What's with today, today?

Time for a round up of books read in 2012! As always, rereads are not included and I've linked books I've reviewed/mentioned elsewhere to the blog post in which I talked about them. Favourites are marked with a * . I seem to have read a lot of crime fiction again this year, of all different flavours, and one book of crime non-fiction. Usually I dislike true crime, but this was about the Somerton Man mystery, which I find fascinating, so that is an exception. My blogging was mostly dominated by my Century of Books challenge, which provided one of my favourite books of the year- Swann's Way . My other favourites included some fantasy and Northanger Abbey . Anyway, here is my (annotated) list! The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht Domestic Violets - Matthew Norman Kind of male chick-lit? I ended up very much disliking this book, the protagonist was infuriating. Starlight - Stella Gibbons Not quite Cold Comfort Farm . Much more strange. A Room with a View - E.M. Forster...

This is a frustrating review to write, because I had just finished writing it, pressed 'save', went to my dashboard and it had entirely disappeared. It's taken me weeks to rewrite, because I do hate starting from scratch again. It's especially difficult because the review I had written finished off with something like: "this is a difficult book to write about, because I had a strong emotional reaction to it". So maybe I should just work backwards from there. I had a very strong emotional reaction to the book because the events at the end of it were so horrific- basically it covers Pinochet's rise to power (in fictionalised form), and the characters in the book were so heavily affected by it, especially the narrator, Alba. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende focuses on a family in Chile in the 20th century. They're a wealthy family, and the patriarch is involved in conservative politics, but the rest of the family (including the matriarch, Cla...

I may have finished a while after the winner was announced, but I have made it through the Booker shortlist! Part 1 here . Now to round up the rest of the Booker books: I may have finished a while after the winner was announced, but I have made it through the Booker shortlist! Part 1 here . Now to round up the rest of the Booker books: The Lighthouse - Alison Moore Without knowing much about it, I was really looking forward to reading this book, it just piqued my interest. Unfortunately, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I'd hoped. It felt a little hollow to me, kind of lacking in emotion or narrative force I suppose. I did like how Alison Moore built up the story by replaying the same events in Futh's life over and over with slightly more information, from his memory while on holiday in Germany. It wasn't so much that secrets were revealed, more that the characters were built up a bit more, and the use of scent as a trigger for memory was used effect...

Lists seem to be an ever-popular feature of the book world, from Awards shortlists to lists of books read through the year (yep, both of those have appeared on my blog). There are an infinite variety of lists to choose from, such as lists that tell you a bit about a person (like Simon at Stuck-in-a-book's 'My Life in Books' series ) or books are about topics (like this Christmas-gift version at Booksellers NZ ), but the most controversial are the 'Best-of' lists. Some people hate the idea of imposing a ranking on books, some people like to use them as a jumping off post for thinking about their own favourites (see Book Snob's take on Stylists list of must read's ) and sometimes they are just good for inspiring reading choices (or Christmas shopping). So for your enjoyment, I found a list of all the best of lists of the year (i.e. I think someone posted it on Twitter but I forget who): Largehearted Boy's 'Online 'Best of 2012' book lists O...

Helen over at A Gallimaufry has given me a Liebster award! Which is basically a meme for small blogs (with under 200 followers) where you answer 7 questions and then ask a new set of 7 questions to 7 people. I enjoy both memes and A Gallimaufry (she has a series on the Grimm Fairy Tales which I particularly enjoy) so I am excited about this. The questions: 1. Describe your ideal home library/study.  I'm going to base this on my ideal home library as described to a friend 10 years ago, while doing my final exams at school. Because obviously I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. For starters, this library is situated somewhere near the sea. I'm thinking of a remote Hebridean island, but a cliff-top anywhere would probably do. One wall of the room is double-glazed glass, looking out at the ocean and the storms that roll in from the distance. The opposite wall is covered in bookshelves which are full of books. The floor has rugs and beanbags scattered round, and t...

"Did you move to Scotland for a woman?" "No, for money" "Oh, I understand. It's hard in Turkey. Everyone's wearing burqas!" - American tourists to owner of Turkish restaurant in Inverness Rowley died in 1806, leaving the estate in trust for his 5 natural children 'begotten on the body of Elizabeth Selwyn' and one sixth for his wife 'so long as she does not live in a state of co-habitation or marriage with any man and continues to take care of my said children'. -From an article on early Stanmore history- a little cold "He's at a funeral" "Who died now?" "Oh no, he's been dead two years" -Overheard In many cases, fiction over the last 35 years has eschewed the novel's traditional attempt to render depth, preferring to tell a story, which, instead of seeking to offer truth, deep meaning or philosophical belief, depicts particular aspects of the modern world refracted...

