What's with today, today?

The annual list of new books read in 2013! My New Year's Eve celebrations are sooner than anticipated, so this post is a bit curtailed- but here they are! I read 88 books in 2013, a personal best, which I am putting down to a long commute, and maybe the number of graphic novels. There are some good books in here (and some not-so-good) which hopefully I will get to post about another day! ETA: Now added links to books that I've blogged about. The High Window - Raymond Chandler The Lady in the Lake - Raymond Chandler Little Sister - Raymond Chandler The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Hoeg Book Lust - Nancy Pearl The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones Art in Nature - Tove Jansson Unspoken - Sarah Rees Brennan The Long Ships - FransG. Bengtsson Wildwood - ColinMeloy, illus. Carson Ellis Under Wildwood - ColinMeloy, illus. Carson Ellis Inverted Worl...

I'm ready for Christmas over here Merry Christmas all! By the time you read this I will likely be on holidays (finally!) and enjoying some time off. It's been an exhausting year and I'm looking forward to a break. But although the blog has been quiet, it has been a year full of plenty of reading, so I'll be back sometime soon to write up my reading list of 2013. In the meantime, I hope you're all having some wonderful holidays and have many books waiting underneath the Christmas tree!

Slowly slowly working on my reading challenge this year- reading more books written before the 20th century. It looks like we're slowly going further back in time, from the 19th Century (The Moonstone) to the 18th, with The Castle of Otranto  by Horace Walpole, and sticking with genre fiction so far, from the detective story to the Gothic. As The Moonstone  is known as one of the earliest examples of detective fiction, so The Castle of Otranto is an early Gothic novel. And how! A brief summary: the prince of Otranto (Manfred) is obsessed with carrying on the male line, and when his son dies unexpectedly just before his wedding to Isabella, best friend of Manfred's daughter Matilda, this obsession grows, as he tries to avoid the family curse. He is clearly concealing a family secret, and is horrified at the giant coat of armour which appears to haunt the library. I thought what would stand out about this book is its part in the history of the Gothic, but what really stood out...

I NEED to write about Burial Rites by Hannah Kent- it's a book I was very much looking forward to (see my last post), and yet I ended up feeling a bit ambivalent about it, so I have been itching to discuss it with someone since finishing it. It would be ideal for a book group, but unfortunately we didn't read it in book group, so blog it is! Burial Rites has an intriguing set-up- a woman (Agnes Magnusdottir) is condemned to death for murder but, since she is living in Iceland in the 19th century and there are no jails, so until her execution she is lodged in a remote farm with with the family of a local official. During her stay she is able to talk to a priest, who is instructed to prepare her for death. To him, and to us, she relates her story. So interwoven with the story of Agnes life at the farm, living with a family who are apprehensive abot hosting a convicted murder and facing her impending death, is the story of Agnes life up to this point, leading to the answer the ...

At the moment, I seem to be aiming for around one blog post a month on here. Poor sadly neglected blog! I have been reading as many books as ever, but haven't really felt inspired to write about any of them. So instead, here are some books I'm looking forward to reading: A Brief History of Montmaray -  Michelle Cooper A girl and her family living on the small (and crumbling) island of Montmaray find their eccentric way of life interrupted by the onset of WWII. This has been compared to I Capture the Castle , and, while I'm sure it can't live up to that standard, it does sound very appealing! The weather is getting pretty hot right now, and I'm getting pretty tired, so this sounds like just the thing. My hold has just come in at the library, so I get to read it soon! Burial Rites - Hannah Kent Based on the story of the last Icelandic woman  sentenced to death by beheading, this book is set during her last days, staying with a remote Icelandic family. This has ...

