Tag: reading

March reading round-up

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It occurred to me that with my rediscovery of short stories I have been doing quite a lot of reading this month that I’m not mentioning here or on Goodreads. And seeing as one of the reasons for having this blog is to keep a record of my reading, I thought I would make me a list! (I do love a list.)

Books read

Ritual by Mo Hayder (review)

Saga volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples (review)

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius (review)

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (review)

The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer (review)

Room by Emma Donoghue (review to follow)

The Small Hand by Susan Hill (review to follow)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (review to follow)

Short stories read

“The furies” by Paul Theroux (New Yorker Feb 25, 2013)

“Symbols and signs” by Vladimir Nabokov (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The lottery” by Shirley Jackson (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Playing with dynamite” by John Updike (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Where is the voice coming from” by Eudora Welty (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“My Russian education” by Vladimir Nabokov (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Baader-Meinhof” by Don DeLillo (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Compensatory behaviour” by Emma Newman (read by the author here and here)

“Sanctuary” by Emma Newman (available online here)

“Vanilla bright like Eminem” by Michael Faber (available online here; discovered via Books on the Nightstand podcast)

“The story of an hour” by Kate Chopin (available online here; discovered via Books on the Nightstand podcast)

We also went to see Richard III at the Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol and I bought too many books. Good thing I’m doing this Easter read-a-thon or I wouldn’t be able to justify buying more books for months! Now here is a pretty picture of spring buds in our garden during today’s actual genuine sunshine.

Cherry blossom

Sunday Salon: Easter read-a-thon anyone?

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The Sunday Salon

Lately I seem to have spent a lot of my free time planning various holidays, which has got me thinking about what makes the perfect holiday. The thing is, my favourite way to relax is with a book, but when it comes to holidays I always want to go somewhere new, to see and learn new things, which tends not to leave masses of time for reading, or really relaxing.

If I could take longer holidays, of course that wouldn’t be a problem, we could go somewhere long enough to sightsee and have whole days off reading. But being average folks who can usually only take a week off work at a time, we’re trying to figure out where we can go with enough amenities so we have food choices and some culture, plus beautiful surroundings so that if we do take a few days to chill and read, we can call it enjoying the beauty around us. I’m thinking maybe lakeside?

But in case we do plump for an action-packed city break later in the year, I figure I should make the most of any empty weekends at home to do lots of reading from the comfort of my sofa. Now as it happens, over Easter I have six days off work and plans on only two of those days. And Tim’s busy for most of the weekend, so that leaves me a lot of free time.

Easter Read-a-thon with Nose in a book

Which gave me a brilliant idea – an Easter read-a-thon! Okay, it wasn’t strictly my own idea. The primary school I volunteer at once a week issued a challenge to the kids to read six books over the Easter holiday. Now, they have two weeks, whereas I have four days, but I still think I can meet the challenge. Anyone want to join me?

I’m not going to set any rules, this is strictly for fun. But if you want to join in, feel free to use my button and have a fun weekend of reading. I’ll blog later in the week with my choice of books to tackle.

Yay, Easter read-a-thon!

NB The button was made using a Creative Commons photo by Ian Britton/freefotouk and a bit of fiddling in Photoshop.

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!

It is the ideas and stories that count

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Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!
by various authors

Slightly meanly, I think, the publisher has not credited anyone as the editor of this collection of essays on the topic of reading. Even the introduction is simply signed “Vintage Books, 2011”. I bought this book on a whim at the same time as The Library Book, as they were both pretty and colourful and contained essays by interesting people.

Foyles haul

I think it’s probably not surprising, then, that my reaction to this book is very similar to my reaction to The Library Book. Hit and miss. But perhaps to more of an extreme in this case. The hits had me nodding my head furiously, while the misses in some cases had me furious.

I like that the 10 essays are not only written by big names. They include novelists, poets, publishers, journalists, academics and the founder of a charity, the Reader Organisation. And the wide topic allowed them to take very different angles. Blake Morrison writes intelligently and profoundly about the pleasures and benefits of reading, including why poetry matters:

“It takes courage to own up to dark thoughts and dangerous feelings. But poetry – the most intimate yet public of forums – is the ideal place. Ted Hughes is one writer who recognised this. Writing, he said, was about facing up to what we were too scared to face – about saying what we would prefer not to say, but desperately need to share.”

