Weekend breaktime
I can’t get this song by Lenka out of my head since I first heard it earlier this week, so here is an earworm for you.
And if you liked that I also recommend “Heart skips a beat” by Lenka.
Category: Blog
Bloggiesta: coming soon
Bloggiesta is a blogathon that is all about working on your blog. I have watched it from afar the past two years and this year I’ve decided to plunge in and be a joiner. It takes place on the weekend of 30 March – 1 April and it’s hosted by Suey of It’s All About Books.
What will I be doing? I have a few ideas I want to investigate but mostly catching up on writing posts, reading up on advice from other bloggers and brushing up my HTML and CSS skills. Which is quite enough for one weekend.
Interested? You can sign up here.
A few days in the Forest
I was lucky enough to be raised in the Forest of Dean, which may have spoiled me for other beautiful places everywhere. As my folks are still there I went back for a few days last week and took some photographs in the gorgeous February light.
As always, there’s a bunch more photos in my Flickr photostream.
Memorised
One thing I envy my parents’ and grandparents’ generations is that they were taught, in fact required, to memorise poetry. For me, in the 1980s and 90s, we barely touched poetry at school.
There was one supply teacher who did the scissors poem from Please Mrs Butler by Allan Ahlberg (a collection I still love) and I have a vague memory of there being a “big cat poetry” element to my GCSE English course…and that’s it. Aside from on posters on the classroom walls (which, incidentally, is where I discovered this love of mine) and being encouraged to write our own, poetry was strangely absent.
I am lucky that my family spotted my interest and bought me plenty of poetry books to read at home, but I feel that I somehow lack something by not being able to reel off a dozen of my favourite poems by heart. I know bits of poems – from Night Mail by W H Auden (incidentally, I recently discovered you can buy that film from the BFI), The Second Coming by W B Yeats and the aforementioned Please Mrs Butler – and I think I was once able to recite Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and Leisure by W H Davies (which I was reminded of yesterday by this amazing piece in the Washington Post), but now in both cases I get lost.
Of course, I could remediate this; it’s hardly too late. I have all the books. And I should perhaps be grateful that I instead came out of school with computer skills and some knowledge of books written outside the UK (I discovered the Yeats poem mentioned above when I studied Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at A level). I think I need to go read some poetry now.
January fun times
It was my birthday earlier this month and I seem to have managed to spread the celebrations right out! In fact, I think I still have some books to come…
2011 in numbers
This was my first full year of book blogging so I thought I’d take a look over what I’ve done.
According to Goodreads I have read 101 books this year (my aim was 100, so yay!) but I have only published 77 reviews, so goodness knows what happened there (actually, I do have a backlog of 10 or so reviews that I am saving to fill the gaps when I start the new year with a couple of big chunksters). Of those 77, one was an audio book and one was a “novelette”.
But what was the gender breakdown? Of the books reviewed, 42 were by men and 35 by women (actually, two were multi-author collections so I have taken the gender of the editor in those cases). As I mentioned here, 44% of books are written by women so my 45% of reviews being of books by women just about scrapes in there.
How international was my reading? It would take some research to figure out where every author lives/lived but a quick count of translations read shows just 13. That doesn’t include foreign (by which I mean non-US, non-UK) authors writing in English, such as Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it’s still something to work on.
All of which I find fascinating and I think I might just start a spreadsheet for the new year (which I’ve seen a few other book bloggers do). I can include nationality, gender and language of author, plus maybe gender of main character? Anything else?
Most importantly, I have enjoyed the majority of the books I have read and look forward to another year of blogging about my reads. Happy New Year everyone!
Musical interlude: Lana Del Ray
I like a current song! This is a rare thing indeed. Not that I never like new music, but I tend to be at least six months behind discovering it. This is one of the few things that make me feel old. But back to that song: