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Sunday Salon: New year, new books

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The Sunday Salon

Every year when my family asks what I want for Christmas and my birthday (they’re pretty close together) I give them a wishlist that is 90% books and every time I have to reassure them that yes, books really really are what I want. You’d think they’d learn. Thankfully, they know me well enough to buy me said books, in addition to a few useful things.

Even though I already own 120 or so unread books and a couple of thousand read books that I have kept because I want to re-read them some day, it makes me super happy to see this stack of new books.

Christmas books

If you can’t quite read those spines, the books are:

Cairo: My City, Our Revolution by Ahdaf Soueif
The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky
The Birds and other stories by Daphne du Maurier
The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
The Most Remarkable Woman in England by John Carter Wood
No Surrender by Constance Maud (that’s the pretty Persephone edition)
Burmese Days by George Orwell
The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami

And despite already having all of those lovely new books, I tripped and bought a book yesterday – the first trade paperback volume of Sandman by Neil Gaiman (and if I like it there’s 11 further volumes to buy!) – while Tim was picking up his latest comics and earlier this week I ordered a book from Abe Books to complete my collection of the Claudine series by Colette. Can I help wanting to give a loving home to all the books?

Oh, and I also received a belated Christmas card via the Book Bloggers Holiday Card Exchange. This one is from Vasilly and came in a very pretty shiny envelope and contains a great quote about reading.

Card exchange prettiness

Yay, I love Christmas and birthdays! Just eleven and a half months to go to the next time. Did you get any great books lately?

Now the year is over

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This year, for the first time, I kept some statistics on the books I read. I didn’t go out of my way to read differently, I just recorded what I felt were the key details, with a view to looking at them at the end of the year. Well, here we are. So what have I learned?

Of my 78 books read in 2012, 12 were non-fiction, 3 poetry and 63 fiction. 32 were written by women, 41 by men and 5 had multiple authors covering both genders, so that’s not a bad split. Only 7 were translated, which is pretty poor. And only 15 of the authors were non-UK, non-US. I think I should work on that.

So will I read differently in 2013? I’d like to try but the TBR is getting unwieldy so my first priority is to stop buying books for a while! And I still have to add the generous pile of Christmas books to the TBR, which will make it even longer…

A merry Christmas indeed

And now it’s time to do some painting before I can bring in the New Year with some of that Christmas wine. Happy New Year everyone! Do you have any reading resolutions?

EDIT
I’ve just been poring over my spreadsheet again, as I am wont to do, and spotted that while my reading wasn’t as international as I would have liked, I did read something written by at least one author from every continent, and every continent was represented as a setting as well. However, that’s counting America as one continent. If you split it into north and south, then South America is a big glaring omission from my 2012 reads. Good thing I already have a Peruvian book lined up for January!

Bookish things in the post

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Life has been hectic for me lately, so I haven’t been paying the blog enough attention, but I’ve had a few bookish arrivals in the post that I thought I might share.

The Book Bloggers Holiday Card Exchange is a very lovely idea run by Courtney and Judith. When I got post from France I was initially confused who it could be from, but when I saw this lovely card inside it twigged:

Card from the Book Bloggers Holiday Card Exchange

My exchange partner was Beth and I love my French card and the very friendly bookish message written inside it, so thank you Beth.

I also received this very exciting book from And Other Stories:

First book on subscription from & Other Stories

And Other Stories is a small publisher that works on a subscription model. They publish six new books per year, often translations into English. Subscribers get their names printed in a numbered first edition of each book they subscribe to. I was very excited to read my name in this book! And as a bonus they included a few copies of this poem, which I have stuck to our fridge:

Lovely poem from & Other Stories

Have you had any good post lately?

Sunday Salon: Do you re-read?

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The Sunday Salon

Re-reading is one of those subjects that comes up every now and again and every time I say wish I did, I just never get round to it. But that’s a rubbish excuse. I mean, if I don’t re-read, then what’s the point of my beautiful library (except as a repository for the ever-expanding TBR)? I have friends who re-read all the time, who return to certain books over and over again, and I can definitely see the appeal.

