BBAW – Blog recommendations

Today (as probably everyone reading this post already knows) is the start of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Today’s meme is to share favourite blogs that perhaps didn’t make it to the shortlist. First, though, I’m going to kick off with a list of new blogs I’ve discovered from reading other people’s recommendations (though I’m sure there’ll be more to come!):

• Fresh Ink Books
• Breaking the Spine
• The 3 Rs Blog
• Devourer of Books
• At Home with Books
• Reading Proust in Foxborough
• Life and Times of a ‘New’ New Yorker

And now for a few of my favourite book blogs:

• The Bluestocking Society – if I had to count how many books I’ve read or wanted to read after seeing them on Jessica’s blog, I’d have to borrow a few extra hands ‘cos I haven’t got enough fingers. She also does amazing work on the Book Blog Guild.
• The Book Lady’s Blog – a few people have already mentioned the hilarity of Rebecca’s Adventures in Bookselling series and I have to agree. I also love how chatty she is and her posts never fail to interest me.
• The Boston Bibliophile – I don’t share all of Marie’s tastes (I’m not interested in graphic novels, for example), but her reviews are always interesting and I’ve picked up a few books I wouldn’t normally have gone for after reading them.
• Restless Reader – not maniacally active, but it was the first book blog I started to read and for that reason, it deserves a place in this list.

Share your recommendations here or in the comments!

I’m running out of room!

I’ve reached that point (again) where I simply don’t have enough shelf space. My bookshelf is full. My two shelves allocated for TBRs are also full, despite my having started choosing my next book to read based on how thick it is (!) and therefore how much shelf space it will fill up.

There are 3 more shelves on the bookcase with the TBRs, but they’re all full already – I have a feeling that some creative reshuffling is in order so that I can increase my collection!

France holiday reading

I was lucky enough to spend a week staying in the south of France with family. Here’s what I read while I was there:

The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhineheart – This has been on my list ever since I read The Dice Man. The Dice Man was really good: I liked the writing style, the plot was good and the characters were intriguing. The Search for the Dice Man, while retaining an enjoyable writing style, was otherwise not good: the plot didn’t seem to hang together and the characters (partly because of the terrible plot) didn’t seem meaningful or fixed in their attributes. This was an enjoyable book with a few good scenes in it (most notably at the very beginning and the very end) but if I were to choose again, I wouldn’t bother reading it.

Incompetence by Rob Grant – This is a ‘mystery’ but more of a comedy about a world where incompetence is no longer a barrier. Our hero, who is by turns Harry Salt, Harry Tequile and Cardrew Vascular, travels across Europe to follow the clues his friend has left him and struggles with pilots with vertigo, trains that don’t stop at stations and more. This book was hilarious – thoroughly recommended.

America Unchained by Dave Gorman – This is yet another travel book. In this one, Dave Gorman attempts to travel across America from coast to coast without giving any money to The Man (i.e. without shopping at any chain stores). For me, the key to this genre of book is the narrator, and Dave Gorman was brilliant. I’ll definitely be reading more by him.

God is Dead by Ron Currie – The premise of the book is in the title: having taken on the body of a young woman in the Sudan, God has died. This is a series of short stories about the world left behind, including an interview with one of the dogs who ate part of His body and the story of a man whose job is to stop people worshipping their own children because they have nothing to do on Sundays. The first few stories were good, but in general, I found the collection lacking and dull.

Musing Mondays – Publishing House

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about publishing houses …

Do you have a favourite publishing house — one that puts out books that you constantly find yourself wanting to read? If so, who? And, what books have they published that you’ve loved? (question courtesy of MizB)

Publishing houses have absolutely no effect on what I choose to read. Many of the books I read are from reviews online, and I don’t often see the book cover or know who the publisher is before I actually get a copy. I pick up a lot of books in charity shops too, but it’s the title that has the biggest effect on whether or not I choose to pick it up and the blurb that decides whether or not I actually read it.

What about you? Do you notice or care about the publisher of a book?

A Serious Dislike

This is a topic I’ve spoken about with a few people, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted about it on here before.

When I was young, I used to read a lot of series books. Nancy Drew, The Babysitters’ Club, Sweet Valley…I think I had over 150 Sweet Valley books at one point, and I read every single one of them. I also used to read shorter series. I watched a lot more TV back then too.

Over time, my opinions have changed a lot. For me, the problem with series is that you have to compromise. You can have a series that’s essentially one really, really long book broken into different volumes, which does give you the advantage of being able to have a complex story but also brings the disadvantage that you have to have the commitment at the beginning of the series that it’s going to be worth reading all the way through (or at least I do – I hate to start and not finish) and with stories that are that complex, things can often get confusing. You can have a series that works more like a brand, with each book in the series being a variation on a theme, which brings the advantage that there’s less importance placed on the order but also the disadvantage that things tend to get repetitive. And finally, you can try to have a plot that moves forward but also try to have each book have a plot of its own, which makes for a more interesting story as there’s no feeling left dangling but can sometimes feel forced.

The same problems apply to television series, which is why I’ve almost entirely stopped watching them -  I watch films and the news and that’s about it.