Just some rambling thoughts on fairy tales and folk ballads today! I recently found some great fairytale related links- so I thought I would share them with the internet. They are all from D.L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh, and you could get lost for ages wandering through them. Among other things you can find in this linked set of pages are a directory of tale types, comparisons of different editions of Grimm (for selected fairy tales) and links to other folk- and fairy-tale sites. Here are the pages: Directory of folktales Links and overview Brothers Grimm  Recently though I've been most interested in the story of Tam Lin, which has gotten me interested in other Scottish ballads (or other British ballads generally as well). There's an online version of the Child Ballads  which is interesting, since Child collected some variants of common ballads as well, and I've had a look at some of the versions of Tam Lin, which is interesting. I love Tam Lin, but I...

The other day at work I was telling a co-worker that I didn't have anything to read, and asked her to recommend me something. "What do you like?" she asked. I answered "Literary fiction, like A.S. Byatt, crime, like murder mysteries, and fantasy, like Kate Griffin..." And from there we got to urban fantasy (but not paranormal romance), and all the genres, sub-genres and genre traits that appeal or repel. It is like a secret handshake, finding someone else who enjoys the same genre as you do. Saying you like reading fantasy can be like asking someone to condescend to you or adopt an air of puzzlement, but being able to talk about the fantasy genre brings an air of freedom. Here, you think, is someone who understands! But this is not always so. After all, there is that multitude of subgenres and other preferences to face. There are large gaps in my knowledge of genre that could encompass someone's entire favourite reading matter- talking about genre is not alw...

At the beginning of the year I said that my challenge this year was to read pre-20th century books. So far, this reading challenge has not really gotten off the ground, but recently I did manage to read something published before 1900, so I thought I would count it and blog about it here. The book that kick-started my challenge was  The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a book I have heard of often but never read. A short summary: during the wars in India, a British soldier steals a fabulous diamond from a Hindu temple. This British soldier being something of a disreputable type (see stealing Indian diamonds and murdering their guards) he is cut off from the rest of his family, but leaves the diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder, in his will as a birthday present. Whether this is an act of reconciliation or revenge is unclear to the family, seeing that the diamond is said to come with 3 Indian assassins set on reclaiming it. When the diamond goes missing from Rachel's room th...

Regular readers of this blog (if such an irregular blog can be said to have regular readers) may know that I am a big fan of A.S. Byatt- I've loved her books ever since I read Possession at the end of high school. Despite this, there are still a lot of her books that I haven't read, and I just recently read her first book, The Shadow of the Sun . The Shadow of the Sun is about a young girl, Anna, in her late teenage years and trying to figure out what she should be, while at the same time feeling overshadowed by her father, a famous author. Enter Oliver, a family friend and academic, who agrees to tutor Anna to help her get into university, and becomes increasingly convinced she needs to decide what she should do with her life, and that he knows best what that is. When Anna successfully gets into Cambridge she continues to (somewhat listlessly) wonder about her purpose in life. Eventually she runs into Oliver again and, almost accidentally, they start an affair. Image from ...

Well, every time I plan to get into the swing of regular updates I seem to fail! So sorry about that... I do have some exciting news though. I got a new job! I'm now working as a librarian at a university. I'm really happy to be there, but it means I'm no longer working part-time and I have a longer commute, so recently things like writing (and even reading) blogs have fallen by the wayside a little. Hopefully this will change once I've settled in a bit more. Happily, I have had time for reading books (in fact, lots of time on my commute) and I've been reading a few things that I've really enjoyed. I've been in the mood for fantasy and fantastical books lately, which has been helped by a couple of book group picks- the magic realism of The Master and Margarita and the sci-fi of Inverted World (which was quite strange, and a lot of us found the ending fairly unsatisfying). My two most recent reads have been Among Others by Jo Walton and Sea Hearts by Margo ...

