Readathon cancellation

This is only going to be a brief post as I’m just on my way out (an evening at the theatre – lucky me!).

Unfortunately, plans have changed and I’m no longer going to be around for most of the readathon, which starts tomorrow.

I will be doing my best in the limited time I’ll have to support those participating in the challenge, but regrettably my commitment will be minimal.

Best of luck to everyone who is going for it!

Borders visit

I passed a while this afternoon in Borders. There isn’t a Borders round here (the one we went to was about 40mins drive away), but I wish there was because they always have a good selection. My favourite thing about them is that they stock reprints of old books instead of only new releases, which means there’s a lot more variety.

I didn’t buy anything (I hardly ever buy books new) but I did write down a good selection:

Have you read any of these? What did you think of them? Let me know!

Looking at this lot and dealing with the task of looking them all up on bookmooch and then realising that my printed wishlist for taking to libraries really ought to be updated (I last went through in June), I’m beginning to think I need a better way to organise my wishlist. Librarything, perhaps?

In other news, I’ve completed my first book for the Clear Off Your Shelves Challenge and will shortly be writing a post about how I’m tackling the challenge.

Clear off your shelves challenge

I’m not really one for reading challenges, but this one just looked so perfectly suited to me that I couldn’t not sign up for it!

The challenge is hosted at S. Krishna’s Books. The aim is to have a certain percentage of books read from October 1 to November 30 being from your own shelves. However, I’m going to switch things up a bit because I only rarely read books which aren’t from my shelves, and from my TBR pile at that! Instead, I’m going to challenge myself to have 30% of the books I read in those two months be ones that were on my TBR pile at the beginning of the year. I made a list back then, so finding those books will be easy (I keep a list on the shelf with the books).

I would like to do something come January to help get the last of these books off my shelf (my TBR pile isn’t massive, so if something’s been on there for more than a year, I’m probably avoiding it) but I don’t want to just throw them out. Any ideas? Do you have some kind of an annual clearout?

Physical TBR Pile

Just realised that I didn’t actually give a lsit of what’s on my TBR pile in my last post, so here it is for future reference. I’ve removed another book (The Appalling Guests by Victoria Marther & Sue MacCartney) as I don’t really have any interest in reading it.

First name	Surname	Book title
Colin	Bateman	Wild About Harry
Colin	Bateman	Shooting Sean
Kevin	Brockmeier	The Brief History of the Dead
Christopher	Brookmyre	Country of the Blind
Christopher	Brookmyre	Boiling a Frog
Christopher	Brookmyre	All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye
Christopher	Brookmyre	A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil
Bill	Bryson	A Short History of Nearly Everything
Jonathan	Coe	The Rotters’ Club
Douglas	Coupland	Jpod
Ron	Currie, Jr.	God is Dead
Francis	Dick	Slay Ride
George	du Maurier	Trilby
Ben	Elton	High Society
Ben	Elton	Gridlock
Ben	Elton	Blast from the Past
Ben	Elton	The First Casualty
Jasper	Fforde	The Well of Lost Plots
Fannie	Flagg	Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Gustave	Flaubert	Madame Bovary
John	Grisham	The Appeal
Sparkle	Hayter	The Chelsea Girl Murders
Nick	Hornby	31 Songs
William	Landay	The Strangler
William	Landay	Mission Flats
Gavin	Lyall	Judas Country
Stuart	MacBride	Cold Granite
Steve	Martin	Shopgirl
Sue	Monk Kidd	The Secret Life of Bees
Kate	Muir	Left Bank
Irene	Nemirovsky	Suite Francaise
Andrew	Nugent	The Four Courts Murder
Andrew	Nugent	Second Burial
E. Annie	Proulx	Postcards
He. E.	Saint	Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Stav	Sherez	The Devil’s Playground
Lionel	Shriver	We Need to Talk about Kevin
James	Siegel	Derailed
Karin	Slaughter	Kisscut
Jerry	Spinelli	Milkweed
Newton	Thornburg	Cutter and Bone
Irving	Wallace	The Writing of One Novel
Irvine	Welsh	Ecstasy
Irvine	Welsh	Marabou Stork Nightmares
Markus	Zusak	The Book Thief

TBR Review

Back in January, I made a list of the books on my physical TBR pile. We’re now halfway through the year, so I decided to take a look back and see how well I’m doing at working through it.

I’ve read 12 books from my physical TBR pile, namely:

• Chapter and Verse by Colin Bateman
• Any Human Heart by William Boyd
• The Debut by Anita Brookner
• The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
• Mr Mee by Andrew Crumey
• Night and the City by Gerald Kersh
• Demo by Alison Miller
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Me Times Three by Alex Witchel
• The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer

Three books have been otherwise removed:

• Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan, because it doesn’t look all that interesting and I know I’ll never get to it
• Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy & Jill Morrell, for the same reason
• A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice, which I gave up on

In January, my physical TBR pile had 55 books on. At the beginning of my review, I had a TBR pile of 56, 40 of which were also on my January pile.

