as not only is it such a fat, heavy book, but it is printed in a very small font. The best things about chunksters are that they are books that you can really get your teeth into and because they are so long the characters and plots are really well defined and the books almost become part of my life!