Author: Kate Gardner

I live in Bristol and I like to read books and share what I thought about them here. I read mostly general or literary fiction, with pretty much every genre making an appearance from time to time. I love to receive comments, whether you've read the same books or not!

One of them would die first

birthday-storiesBirthday Stories
selected by Haruki Murakami
Japanese text translated by Jay Rubin

When rearranging my TBR on my new shelves just before my birthday, I spotted this title that seemed like it would be pretty appropriate birthday reading. Even more appropriately, today is the birthday of the book’s editor, Haruki Murakami (happy 67th birthday Haruki!). This slim collection of 13 short stories is not the most cheerful but it provides a good introduction to a variety of authors.

The book started life as a collection of works in English translated into Japanese by Murakami, with an added short story of his own that he wrote specially. For this English edition he has written an introduction about the curation process and perhaps reading this first gave me a slightly negative start. First, Murakami freely admits that he is not a big birthday person himself and that the stories he found tend to be dark and unhappy. Second, he struggled to find enough stories and ended up asking friends, editors and agents for ideas, which does not suggest a rich treasure trove from which to curate a “best of”. But it’s a nice idea and there were a couple of authors here – David Foster Wallace and Claire Keegan – who I’d been meaning to give a try, so this seemed like a good route.

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Sunday Salon: Getting the New Year going

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The Sunday SalonIt’s been mostly a good start to 2016 for me. I got through the first week back at work with not only no major mishaps but also no major stresses, which is nice. I’ve got another year older but don’t feel it, which is also good. I’ve just had a lovely weekend away with friends. The only negative is my apparent lack of attention span to any one book. It’s not that I’m not reading, I just seem to have picked a couple of giants to start the year with, and then I got disheartened that I wouldn’t finish a book for several weeks, so I started yet another book. I did finish that one, and I’ll try to review it this week as it has a certain timeliness factor.

I did gain a few books for my birthday, which is inevitable and I am not at all upset about it, but it’s probably for the best that it’s a much smaller pile than I got for Christmas!

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New Year TBR clearout

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New bookcase - ready and waiting.
New bookcase – ready and waiting.

Happy New Year! For 2016 I have set my Goodreads challenge to 80 books (I don’t really use it as a target so much as a counter to check against my spreadsheet. Last year I was somehow 6 books out, so I either read 85 books or 91. Or maybe a number inbetween!). I have already made a good start on my primary aim to reduce my TBR by giving it a good old clearout.

For my birthday my Dad bought me a set of shelves for the master bedroom, which gave me the perfect opportunity to collect my unread books from the spare room and give them a thorough sorting before re-shelving them in their new home.

I thought I would struggle to discard any of my books so I gave myself the rule that I would remove anything I’ve had for more than 10 years. I’m not sure if I quite stuck to that but I actually found it fairly easy to set aside no less than 35 books! These are mostly older classics, with a handful of freebies and other books I’ve tried once and decided not to give a second chance to.

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Another year, another stats post

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christmas-tree-2015Happy New Year’s Eve! I have about an hour before I go out for party party fun times (board games and chilli) to rattle through my annual stats. Well, I find them interesting, even if no-one else does!

In 2015 I read 91 books according to Goodreads, 85 according to my spreadsheet (I think I got a bit lax about recording comics at one point). Which means these stats aren’t quite accurate, but close enough. 37 books were by women and 5 were by a man and a woman, so that’s a pretty even split. 10 were works in translation and 16 were by authors from a country other than the US and UK. Only 8 were classics from my Classics Club list, so I have some catching up to do there.

I’ve just spent a lovely day buying and building a new bookcase with my Dad and his girlfriend, and loading it up with my TBR. I haven’t yet picked my first book of 2016, but I think I have weeded out enough of the old that I am excited by every single book waiting to be read, which is after all how it should be. I’ll post about my TBR cleanse in the new year, hopefully with added photos!

I hope you have a great New Year’s Eve and wish you all the best for 2016.

December reading round-up

Woman Reading by George Henry Boughton, c. 1900
Woman Reading by George Henry Boughton, c. 1900

This past week I seem to have started and abandoned at least four different books, which doesn’t look good for my Goodreads stats, but I have read a lot of other great stuff this month, including finally picking up a New Yorker summer fiction special that a friend loaned me more than a year ago. Yay for holidays!