This illustrates what my favourite of these essays do well – they quote widely, creating a whole reading list for me within their few pages of eloquent argument. Carmen Callil writes interestingly about books in her life and how being a woman in a man’s world led her to found Virago. She shows a great, warm love for books. Tim Parks, in contrast, goes negative. He generalises the average westerner as someone who either doesn’t read or only reads the latest big title:

“If we read fast, superficially, for plot, to get through, so as to congratulate ourselves…we’re not only missing out on certain pleasures, we’re actually putting ourselves at risk, leaving ourselves open to messages and attitudes we haven’t weighed up…”

Not only is this quite ungenerous, not to say judgemental, but I also think it’s wrong. Different books have different effects on us and who is he or I to tell someone that they shouldn’t read a certain book because we didn’t get anything from it? Thankfully Mark Haddon says entirely the opposite:

“This, I think, does a disservice both to readers and to the books themselves…because it’s not true. Visit a prison library and you’ll meet good people whose lives have been saved by potboilers, and psychopaths reading Jane Austen.”

But Haddon also writes intuitively about the act of reading itself:

“Stop reading right now. Look around you…The sense of being inside looking out, of seeing a world that belongs to everyone, but is nevertheless yours alone. It is this uncrossable gulf between me and not-me, between my private experiences and yours, which lies at the heart of being human and which no other medium can touch, and this border is where the novel lives and moves and has its being.”

And then Jeanette Winterson went and ruined it by returning to Parks’ snobbery and turning it up to 11. She goes from praising the King James Bible and Shakespeare to:

“We live under 24/7 saturation bombing from an enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture. If you don’t read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or listening to fake music from puppet-show bands…The consequences of homogenised mass culture plus the failure of our education system and our contempt for books and art (it’s either entertainment or elitist, never vital and democratic), mean that not reading cuts off the possibility of private thinking, or of a trained mind, or of a sense of self not dependent on external factors…Attention Deficit Disorder is not a disease; it is a consequence of not reading.”

What?!! There is so much wrong with these statements. That last sentence…whooah! Has she ever expounded her theory to a doctor or ADHD specialist? I’d be interested to hear their response! I mean, I think reading is important and rewarding, but that really is taking it too far. And as for her comments on modern pop culture, well that’s her own personal taste and to extrapolate from her dislike to such disparagement is unkind and even ignorant. Music can transport me, make my heart race and my emotions surge – and I don’t mean classical music here, I mean rock, folk, dance and pop music. Not every song, or course, but plenty that I am sure Winterson would turn her nose up at. And let’s not forget that Shakespeare was the pop culture of his day.

I think in general it is a stubborn clinging to the past that frustrated me. A few of the essayists write about how the physical printed book is intrinsically better than ebooks, and how new technology and mass media threaten today’s youth and therefore the entire world. Personal preference is one thing, but I think we have to face up to the fact that we live in an age of transition and be positive about the possibilities the future offers. The final essay by Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai addresses this well:

“The Greek transition from an oral culture to a literacy-based culture provides a valuable analogue…Socrates argued that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude the young into thinking they had accessed the essence of some aspect of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it…Will [today’s] young people immersed in technological innovation become adept at prioritising, sorting and critically evaluating information, adapting different types of reading styles based upon their purpose…Will the flexibility of digital text actually enhance the reading experience for many readers, propelling them into a deeper engagement with text, or will such enhancements serve as further distraction?”

I accept that my own preference for reading novels in hard copy is a product of my life to date, but I didn’t exactly dislike my brief dalliances with a borrowed Kindle and I absorb most of my journalistic writing via computer these days. I think a love of music, film, TV, comedy and theatre complements my love of reading, rather than detracting from it (though I won’t deny that they are all competing for my time). I think reading is important, valuable and worth encouraging in others but it is not about to disappear. As Callil says in her essay:

“The human race has been telling stories, and trying to record them on papyrus, on manuscripts, on stones, since the beginning of time. Whether we read on the printed page or on a machine is beside the point. It is the ideas and stories that count.”

