Category: Blog

January reading round-up

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A Girl Reading
A Girl Reading by Berndt Abraham Godenhjelm (1830s).

January was so busy I didn’t even find time to write this post! I had a slow start reading-wise, possibly not helped by my new knitting hobby, which gives me an excuse to watch telly instead of reading, as I am still “being useful”. I’ve settled into a better balance now so hopefully February’s round-up will look a bit healthier. (I also have a few days off work coming up, which should help with finding time to read.)

Lack of reading certainly didn’t translate into low-quality reading, as this month I awarded my first five-star rating on Goodreads since last August, to The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd. I really do recommend this book to anyone and everyone; it ticked all the boxes for me. (Not that I’m a fan of star ratings, I find them a bit of a crude measure and we all have different levels of generosity/harshness, but they can be useful as a rough idea of how I felt about a book immediately on completing it.)

So what did I read this month overall?

Books
The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin (review here)
Bullet Park by John Cheaver (review here)
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd (review here)
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (review here)


Short stories
“Victory” by Yu Hua (New Yorker magazine, Aug 26, 2013)
“The veldt” by Ray Bradbury (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The catbird” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)
“I love Girl” by Simon Rich (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Then we lived together in the belly of a whale, some nights were perfect” by Mara Sternberg (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Jubilation, Florida” by N M Kelby (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Homegirls on St Nicholas Avenue” by Sonia Sanchez (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Strike and fade” by Henry Dumas (Selected Shorts podcast)
“Fenstad’s mother” by Charles Baxter (Selected Shorts podcast)

How has your reading month been? What was your last outstanding read?

Sunday Salon: New year, new start?

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The Sunday Salon

The new year is really just an arbitrary point in time, but I think a lot of us see it as an opportunity for change. That might be making resolutions, beginning new projects or routines, or just making promises to ourselves to be “better” in some way this year. I pretty much never make resolutions, though I do have annual reading goals, but I do tend to see the new year as a time to start afresh on good habits.

Well, we might only be 12 days in, but so far the signs aren’t good for my habits this year. I could blame it on the nasty cough/cold I’ve had or the fact I’ve not yet settled back into a routine after the Christmas holiday, but I’m still not happy with how my year has started. I have so far finished one book. I have done zero exercise. The to do list is longer than ever. And I’ve not been eating especially healthily. Hmm.

Just practising

On the plus side, since my mother-in-law taught me to knit in December I’ve been practising a little every day and I’m really pleased with my progress. I might even treat myself to a second ball of wool soon! I find myself studying every knitted item I see to figure out what stitches it’s made up of and whether I think I might be capable of making it in the future.

Oh – and I have also ordered myself a comfy reading chair, which I look forward to snuggling up in when it arrives. That will – finally – complete our library, a mere three a half years after we started work on it. We’re not the fastest at redecorating!

Right, I need to squeeze in some reading and review-writing before the weekend is gone. It’s time to start asserting those good habits!

How’s your new year going? Do you have any special aims, goals or resolutions? If so, then good luck with them!

2013 reading stats

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The mulled wine is keeping warm and the box of chocolate biscuits is open, so all that’s left to do before bringing in the New Year is to round up my 2013 reading.

Seek the truth

This year I continued keeping stats on what I’ve read, as I had begun to in 2012. I have read 75 books, which is the exact number I aimed for in the Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge (yay!) and just three fewer than last year. Of those, 18 were translated from other languages, which is a fair bit better than last year, though clearly there’s still room for improvement. And only 18 books were written by authors not from the UK or North America (strictly not quite the same 18 books as there was one written in French by a British author and one written in English by an Indian author). My best success is that I read 37 books by women and 38 by men, which is about as even a split as it could be!

As I thought I would find, I’ve only read 5 books that could be classed as science fiction this year, so I’m definitely going to try to read one SF book per month in 2014. And only 9 were non-fiction (not counting the Little House books because they are fictionalised memoir) so my 2014 Popular-Science Reading Challenge will definitely be a bit of a change for me.

My favourite reads this year were The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, Dan Yack by Blaise Cendrars, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Black Vodka by Deborah Levy and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. What were yours?

Overall I’d say it’s been a good reading year. I have greatly enjoyed most of what I’ve read (lots of 4 stars on Goodreads) and only abandoned one book that I can remember. As I mentioned last month, my 2013 challenges have been a bit hit and miss, but I’m happy with what I have lined up for 2014.

Now I’m going to refill my mug of mulled wine and pick out a book to begin 2014 with. So many to choose between!

I hope you have a fantastic New Year, and here’s to a wonderful 2014!

December reading round-up

Christmas bokeh

Well I hope you’ve all had a few days off work and eaten far too much and maybe even found some time to escape into a quiet corner and read. I didn’t get much reading done over Christmas because, as predicted, meeting my newest niece was quite the distraction! Plus it was good to spend some time with my family and old friends, as well as just enjoying being back in the beautiful Forest of Dean for a week.

Having a cuddle with my niece.
Having a cuddle with my niece.

Tomorrow I’ll write a round-up of my year in reading, but for now here’s what I read in December. You’ll notice it’s significantly less than the number of books I was given for Christmas 🙂

Christmas bookses

Books
All is Fair by Emma Newman (review here)

Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk (review here)

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

And as I’m writing this a day early, I’m hoping I will have finished Paradises by Iosi Havilio by midnight tomorrow!

Short stories
“Xingu” by Edith Wharton (Selected Shorts podcast)

“How to relax while broadcasting” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The topaz cufflinks mystery” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“A ride with Olympy” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Macbeth murder mystery” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The secret life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The babysitter” by Jane Yolen (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The wood duck” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Here we are” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Just a little one” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The waltz” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

There’s a bit of a pattern to my short stories this month, I notice! This was a particularly good bunch, I thought.

 

Happy New Year, all.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’ve wrapped the presents, picked out my Christmas Day outfit and had too many Christmas drinks already. I thought I’d share a favourite Christmas tune with you to keep the blog ticking over while I’m busy with family. I do love a good Christmas song.

I have no idea if I’ll find time for reading (I have a new niece to play with and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for board games this year…) but I do (of course) have a stack of books lined up that I’m hoping to snatch a few hours with at some point in the next week and a half off work.

Happy holidays!

Kate Adie on women in World War I

Kate Adie
(CC-BY Joanna Penn)

A Topping & Co author event
Christ Church, Bath, 10 December

As I mentioned a while back, one of my heroes in life is Kate Adie, so when Topping Bookshop sent me its list of upcoming events I got very excited about this one. Adie is a proper serious broadcast journalist. She was a rare female face on TV news outside of the studio back in my childhood and when I aspired to be a journalist she was a natural role model. But my failure to become a journalist hasn’t stopped me from admiring her, so I willingly braved the cold, dark and steep hills of Bath last night to see her in the flesh.

Unlike the other author events I’ve been to this year, Adie wasn’t interviewed for the crowd, she simply stood at the front of the big old church and spoke to us. She was lively, engaging and full of enthusiasm for her subject. Essentially her talk was background to and highlights from her new book Fighting on the Home Front: the Legacy of Women in World War One.

Adie held forth knowledgeably about the legal status of women 100 years ago and how World War I changed everything. She consummately related the points she was making to Bath and Bristol, as well as dropping in some related anecdotes from her own life. But most of all she exuded passion for her subject and admiration for the women who stepped up, not only those who filled the gaps left behind by men who had gone to war, but also the women who went to war themselves and those women who had to fight hard for the right to fill those gaps, even as Britain was creaking desperately with need of them.

Adie also spoke a little about her own career, about how her school teacher was so eager to get at least one pupil into university that Adie found herself “shunted into university via the catflap”, and how a reporter has to have an ordinary life to go back to between assignments: “You have to live an ordinary life in order to understand disorder.” She also had a lot to say about the strength and resilience of human beings.

I enjoyed Adie’s autobiography The Kindness of Strangers back when it came out and greatly look forward to reading my autographed copy of her new book.

The 2014 Popular-Science Reading Challenge

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2014-pop-sci-reading-challengeAs I briefly mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have set myself the goal of reading more popular science in 2014. It’s a genre I have enjoyed on the very few occasions I have dipped into it, so I’m not really sure what has been holding me back. To spur me on, I thought I’d make into a challenge, so here we go.

I think the aim will be to read one popular-science book per month (though I’ll still count it as a success if I manage to read 10 in a year). I’ve put together a list of titles recommended to me by people I trust (below), but this is just a starting point (and also a much longer list than I’ll get through in a year). Any popular science (including biographies or other forms of science history) will count.

I’ll create a page to keep track of how I’m doing in this challenge shortly. Does anyone fancy joining me? If so, feel free to use the button I have created (with huge thanks to Doublecompile for making the line drawing available through Creative Commons) and let me know how you get on!

Without further ado, here’s the list I’ll be starting from:

A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: the Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher by Joel Achenbach
The Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology by Anil Ananthaswamy
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Why Does e=mc2? by Brian Cox
Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich
Measure of the Earth: the Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World by Laurie Ferreiro
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser
The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
Stiff by Mary Roach
Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
The Double Helix by James Watson

I’ll add to this list any further recommendations that take my fancy. So who’s with me?

November reading round-up

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This month has felt full and busy yet I’m not sure I could tell you what I filled it with. I definitely seem to be over my reading hump, though I’ve still not finished that book of Orhan Pamuk essays I started back in September. I did finish the Little House series, which was surprisingly emotional for me. I certainly got sucked into that world by the end!

I also started thinking about my 2014 reading goals (it’s the Christmas planning that did for me, I think), which I’ll post more about soon. But mostly everything seems to be about Christmas already. There’s presents to buy, travel to arrange, outfits to plan and goodness knows what else I’ve forgotten. I was going to say I remember when Christmas was just about the one special day, but I don’t think that’s true. When I was little there was the school nativity play, the church nativity play, the Christingle service, the church carol service, the school carol service, Santa coming to switch on the lights in our town, Santa coming to switch on the lights in the next town over (where my Dad’s from), the day we put up the tree and other Christmas decorations, and last but not least Boxing Day at my grandparents’, which was like a second Christmas Day. So maybe these days I get off lightly!