The Booker Prize winner gets announced sometime today, and I am still only halfway through the shortlist! Oh well, I can still read the rest, I just won't be able to make predictions. And there's still time to write a halfway point blog post before the winner is announced. So, a short recap of the shortlist so far...  Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel   I loved Wolf Hall , so it's not surprising that this is probably my current favourite Booker book. Reading the second book of a series after loving the first is always a tricky thing, and I don't know how I would rate this in comparison to the first. The writing remains excellent and fresh and the plot remains tense, but this time there's a greater sense of ambiguity in Thomas Cromwell (and many of the other characters). His thoughts don't match up to his actions, and it's not clear why- is he motivated by revenge? Survival? A political trade-off to achieve his reform goals? All of the above? I felt lik...

Love by Angela Carter was a difficult book to read. For starters, it's title is misleading- the plot centres on three people: Annabel, an art student, her husband Lee and Lee's brother who also lives with them. All three are disconnected with reality in their own separate ways, and seemingly incapable of really knowing or interacting with each other, but none more so than Annabel. When the book opens she is overcome by terror when walking through the park by seeing the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time. The book then moves around in time to look at the doomed relationship (love?) between Annabel and Lee. The first thing that really struck me about the book was the style it's written in. It's full of long run on sentences that don't seem to end the way you'd expect- with the end twisting away from the beginning. Take, for example, this sentence: All was as it should be in the kitchen and she gave him a smile of such unexpected sweetness that he tu...

I'm not always someone who has a clear list in my mind of what books to read next, and that means I don't tend to have piles of books waiting around to be read, like lots of bloggers that I read seem to do. This is great for not having unread-book-guilt, but terrible when I finish one book and have no idea what to read next. The panic! Happily, at the moment I do happen to have a large reading list lined up, and I'm a little bit excited about it. Now I can rush through trying to finish them all and put off having to worry about where my next book's coming from for a little while. So I thought I would share my current TBR list with you: I borrowed a few from my friend (the lovely Georgia ), which I have started on: On Literature by Umberto Eco I just finished this- really enjoyed the change of pace (it's non-fiction essays, I usually read fiction). Had some nice arguments with him about reviewing and symbolism and felt very inspired to read a lot more class...

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is one of those books that people have been recommending to me forever, and yet the title has always put me off actually reading it. That and the fact that I have always kind of mixed it together with Catch-22 (which I have also never read) in my mind. But in the spirit of this Century of Books challenge I thought needing a '60s book to read was  the perfect opportunity to put my misconceptions behind me and actually see what this book is all about. In short, this book is all about the life of Billy Pilgrim- traveller in time- and sort of revolves around his experience of WWII and, in particular, the bombing of Dresden. The book proceeds in a linear way through Billy's war experiences, but these are inter-cut with his travels to a range of different moments in his life, sometimes for a brief impressionistic moment and sometimes for longer, from his time in hospital to his time as an alien abductee on the planet Trafalmado...

I was already late writing up this one, and then I found that the draft of the post I'd been writing has disappeared, so that is partly my excuse for such a long blog silence. I have run so far behind schedule on this project but I haven't given up, in fact I'm already reading my 1960s book. Hopefully I will post on that in a more timely fashion! But I digress, back to The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, and hopefully I haven't forgotten too much of it... I haven't read any Graham Greene before, but when I noticed this book in the bookshop while looking for something completely different ( The Door in the Air by Margaret Mahy, but that's another story) and realised it was written in the '50s it seemed like the perfect time to start. When I started reading the book my feelings of serendipity diminished somewhat. It wasn't what I felt like reading, it was too ironic feeling, too much emotional distance, the kind of book that makes me want to star...