The Christmas holiday has so far been more about watching films than reading books. I’ve watched Inside Out (brilliant), Kingsman: the Secret Service (fun but silly, better than the comic book), Admission (better than reviews suggested but not Tina Fey’s best work), Mermaids (I love anything with Christina Ricci), My Sister’s Keeper (not as good as the book) and Happy Christmas (Anna Kendrick is great in everything she does, even, or perhaps especially, odd indie films made for about ten pence) and I’m only halfway through my time off!

Tomorrow I’ll do a summary of the year (though I’ve already revealed my top five books) but for now here’s how my December went. Happy holidays!

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The existence of the jinn posed problems

two-years-eight-months-28-nightsTwo Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights
by Salman Rushdie

This has everything you might expect in a Rushdie novel: gods, religion, satire, myth, history, sarcasm and wordplay. But it is much more readable than the other novels of his that I have tackled (The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children, Shalimar the Clown, The Ground Beneath Her Feet). The tone is lighter, more comic, even though the topics are just as weighty.

The story begins in 12th century Spain, with exiled philosopher Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes (who existed in real life and is the source of Rushdie’s family name). He falls in love with Dunia, who is secretly a jinnia (female jinn). She bears him dozens of children but he refuses to marry her and leaves her when his exile is lifted.

Skip 800 years and one of the Duniazát, as Rushd and Dunia’s descendents are called, has begun to float. Mr Geronimo is a gardener in New York City, just one of many victims of the “time of strangenesses” – the result of a war between the Jinn leaking into the human world. The normal rules of physics no longer apply.

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Sunday Salon: Merry Christmas!

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The Sunday SalonI hope you are all having wonderful Christmases/end-of-year breaks. It’s still unseasonably warm and our time with family was brief, but it’s been lovely. We had a big family party at my Grandad’s yesterday for the first time in years and it was just like the Boxing Days of my childhood – completely wonderful.

Did you get any good presents for Christmas? I got the usual mix of DVDs, CDs, chocolate and random awesomeness, such as a diary stuffed with tickets for awesome events throughout 2016 (Tim’s pretty great at gift-giving). And of course, as usual, I got lots of books. I love getting new books, always.

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Who am I to judge someone else’s holy site?

how to understand israelHow to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
by Sarah Glidden

Despite the grandiose title, this is the account of a small, albeit important, step in one person’s attempt to understand the complex situation surrounding Israel and Palestine. Told in comic-book style, it combines journalism and memoir to great effect.

Sarah Glidden is a “cultural Jew”. Raised in America by largely non-religious parents, her own politics being liberal and left-leaning, she has always tended to side against Israel, feeling it to be the political “bad guy”. A combination of a wish to understand, a hope to be proven right and the promise of a free holiday encourage her to sign up for a Birthright Tour. These trips, funded by the Israeli government and private sponsors, are open to Jews from around the world to show them the country that they can choose to move to if they so wish.

Sarah travels with her friend Melissa, another cultural Jew who is more earnest than Sarah in her attempts to learn about Israel without pre-judgement. Melissa’s upbringing was even more secular than Sarah’s, so Judaism itself is strange to her, but she is eager to learn and often frustrated by Sarah’s one-track mind: to every experience, every talk, Sarah asks “but what about the Arabs?”.

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Sunday Salon: A whole new year

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The Sunday SalonIt’s the time of year for reflecting on things done or not done and planning how to do the next year…better, somehow. I haven’t quite started my Christmas holiday yet but work is very much wound down and really it’s all about this Friday. (Which I am not at all ready for. I haven’t got the last few presents, let alone wrapped and labelled them all. Gonna be a busy Christmas Eve!) But I love Christmas – all that tinsel and the sparkling lights and the hearty foods – even if the weird broken weather is making it feel more like May outside.

I’ll save my end-of-year reading stats for the actual end of the year but this is as good a time as any to reflect on my top books read in 2015, which were:

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Death stats in Shakespeare and other bookish fun

I saw this chart in a few places today and just had to blog about it. As Improbable Research explains, this was put together as research for a new play, The Complete Deaths, produced by Spymonkey, in which all 74 deaths in Shakespeare are re-enacted. I’m envisioning something like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who are always hilarious, so I’m pretty sure I want to see this play. But I’m also thoroughly enjoying the above chart and trying to remember which plays which deaths belong to! Who doesn’t love the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” from The Winter’s Tale?

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