I was listening to an old episode of Books on the Nightstand in which Ann and Michael discussed how they don’t re-read and I recognised some of their excuses: too many new books – both in terms of the excitement of new books and the pressure to keep up – but also the fear that a book that was a perfect read the first time round won’t live up to the memory of it on re-reading. But I must also admit that blogging is another reason I don’t do it. Because it’s a lot harder to review a book on a re-read. Or at least, it can be.

For instance, I just read The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for, I think, the third time. Not only have I read it before, and all of its sequels, and watched the TV series and the film (though sadly never heard the radio show) but it’s also become a firm part of our culture, from the Babel Fish online translation tool to our local secondhand bookshop Beware of the Leopard to everyone’s favourite number being 42. There’s even a Towel Day every year to celebrate the work of the late Douglas Adams. This weekend, while going round our neighbourhood arts trail (here’s my post about the 2010 trail) I spotted that the sign next to the Norwegian waffle window included a joke about Slartibartfast, which made me grin like a loon.

How do you review a book like that? It’s not far off when I read a book for book group and on my way to the meeting I’m desperately trying to think of something more clever to say than “I liked it”. But then, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is exceptional, surely. Not every book I want to re-read is going to be quite so…well, brilliant.

Of course, when I was a child and even as a teenager I re-read all the time. My copy of Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh is in pieces I read it so often, and I’m frankly amazed my other most-read favourites The Wickedest Witch in the World by Beverley Nichols and The Ghosts of Motley Hall by Richard Carpenter (yes yes, I loved a book based on a TV series) didn’t end up in the same state. I think I did buy new copies of a couple of Roald Dahl books that were getting tatty. But then I hit 16 or so and stopped re-reading as often. And the books I have re-read as an adult – most of which were for book groups – I have still only read two or three times, as compared with the at least 50 times I must have read the three titles listed above.

Of course, I do have less free time now. And I do challenge myself more (sometimes, at least) with my reading choices. And I am aware of the limited time I have versus all of the beautiful books out there that I have yet to read. But still, it is both comforting and rewarding to re-read and once again I conclude that I should do it more.

What about you? Do you re-read?

Autumn days

I love this time of year – late autumn/early winter. Crisp cold air and clear blue skies. Or mist and rain and wind howling down the chimneys. I blame The Secret Garden – that line about the wind wuthering always was my favourite.

Autumnal

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Sunday Salon: Speed reading

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The Sunday Salon

I have had wildly varying reading speeds lately, and this has set me thinking. Are the better books the ones that slow you down, that make you re-read sentences or even paragraphs? Or are the books that you read in one or two settings in an engrossed daze actually better?

In September I started reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. It took me more than a month to finish. I worried that I had lost my reading mojo. And admittedly I did find it hard, but I thought the language wonderful. And so clever. I feel enriched for having read it.

In the past few days I read Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson (review here). I was absorbed and raced through it, eager to get to the end. And once I did I felt satisfaction with the story. But the language had at no point caught my eye and I’m already beginning to forget the book.

In some respects I enjoyed Before I Go to Sleep more. And as a thriller it did for me exactly what it set out to do. But I would absolutely state that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is the better book, without question.

So I’m trying to work out if this is a general rule or just these two books. Is there always more value in the books that slow you down, encourage you to notice the language and savour it, or can quick reads be equally good? I certainly know I like to read some of both. How about you?

Sunday Salon: Do you read prize winners?

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The Sunday Salon

On the back of this week’s announcement of the Booker Prize winner, I was wondering how much note people take of literary prizes. Are they just an excuse for bookshops to promote certain books? Or are they a valuable exercise in weeding out the best books from the thousands published each year?

I don’t follow any prizes closely enough to make a point of reading their long or shortlists every year, but there are certain prizes that have winners that tend to fit my taste. I find hype generally puts me off a book, but later I’ll come back to them and agree that the judges did a good job. And I do think it’s a great opportunity for small publishers to get their books out in the public eye and into all the bookshops, something they normally struggle with thanks to lack of the big bucks when it comes to marketing.