Published 2011 by Vintage.

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?

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?

Holiday reads in brief

Trains Are Mint

I read quite a few books on holiday and it now feels like an age ago so I’m going to play catch-up with some shorter reviews of slightly unusual books I have read lately.

Trains are Mint
by Oliver East

This is a sweet but odd piece of graphic-novel-style journalism/travel writing. East took his notebook and pen on walks along railway lines from Manchester to Blackpool, drawing and taking notes on whatever grabbed his interest. Which sounds like a fascinating project. And both its niche appeal and its failure to grab me stem from exactly what it is that East finds interesting: rubbish, graffiti, kids hanging out, small railway stations and tumbleweed.

Published 2008 by Blank Slate.

Turning-Point
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Miscellaneous poems 1912–1926
Selected and translated by Michael Hamburger

I love Rilke. I don’t really understand a lot of it but I find it beautiful. In a different mood this might make me feel stupid or at least self-conscious but thankfully I read this book in the stately, studious surroundings of Cambridge and I just enjoyed floating on the words. And using the helpfully supplied German original texts opposite the English translations to remember how I once knew some German but have basically forgotten it all. It may take another read or three to get a little more from it. As Rilke says:

“Do not, do not, do not books for ever
hammer at people like perpetual bells?”

First published as An Unofficial Rilke in 1981. This edition published 2003 by Anvil Press Poetry.

The Hungry Ghost Festival
by Jen Campbell

This is a slim volume, which I have already read most of twice (see above for how this is a good thing with poetry), and I think it’s safe to say that these poems are right up my street. Campbell writes about growing up in north-east England, about being a teenager, the seaside, friendship, gossip, sex and illness. The poems tend to concentrate on the random details that give memories their surreal quality. They are both magical and grittily real.

Published 2012 by The Rialto.

The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963
by Barry Miles

I started reading this book as part of my research for my dissertation at uni. I got halfway through it and then had to concentrate on finishing the dissertation so I put the book down and inevitably I had had enough of Bob Dylan and the Beat poets so I didn’t pick it up again…for eight years. I had forgotten how interesting a read it is. Miles uses lots of primary sources, plus his own interviews with many of the people involved, but slips them seamlessly into the narrative. He has a good grasp of what makes an interesting anecdote. If you have even a passing interest in the Beats I definitely recommend it and defy you to come away not wanting to go straight to Paris!

Published 2001 by Atlantic Books (UK) / Grove Press (US).

Sunday Salon: Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

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The Sunday Salon

So, this one’s just for fun. The challenge has been around for a while but then it’s a long list to get through! I love the TV show Gilmore Girls and wish I could be half as smart and frankly lucky as Rory, or have half of Lorelai’s style and wit.

To borrow the intro from It’s Time to Read: With some wonderful people on the Book Club Forum we are reading through some of the books that Rory Gilmore read in the TV show Gilmore Girls. Here is the list of books she has read (taken from this forum – thanks!).

I have annotated the ones I have read and the ones that are already on my TBR.

