Category: Blog

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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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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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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Sunday Salon: New books versus old

The Sunday SalonI have been trying fairly hard not to acquire new books as my TBR persists in being more than 130 books. But the fact that its size persists goes to show that I’m not succeeding very well in my aim! It possibly doesn’t help that I subscribe to two publishers and I still borrow books from family and friends.

This week I gained three new books. Martin John by Anakana Schofield is the first book in my 2016 subscription to And Other Stories. 100 Poems by Jen Campbell was a reward for supporting Jen in a charity fundraiser. The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst is the first book in my 2016 subscription to Peirene Press. They all look awesome and I can’t wait to read them.

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November reading round-up

Girl Reading by Emil Brack (1860-1905)
Girl Reading by Emil Brack (1860-1905)

So here we are, one month left of 2015. One last chance to assess how I’m doing against my reading goals for the year so I can give it one last push. Better than I am on my November goals. Once again, NaNoWriMo was a wash. I started well, but stuff came up and I think my total word count ended up around 18,000. Which is better than 0, I guess.

My annual goals are looking better. Nine books in translation so far. I think if I read one more and make that a round 10, I’ll be happy with that. For Classics Club I’ve read eight, which puts me slightly behind, but I have four more years to play catch-up there!

November wasn’t the greatest month. Roll on December. Although that said, I am so far from ready for Christmas. I tried preparing by reading a collection of Christmas stories by David Sedaris but it didn’t put me in the mood. Guess I’ll have to try the good old covering-the-house-in-Christmas-decorations method. That usually works. I really like fairy lights.

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Sunday Salon: Autumn turns to winter

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The Sunday SalonI was planning to write a post about how much I love November. Which I do. Growing up, Halloween was never much of a thing for me and my family but Bonfire Night was. It marked the start of winter in celebratory style. I remember the crisp cold and woolly hats that accompanied firework displays with great affection. And even though this year it hasn’t got that cold just yet, it’s definitely coming. The trees are bare, the rain is freezing, the big winter coats are out and I love it all.

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Sanctum

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Lewis Creaven and Patrick Farrell

Sanctum is a project created by installation artist Theaster Gates. He has built a wooden structure inside the bombed out shell of Temple Church in Bristol, and in this shelter from the miserable November weather, for 24 days there is a constant 24-hour-a-day stream of live performances, largely music and poetry. It’s free to drop in at any time.

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October reading round-up

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reading

Happy November, folks! Suddenly life is full of Christmas plans and all the people we promised to catch up with before the end of the year. And yet through summer I always think October and November will be quiet. One day I’ll learn!

We started the month on holiday in Yorkshire, which was lovely and relaxing and already feels like a thousand years ago. I went to see The Crucible at Bristol Old Vic, a “theatrical experience” called The Stick House in the Bristol Temple Meads tunnels (a creepy gothic fairy-tale-type story that wouldn’t be out of place in an Angela Carter novel), Salman Rushdie talking about his new book and Bill Bailey on his latest comedy tour. The large collection of tickets for stuff on the fridge is finally all gone now and I’m itching to book something in!

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Gilmore Girls returns!

gilmore-girlsThe news that Netflix is going to revive Gilmore Girls with a series of four feature-length episodes written by original creator and producer Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino has got me pretty excited to say the least. While, like everyone else I am curious to see who will be back and what developments will have happened in their lives in the last 8/9 years (and whether they map what I imagined for the characters), I am also looking forward to a general revival of interest in the original TV show, so that my fandom doesn’t seem quite so out of date!

I am unapologetically a Gilmore Girls fan. I don’t own any merchandise but I recorded every episode off the telly and have watched them all…well, a lot. Now this may seem a decidedly unbookish topic for a book blog (though it’s my blog and I’ll write about whatever I want to) but Gilmore Girls might be the most bookish fictional TV there ever was. In fact, it’s so bookish that there are countless reading lists out there based on it, including my own version of the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge in which I have attempted to list every book read in the show by Lorelei or Rory. And let’s not forget that the show’s star Lauren Graham is a bona fide author (of a book that has been languishing on my wishlist since it was announced).

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