The [Man] Booker Prize
Launched in 1969, given to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland”. Of 47 winners, I have read 11 and have a further four in my TBR. (That may not sound like many but all the ones I’ve read were published within my lifetime.) And I have had several other books on the list recommended to me.

The [Orange] Women’s Prize for Fiction
Launched in 1996, given to “the best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality”. Of 17 winners, I have read seven. I never used to pay that much attention but the last two winners have been two of the best books I have read this year – The Tiger’s Wife and Song of Achilles.

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Launched in 1917, awarded for “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”. Of 85 winners, I have read nine and have one on my TBR, but again I have had several recommended to me. I keep meaning to pay more attention, but that clashes a little with my intention to look beyond the UK and US in my reading.

Hugo Award for Best Novel
Launched in 1953, awarded for “the best science fiction or fantasy novel published in English or translated into English during the previous calendar year”. Of 64 winners (including Retro Hugos), I have read nine but I think we (by which I mean mostly Tim) own at least half, probably the SF half. And that’s probably also how many I’ve had recommended to me (largely by Tim, who has probably read them all, or at least significantly more than me). I have to say I’m a little surprised that JK Rowling won it in 2001 (actually, I know for a fact that Tim hasn’t read that one). I was also surprised to see that the book I’m reading right now, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won it in 2008 (okay, Tim hasn’t read that one either). This is not mentioned anywhere on the book jacket. Had it been, I might have found myself less confused when it turned out to be an alternative history. I wonder why the publisher didn’t choose to publicize this, when they did do that awful three pages of quotes thing at the start.

Nebula Award for Best Novel
Launched in 1966, awarded for “the best science fiction or fantasy novel published in English or translated into English and released in the United States”. Of 48 winners, I have read seven. The winners overlap quite a lot with the Hugos. In fact, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union also won this award and again this is not advertised on the book jacket. Methinks the publisher (HarperCollins) doesn’t want people put off a “literary” author by the idea that he has written SF.

Clearly, my bias is for novels, mostly literary ones. I include those last two prizes not only because I am actively trying to read more science fiction, but also because I know it is often discussed that the big literary awards occasionally include historical or crime fiction but never science fiction, not even in the shortlists. There is a certain anti-SF snobbery.

So which prizes (if any) do you follow, and how closely? Do you read the whole longlist? Are you more likely to buy a book if it’s won a prize?

Bristol Festival of Literature

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If I had had any spare time at all this week I would have blogged about this sooner but I didn’t so I didn’t. Hey ho. It’s Bristol Festival of Literature time!

I’ve been to two events this year, both of which were great. On Sunday I ventured into Redcliffe Caves to hear Bristol Writers Group read aloud a series of chilling tales. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric location and organisers had done a great job of lining the route from Redcliffe Wharf entrance to the big cavern with candles so that we didn’t even need the torches we’d been advised to bring. (We did need the sensible shoes and camping chairs, though. Glad I was reminded of that advice!) The stories were generally excellent and well chosen for the location – occasionally spooky but mostly choosing more real-life chills than supernatural. (I’m afraid I didn’t take notes of any of the writers’ names. Poor journalism, I know.) And I now want to do a proper tour of the caves even more than I did before.

The second event was at the Thunderbolt pub and entitled “Satire and the city”. Local authors Mike Manson and Jari Moate talked about Bristol, comedy and the subjects that interest them. The title was a little misleading in that satire was not specifically discussed, though it was there to some extent in some of the excerpts they read from their books. Perhaps I need to read one of their books to find out if it was just an accurate description of them as writers. I’d be happy to do that; both were interesting, funny speakers. And another great venue that I’ve been meaning to go to for years and never made it to before.

Bristol Festival of Literature continues until this Sunday, including a big day of many events on Saturday, so there’s still a chance to join the fun. And for more bookish fun, tomorrow it’s also Bristol-Con, which was great fun last year.