1984 by George Orwell – read multiple times, originally in my teens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – read in 2003, but I also half remember my Dad reading it to me and my sister many years earlier
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – read multiple times, originally when at primary school
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon – read in 2010
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt – read in my teens
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank – read multiple times, originally in my teens
Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
The Art of Fiction by Henry James
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – read in 2010
Atonement by Ian McEwan – read
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
The Awakening by Kate Chopin – read for my degree
Babe by Dick King-Smith – read (under its original title of The Sheep-Pig) when at primary school
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie – read 2009-ish
Bambi by Felix Salten
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – read in 2010
Beloved by Toni Morrison – read
Beowulf A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney – TBR
The Bhagava Gita
The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duffy
Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – read in 2009
Brick Lane by Monica Ali – read, I think, almost certain
Brigadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
Candide by Voltaire – read in 2011
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer – I’ve read the odd extract but not enough to strike this off
Carrie by Stephen King – read in my teens
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – started and gave up. I know, I know, I must try again sometime
The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger – read
Charlotte’s Web by E B White – read when I was at school
The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
Christine by Stephen King
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – read multiple times
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – started and gave up. Another one I intend to try again
The Code of the Woosters by P G Wodehouse
The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare – TBR
Complete Novels by Dawn Powell
The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby – read in 2012
Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe – I’ve read several but certainly not all
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père – read
Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – TBR
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Cujo by Stephen King
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon – read in 2003
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown – read
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Deenie by Judy Blume
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Don Quixote by Cervantes – started and gave up
Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson – read in my teens
Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
Eloise by Kay Thompson
Emily the Strange by Roger Reger
Emma by Jane Austen
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J Sobol
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Ethics by Spinoza
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Extravagance by Gary Krist
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – read
Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore
The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson – read 2002-ish
Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom – read
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
Fletch by Gregory McDonald
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – read 2008-ish
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand – read 2008-ish
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – read multiple times, originally for my A levels in 1998
Franny and Zooey by J D Salinger – read
Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
George W Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – read for my degree
The Gospel According to Judy Bloom by Judy Bloom
The Graduate by Charles Webb
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – TBR
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald – read
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – read multiple times, originally in my teens
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Hamlet by William Shakespeare – read
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J K Rowling – read
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J K Rowling – read
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers – read
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry
Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare – TBR
Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare – TBR
Henry V by William Shakespeare – TBR
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby – read
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr Seuss
How the Light Gets in by M J Hyland
Howl by Allen Ginsberg – read 2004
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
The Iliad by Homer – TBR
I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – read
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee
Iron Weed by William J Kennedy
It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – read multiple times
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare – read for my degree
The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence – read
The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000 by Gore Vidal
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman – read for my degree
The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis – I started this and ended up giving it away because I really didn’t like it
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
Life of Pi by Yann Martel – read
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen – read
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – read multiple times
Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Lord of the Fliesby William Golding – read
The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien – read
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – read
The Love Story by Erich Segal
Macbeth by William Shakespeare – read
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – read
The Manticore by Robertson Davies
Marathon Man by William Goldman
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov – TBR
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
Memoirs of General W T Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
A Mencken Chrestomathy by H R Mencken
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare – read for my degree
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – read
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – read in 2011
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
Moby Dick by Herman Melville – started, did not finish
The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin
Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – read (for A levels, I think)
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath by Seymour M Hersh
My Life as Author and Editor by H R Mencken
My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult – I’m actually not sure whether I’ve read this…
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco – read 2004-ish
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson – read some of them, not all
The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Night by Elie Wiesel
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen – read for my degree
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E Cain, Laurie A Finke, Barbara E Johnson, John P McGowan
Novels 1930–1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell
Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – read in my teens
Old School by Tobias Wolff – read
On the Road by Jack Kerouac – TBR
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – read in 2011
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Othello by Shakespeare – read for my degree
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens – read for my degree
The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
Out of Africa by Isac Dineson
The Outsiders by S E Hinton
A Passage to India by E M Forster – TBR
The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – TBR
Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi – read
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche
The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – read in 2011
Property by Valerie Martin – read
Pushkin: A Biography by T J Binyon
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw – read in 2012
Quattrocento by James Mckean
A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
Rapunzel by the Grimm Brothers – read
The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi – read
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier – read multiple times
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
Rita Hayworth by Stephen King
Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert
Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare – read multiple times, originally for school in 1994
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf – read in 2011
A Room with a View by E M Forster
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L Baum – read
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – read for my degree
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913–1965 by Dawn Powell
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Sexus by Henry Miller
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – read
Shane by Jack Shaefer
The Shining by Stephen King
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
S is for Silence by Sue Grafton
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – read in 2011
Small Island by Andrea Levy – read
The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway – read in 2010
Snow White and Rose Red by the Grimm Brothers – read
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems by Julia de Burgos
The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
Songbook by Nick Hornby [31 Songs in the UK]
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare – read
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning – read some of, but not all
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron – read
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Stuart Little by E B White
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett
Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – read
Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald – read
Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – read 2005-ish
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway – TBR
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – read
The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare – read for my degree
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Trial by Franz Kafka – read
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Ulysses by James Joyce – read for my degree
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 by Sylvia Plath – TBR
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera – read
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe – read for my degree
Unless by Carol Shields
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – TBR
The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett – I’ve seen the play. I know that doesn’t count, but it was excellent.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau – read for my degree
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker
What Colour is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
The Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum – read
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë – read
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