The specific example I was talking to my family about earlier is Harry Potter. I really enjoyed the first four books, ploughed through the next two without really taking anything in and never bothered to read the final one. The first four books are pretty self-contained and deal a lot with J.K. Rowling’s imaginary world. After that, though, the series seemed to move away from that and started getting into The Big Serious Plot. A lot of people kept reading, but I felt totally alienated at that point – I liked the books because I often have trouble suspending my disbelief (which makes reading fantasy very difficult) and they were realistic enough for me to be able to enjoy something different to what I normally read. After the fourth book, though, the series made the awkward shift from mostly self-contained books to being very plot-driven. I understand that the first four books were setting up for what happened later, but personally I think it would have been a better series if the major plot (which doesn’t really come about until the latter half of the series) had been introduced earlier. As it is, it felt like it was tacked on at the end for a grand finale.

Another series that let me down was the Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s also another series where it changed midway through: the first few books were mostly just repetition, up to The Awful Academy (at least I think that was the title), when the real plot kicked in. I carried on reading, confident that the ends would be tied up and I’d get a return in my twelve-book investment, only for the thirteenth book to be a total pile of rubbish that answered none of my questions. That’s what finally put me off series: I’d been looking forward to the answers, I’d put in a lot of time (and money, unusually for me) to getting them and I was gutted not to get the resolution I felt I deserved. At least if you read a bad novel, you’ve only put in the investment of one book (though you can run into similar problems when you read an author’s best book first and find all their others a disappointment).

Pretty much the sole exception to my dislike of series is detective books, which I like because I’m picky about the way I like my detectives, my murderers and my writing. Having discovered a good series of detective books, I know that each book will be almost entirely self-contained (at least you always get to find out whodunnit at the end, even if there’s some personal history you don’t quite get) and I’ve then got a source of some more to read. That’s going back to what I said about series sometimes being like brands – I’m not looking at the story, I’m looking at what I know I’m going to get by reading a book that’s part of that series.

I have a feeling that I could’ve structured this a bit better, but hopefully it still makes some kind of sense. What about you? Are you prepared to make the investment in reading series or do you too tend to avoid them?

Book Review: Morvern Callar

Genre: Novel

Synopsis: Morvern Callar, a young girl stacking shelves in ‘The Port’, goes home one day to find ‘Him’ dead on her kitchen floor. The novel deals with her (somewhat unconventional) reaction anda subsequent period of her life.

Thoughts: Good and bad. The real genius in this book is the characterisation. Morvern is a very unconventional character, but Warner makes her seem entirely real. I did feel sometimes like the narrative was slightly detached (for example, most of the speech in the book is reported, and there’s no direct dialogue from Morvern herself), even though the book is written in first person, but looking back, that’s just part of how Morvern is. One of the best qualities of the writing is how things which most people would find truly horrific are presented alongside the mundane.

What I didn’t like about this book was how it didn’t really seem to hang together. In the beginning, the plot – such as it is – was strong, but after a while, the book began to lose the direction it had at a start. In one way, I can see that that’s kind of the whole point, but it made the end go a bit flat for me – due to the detached quality of the writing, it’s hard to tell what Morvern’s motivation is, and the large jumps in time and place made it quite unsettling to read.

All in all, this is a book about the characters, not the plot, and that’s fine, though it wasn’t altogether what I was expecting. Reading it is almost like people-watching: nothing is spelt out and it’s left to the reader to fill in most of the emotion and justification. I’m glad I read this, and maybe one day I’ll go back and read it in more detail – I have a feeling it’s one of those books you appreciate all the more once it’s had a while to digest.

TSS on Monday

Okay, so I really should’ve got myself organised and done this yesterday when I meant to, but I didn’t. I’ve been away (a week on a narrowboat on the Leeds-Liverpool canal) so it’s time for a holiday reading wrap-up.

I read 7 books while we were away, which sounds like a lot, but you get a lot of time to read when you’re not doing locks! Here they are:

• Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint
• The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg
• Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
• Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler
• Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blanchman

I also read about half of The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter but gave up on it.

In Skipton, we visited a bargain bookshop (much recommended – take a look if you’re ever there, it’s right on the high street) and I picked up a couple:

• Anonymous Lawyer, as I said – a book made up of the blog and emails of a fictitious hiring partner at a major law firm
• American Gangster by Mark Jacobson
• The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
• Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter – another Robin Hudson mystery. I bought this before I started The Chelsea Girl Murders, and I’m getting rid of it unread, but it was only 99p so I can’t feel too bad about it.
• The Next Accident by Lisa Gardner – I enjoyed The Survivors’ Club, so hopefully this should be another good mystery/thriller.
• True Crime by Jake Annott

For once, I remembered to write down some notes about the books after I read them, so I’ll be posting some reviews soon.

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

Musing Mondays: Covers

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about book covers…

We all know the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover, but just how much sway does a book cover have when it comes to your choice of book – whether buying or borrowing? Are there any books you’ve bought based on the cover alone?

Book covers don’t really hold much sway with me. A good deal of the books I read I end up with without even having seen them: I’ll read a review online and then mooch it or reserve it at the library. When I’m buying books, I tend to go for the titles as I find them much more intriguing than the covers. I find pictures very difficult to interpret (reading Maus was incredibly hard for me; no wonder I’m so bad with graphic novels) so I tend to stick to the text. I’d be just as happy if all books had plain white covers with black writing, except for the fact that they’d be harder to find on the shelf (though it would look a lot neater, you have to admit).

I do occasionally look up books after having seen the covers, but very rarely, and even then if I don’t like the title, I won’t look it up, and if the synopsis doesn’t interest me, I won’t go for it. All that artwork is wasted on me!

What about you? Do you judge books by their covers?

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…