It feels like there have been a lot of distractions around lately, so I thought why not share some of these distractions with the world? Firstly, a list of books mentioned or read on the Gilmore Girls! This is a fun reading challenge idea as well. For fellow Gilmore Girls fans- enjoy! I found it through Book Dirt. Secondly, Ronni's boyfriend has started a blog with another medievalist friend about the Anglo-Saxon riddles, called The Riddle Ages . Since uni ended I haven't been reading much Old English at all, and I miss it, so I'm hoping that this blog sticks around. The riddles are largely found in the Exeter Book, a manuscript which also contains most (all?) of the poems known as the elegies- which are my particular favourites- and some riddles have similarities with the elegies. They can be very poetic, and there is the added fun of trying to solve the riddles. I'm looking forward to reading a discussion of the possible solutions. So far there is an introduction...

I thought I was getting onto a roll with blogging, but then February happened and no blogs got written at all! Worse than that, even, is that I got into a bit of a reading slump, though I had to push through to finish my book club book, which has helped. And I haven't even started my reading challenge yet! So what better way to get back into things than a short round-up of recent reading? Here are the last five books that I read: Image from Goodreads Unspoken - Sarah Rees Brennan I ended up buying this because I couldn't get it from the library- and sadly I didn't get this cover, which I like, but the book itself made up for it. I really enjoy Sarah Rees Brennan's blog (I think I first heard about her from Ronni ) and this book sounded great to me- it's a Gothic mystery YA book with a small English town, an aristocratic family with secrets and a telepathic connection between a high school girl and her 'imaginary friend' who turns out n...

Today I was struck by a post over at a gallimaufry about reading things set in unfamiliar places- and how to visualise them- I wonder whether we can familiarise ourselves with different cultures by reading about them, or will we always miss something when we read about things we don't already know? Like when we figure out the meaning of words from their contexts, but sometimes find out years later that we've gotten them wrong (at least, I have done that). Then I came across this post on facebook, which is a piece of writing memories of childhood in South India, and I was reminded of that idea again. Because in the piece I can recognise the nostalgia, even if I can't recognise the things the writer is nostalgic for. This feeds into a lot of different ideas I guess, like the concept of the other, or maybe the subjectiveness of language and meaning sometimes, but I just thought maybe it was some interesting food for thought.

Finally, and belatedly, my 2012 reading challenge comes to an end, with Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg representing the 1990s. It's a book I've been meaning to read for ages, but have somehow never made it past the first page. But while on my beach holiday, accidentally without a book, I found a copy in a second hand bookshop and it seemed the perfect opportunity to finally read it and to finish off my Century of Books challenge at the same time. In some ways this was an odd book to read on a summer holiday, after all the first sentence reads: It is freezing, an extraordinary -18°C, and it's snowing, and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. (Note: I lent this book to my sister when I finished it so I had to look this up online and I'm not 100% sure if it's the translation I read) While I was lying around tr...

I've been reading Book Lust by Nancy Pearl recently and loving it- it's a collection of lists of books on different topics and to suit different moods put together by a booklover and librarian, and though it seems like an ideal book to dip in and out of I've pretty much been reading it cover to cover (it's helping with a small lack of reading inspiration as well). In the introduction she says: I love to read. And while I may not absolutely agree with the Anglo-American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, who said, "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading," I come awfully close to subscribing to his sentiment. I was struck by this, and her dedication to her granddaughter "who I hope grows up loving to read, but not too much." It reminds me of the time a friend in high school told me that some day I would have to stop reading and start living. Of course, I immediately dismissed this, because isn't reading part of living (a vital...

I do realise that it's a bit late to be wishing people a happy new year, but I've been away out of reach of internet for the past couple of weeks, enjoying views like this one: Looking out over the lake while eating fish and chips And this one: South Coast beaches are beautiful, this is near Tilba And generally enjoying the beach. I hope everyone had some good holidays as well! Now it's time to face the fact that a new year has started, head back to work and talk about plans for the year. Specifically, reading plans. On my holiday I did manage to read my 1990s book, so I will soon be able to post about that and finish off my 2012 reading challenge (belatedly). For this year, I want to do something a little bit inspired by the Century of Books challenge and read books published before the 20th Century. Mainly because I have quite a few sitting on my shelves that I can't bring myself to start, and I need a little motivation, and also because I sometimes ...