So that’s 336 titles, I think, of which I have read 96. (I wasn’t sure how to count the “complete novels of” collections.) I have edited the list a little, removing duplicates for example. And I don’t know whether the TV series actually showed Rory reading all of these. I suspect a lot of the titles just came up in conversation or can be read when she packs her book bag. If you think you see any errors in the list, let me know.

The ones I own but have not yet read make up a bit of a heavy list, which may be why they have all sat on the TBR pile for a while. But perhaps having this challenge in the background will be a good way to finally get round to them! In addition, I would really like to read these:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Code of the Woosters by P G Wodehouse
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Gospel According to Judy Bloom
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Songbook by Nick Hornby
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

I have half a plan to come back to this list every six months or so and see how I’m doing. I may have to transfer it all to a spreadsheet of some kind 🙂 And I’ll be keeping a close eye on book titles when I watch Gilmore Girls repeats!

I have been meaning to do something with this challenge for a while, so thank you to Reading in Winter for reminding me!

Are you taking part in this challenge? What do you think of the list?

Sunday Salon: Books in series

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The Sunday Salon

I have been thinking recently about how I review books in a series. I have not exactly been consistent up until now. Do you guys have any rules that you follow?

The thing is, different series throw up different problems. In some cases it is near impossible to discuss sequels without giving away spoilers from the earlier books. I found this a little with The Alexandria Quartet but I had so much to say about each book that I still gave each a separate post.

Sometimes spoilers aren’t an issue. For instance, the Claudine books reveal plot developments in their titles! But then the plot is hardly the point here.

In some cases there isn’t much new to say about successive books in a series, other than the new plot, so reviews get progressively shorter. I suspect this will be the case with the Philip Marlowe books, but I’ve only read the first two so we’ll have to see. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t yet published a review of the James Bond books (which I’m halfway through reading). I’ll probably write about one of them but I see no point discussing every one separately. (For exactly this reason, I have reviewed just one of the Modesty Blaise books I have read.)

Line up

With comic books/graphic novels I have tended to write a single post about the whole series. With Scott Pilgrim, I was so eager to read the whole series that I didn’t want to stop to make notes in-between. With Echo I would have run across the problem of spoilers, so my review really concentrated on the first book and overarching themes (I had both of these problems with Y: the Last Man, a review of which is coming later this week). With Southland Tales, I just didn’t think they were very good and so, though I had a lot to say, I saved myself from writing three separate negative reviews by just doing the one!

I am thinking about this because in the past couple of years I have read a fair few first titles in a series, and in some cases I really really want to read the rest (Tales of the City, for example) but I’m not sure I’ll be able to write much about it so I put it off. I know that’s silly, that this blog shouldn’t stop me from reading great books, but there we are.

Do you have any favourite book series? And do you review every book you read?

Sunday Salon: Happiness

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The Sunday Salon

For no special reason and after a bit of a rubbish week, today I am feeling good. Really truly happy. Which is nice.

I have barely read 100 pages this week and life is pretty busy so reviews might be a bit sparse for a while. But we have some holiday coming soon so hopefully I’ll be able to play catch-up then. If we can manage not to plan ourselves too many other activities!

I have found time/brain power to post reviews of The Library Book and The Big Sleep, both of which I recommend. And my tired brain was glad that I now have a system for headlines so I didn’t have to pluck something out of thin air. I pick a quote from the book. Do you have a system for writing headlines? Do you use the title of the book you review?

I’m off out now to explore the Southbank Bristol Art Trail (I love my city). In the meantime, to spread my mysteriously good mood, here is a picture of gorillas having fun at our local zoo.

At play