Gardens at Nijo Castle, Kyoto Clearly I am not very good at blogging while traveling, since I have been back for weeks but have not blogged since before I left. I also didn't read a lot while I was away. I had intended to bring an e-book reader with me but it turned out I couldn't buy any books for it due to being in the wrong country, so I just grabbed A.S. Byatt's Possession from my shelf and hoped for the best. When I got really desperate for reading material, we stopped in a second hand bookshop in York and I bought a copy of Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt. So all I did was reread books by A.S. Byatt while I was away, and I still need to find a 1950s book for my century of books challenge. I did enjoy rereading Possession though, it's particularly nice to read in England, since it does seem quite English. And it's about a quest and about books- what could be better holiday reading than that? Babel Tower was a bit more of a challenge, I'd forgotten abo...

When I was trying to find inspiration for books to read for this challenge this year, it really struck me just how many books in the 20th century were written about the world wars. Not surprising perhaps, but still it is incredible to think of the enormous influence those wars have had on literature (as well as the broader culture, history, society etc.). So it seems fitting that I read a book about WWII for the 1940s. It's an interesting perspective too, Italo Calvino wrote The Path to the Nest of Spiders  in 1947, not long after the war ended, and according to his preface it was inspired by his time with the Italian Resistance. That's not a part of the war I have heard much about before (and isn't it amazing the number of different stories that came out of the wars? So many people affected in so many different ways), so it was quite an unfamiliar experience.  The Path to the Nest of Spiders starts by following Pin, a kid who is apprenticed to a cobbler and brother to a ...

One of my favourite comfort read genres is crime, particularly murder mysteries. Sometimes I feel strange about that- why are books about murder and horrible crimes comforting? It's a strange balance, and it's the reason I tend to shy away from true crime and towards the milder end of the crime spectrum. I think I really enjoy crime because it's so plot driven. When reading is hard or my brain is foggy what I usually want is something fast paced and absorbing that I won't be able to put down until I reach the end. It's a puzzle that I want to solve, or have solved for me in most cases. There are some other things that make crime novels a good read, and a good comfort read. Firstly, crime fiction always comes to a resolution, the mystery is solved, the bad guys found out and usually punished. I was just reading an interview with Tana French where she says "mystery... is a genre very much based on morality" and I think that's true. Sometimes that plays...

T oday marks an important milestone- it's one month until Andrew and I set off on an overseas trip! I'm pretty excited, it's been 10 years since I last left Australia, after finishing high school, and I have probably been planning on my next trip since then. For this blog this means that either I will be posting a lot of photos and talking about my travels, or I will not be posting anything at all, depending on how much time/internet access I have. I'm travelling to the UK and Japan, and while I do a lot of UK based reading, I haven't read that many Japanese books, so any Japanese author recommendations to read in the lead up would be appreciated. Or Japanese history book recommendations. Or places to see in Japan or the UK. In general: recommendations welcome. But before that, I have a 1940s book to read and review sometime this month (as well as two assignments to write, a lot of uni readings to do and travel bookings to make). It's going to be a busy month,...

Image source I've been reading a lot of crime fiction lately, so it seemed kind of fitting to read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler as my book for the 1930s. It was also something of a change for me, since my usual preferred crime subgenre is murder mysteries/whodunits, preferably cozy and/or Golden Age , and almost invariably British. The Big Sleep is none of those things (apart from being a crime novel and in fact a contemporary of a lot of Golden Age novels)- it's American, hardboiled  and not particularly cozy. It's hard not to pick up on a lot of the hardboiled tropes though, through movies and spoofs and all sorts of cultural references, and reading this book for me was all about enjoying the genre experience. It's a pretty fantastic genre experience, with dames and liquor and wise-cracks and so on. Philip Marlowe is our detective, introduced in a powder blue suit "calling on four million dollars" to take on a case. The case is to suss out som...

It's taken me a while to get around to blogging about Passing by Nella Larsen, even though I started writing up notes for a blog post a while ago, so it's now April even though this was my book for March for the Century of Books. I think there are a couple of reasons for that, one is that I really didn't have particularly strong feelings about it, and the other is that I just left it for a while and when I think about a blog post for too long I tend to lose enthusiasm for actually writing it. But it's definitely an interesting book, and there is a lot I could talk about, so it's worth the blog post (and worth a read). I first heard about Passing through a review over at Evening All Afternoon , and it just sounded fascinating. Passing follows the perspective of Irene, who reconnects with a friend from childhood, Claire, through a chance meeting in Chicago. Both Irene and Claire are of mixed race, which in 1920s America means they are both classed as black and t...