However, in looking through the pile, I realised that several more books are never going to be read, so I removed some more:

• Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, because I started it and am never going to finish due to a hatred of the author’s writing style (I tried Maya, once upon a time, and failed to finish that one as well)
• The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger, because I started it and it failed to hold my interest and it somehow ended up back on the pile
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown because if I’m completely honest, I don’t even want to read it and it’s only there because so many people said it’s good
• The Sport of Queens by Dick Francis because if I didn’t finish it, then I was certainly within spitting distance, and I don’t want to read the whole thing again
• How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass because they’re not the sort of books you can read cover-to-cover
• Touching the Void by Joe Simpson because again, I got within spitting distance of finishing and can’t be bothered to read it all again (and I don’t know where I got to)
• Otters on the Swirl of the Tide by Bridget MacCaskill because I don’t think I’m ever going to read it

So that leaves me with a new total of 48 books on my physical TBR pile, which is less than I started with at the beginning of the year! My list of books to read that I don’t own has no doubt expanded a lot, but I’ve read a couple of books from it, and some of them I now own, so that’s not going too badly.

I’m going away at the weekend and will be away for a week, so I’m going to use my regular strategy of only taking books I’ve been putting off. I’m going to aim for ending the year having read 50% of the books that were on my physical TBR pile at the start of the year (aren’t I ambitious!), so I’d better get a move on…

Book Review – Ludmila’s Broken English

I read this as part of the Seconds Challenge. In this case, my ‘first’ was Vernon God Little. This is also the author’s second novel.

The story flips between Russia and England. In Ublilsk, in Russia, Ludmila Derev lives a life of hardship, desperately trying to eke a living in depravity. In England, Blair and Bunny (Gordon) Heath, two ex-conjoined twins, have just been separated at the age of 33. The Heath twins, just released from an institution, attempt to find their way in a new world bristling with new experiences, including, most notably, sex. And as soon as I mention that Ludmila eventually finds her way onto a website for Russian brides, you can guess where the story is going.

For me, this was a bit of a hit-and-miss book. Unfortunately, what let it down for me was the plot: the two stories, especially Ludmila’s, were superb by themselves, but the connections only became apparent very late on in the book and they didn’t merge very well. The plot detracted from what was, for me, the most enjoyable thing about the book: the writing style. I don’t speak Russian, but I have of course heard the traditional stereotypes of the languages (including some of the supposed insults in the language), and this is brilliantly invoked in the dialogue. The characters of the Heath twins are very well developed; they are somewhat one-dimensional, but they do have fleeting shades of other traits, and they come alive very well in the mind. Ludmila was also a very interesting character, but most of the personalities of the Russian characters is shown in their dialogue, and towards the end of the book, she speaks only in badly broken English, which took away my interest from her. Trying to follow the somewhat fantastical plot was an unwelcome distraction from the characters and the writing; I can’t help feeling that this would have worked far better as two separate stories somehow.

Compared to Vernon God Little? This wasn’t as good. The writing was excellent, but it lacked the edge and bite of its predecessor and while VGL’s plot meandered along and could quite happily be mostly ignored in order to enjoy the writing, in Ludmila’s Broken English it felt as it it had been shoehorned in a little too tightly.

It’s difficult to think who would enjoy this book; ardent fans of Vernon God Little may find it a disappointment, but the writing style is similar and I think that’s a reason that many people didn’t enjoy VGL in the first place. I’m not sad I read this book, but I don’t think I’d read it again.

Given up on a book

A couple of days ago, I gave up on The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.

This was supposed to be part of my 2nds challenge, but at the end of the day, I just couldn’t take it. I read 200 pages, looked at the amount I had left, put the book down and walked away.

There wasn’t one single thing that made me want to keep reading, and if there isn’t something after 200 pages, then it’s dubious it’s going to be there at all. None of the characters interested me. The ‘plot’ (such as it was; maybe something happened after that, but again, if it’s not there by page 200…) didn’t hold my attention. Even the writing style that had me spellbound in The Secret History didn’t seem to be there.

I was reading my mother’s copy. She also gave up, so it looks like this is one for the charity shop.

2nds Challenge

Hooray – I’m joining my first reading challenge!

I’m going to join the 2nds challenge. The challenge is to read 4 books by authors I’ve only read once before. So, here’s my 4 books:

• Ludmilla’s Broken English by DBC Pierre. I’ve read Vernon God Little twice and really enjoyed it, so hopefully this should be just as good! I already have a copy of this book, so I’ll have no problem reading it.
• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I’ve read The Secret History by her and I loved it, so I thought I’d read this book, which I found on another shelf a couple of months back. I own the copy, so I’ll have no problem with this one.
• Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. I’ve read On the Road, which I very much enjoyed, and I’d be interested to see how it relates to his other works. However, I don’t have a copy of this book and my library situation is currently limited, so I’m unsure if I’ll be able to get a copy of it. Nevertheless, I will try my hardest, and if all else fails, I will replace it with something else.
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I’ve read Junky, which was strange but nevertheless interesting. Once again, I don’t actually own a copy of this book, so I may have to change it if I can’t get ahold of one.