But 2013 isn’t over yet. I have one month left to work on this year’s reading goals. Now I just need to figure which books to save for that week off work over Christmas…


Books read
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (review here)

A Handful of Sand by Marinko Koščec (review here)

Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (review here)

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (review here)

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal

The Most Remarkable Woman in England by John Carter Wood

These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder


Short stories read
“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Dating Jane Austen” by T C Boyle (Selected Shorts podcast)

“You were perfectly fine” by Dorothy Parker (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Unprotected” by Simon Rich (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The day the dam broke” by James Thurber (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Center of the universe” by Simon Rich (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The Tablecloth of Turin,” by Ron Carlson (Selected Shorts podcast)

“The lesson” by Emma Newman (available online here)

“Tourists” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

“The letter” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

“The verdigris set” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

“Escapism” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

“The business of art” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

“Overdue” by Emma Newman (read by the author here)

How has your reading month been? Are you hastily trying to tick off your 2013 goals? Or are you done with all that now and enjoying some relaxing reading before the new resolutions kick in in January?

Sunday Salon: Reading plans for 2014

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The Sunday Salon

It’s probably foolish to make any 2014 reading plans, considering I’ve not been great at the challenges I set myself this year and work is only getting busier. And yet, I keep having ideas for my 2014 reading that really excite me, so I thought I’d share them with you.

First, what did I set myself to do in 2013 and how, with five weeks of the year left, am I doing against those goals?

Well, this year I signed up to two challenges and a read-a-long, plus I set myself a challenge. The read-a-long of Crime and Punishment was run by Wallace of Unputdownables and was a great success. I (and many others) managed to get through a book I had previously given up on and I’m really glad that I did persevere. The 2013 Translation Challenge is run by Ellie of Curiosity Killed the Bookworm with the goal to read one translated book per month. I’ve actually not achieved that every month, but on the other hand in several months I’ve read more than one translated book. I think translated fiction has become a bigger part of what I read and I hope to continue that without needing a specific challenge.

The 2013 TBR Pile Challenge is run by Roof Beam Reader and it’s probably the goal I needed the most. I have so many books that have sat on my shelves unread for years. I have read eight and a half of the 14 I listed for myself, plus I tried and discarded one. I could have done better and I probably need to have a think about what’s putting me off picking up those books. Certainly it hasn’t helped reduce the size of my TBR, which is almost exactly the same number of books now as at the start of the year. I just love books too much to not buy new ones! But my biggest failure by far is the challenge I set myself – the Cookery Challenge. I said I would make more use of my many cookbooks and blog about them one by one. So far I have blogged about just two of my cookbooks. It’s a poor show.

So that’s 2013 so far. But what are these grand ideas I’ve had for 2014? Well, there are three and if anyone is running a challenge related to any of these I’d be interested to see it, so let me know!

Set

Science fiction
As a teenager I read some classic science fiction along with everything else I could get my hands on to read. But as an adult I haven’t read that much of it. I tried a few years back to get better at this, with some guidance from Tim, whose reading is about 90% SF. But this year I notice I have been especially bad at including any SF in the mix, so I’m going to make it a specific goal for 2014. But what form should that goal take? One random SF book per month? Read my way through the Gollancz SF Masterworks series à la Gavin back in his Gav Reads days? I’d quite like to find some good SF by women, so if anyone has any suggestions I’m all ears.

Popular science
I don’t read a whole lot of non-fiction, but I do like a good essay and I like to learn things. As an English graduate who works with mostly science graduates, I am finding that the scientists tend to be open to and enjoy the arts but a lot of my arts friends shy away from science. There’s a lot of fear of science as something hard or “other”. I think science is fascinating and an important part of understanding the world around us and I’d like to know more, hence this goal. I asked a few people for recommendations of really good popular-science books and the plan is to create a list and read my way through it. I’ll publish the list in December and am open to further ideas on this.

Untitled

Re-reads
I own thousands of books, the majority of which I have read and kept because I thought I’d like to read them again some day. But since university I have done very little re-reading and what little I have done has largely been provoked by book clubs choosing something I’d previously read, rather than my own overwhelming urge. Partly this is because I am aware of just how many great books are out there, more than I will ever be able to get to. And partly it’s a fear that a book I loved first time round won’t seem so great on a re-read. But there are so many books I have put down thinking how I would get even more from it on a second read. And so many I read 10 years ago that I have mostly forgotten but know I loved. I think it’s about time I stopped being scared and made time to re-read, even if it’s just four or five books per year. I’m not sure if this should be a challenge per se or just something to keep in the back of my mind.

Have you starting thinking about goals for 2014 yet, reading or otherwise? Do you like to be involved in lots of challenges and projects?

Literary Giveaway Blog Hop – the winner

Literary Giveaway Blog Hop

And the winner is…

Ikkinlala

Congratulations Ikkinlala! I’ve dropped you an e-mail and a copy of The White Tiger will be on its way to you shortly.

I want to thank Judith again for hosting the blog hop. As always, she has done a stellar job organising us lot! And thank you to everyone who entered.