What's with today, today?

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...

Another year, another birthday. This year I celebrated by baking up a storm and then hanging out with a bunch of friends for some sugar overload times in the park. Fun! It seems that every time I bake, I decide that since I do it so rarely I should bake all the things at once. Which results in baking from Friday night to just before the guests start to arrive on Saturday afternoon. But it's fun to have an excuse to try out some new and delicious looking recipes.  No added food colouring! This is just from maraschino cherries The cherry cake necessitated a last minute frantic hunt for a maraschino cherry provider in Sydney, but it turned out ok. I think it was a mixed success though, the icing was heavy on the butter and not everyone was a fan of the almond/maraschino flavour of the cake. I liked it though, and it definitely looked gorgeous (thanks to decoration by Andrew, I had trouble getting the food colouring to take with all that butter!). Cherry-Vanilla La...

Daydreamer by trade "No more dreaming like a girl, so in love with the wrong one" - Florence and the Machine (although I later found out it's actually 'wrong world', which is even better) "There's always a bit of a tug-o-war between the sexes, there's always a bit of tension when there's romance involved." - Overheard in a cafe, older woman giving advice to younger woman "All of that filthy empathy for the way we're feeling" - Bright Eyes What the preacher wants to show him is that the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgement that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences 'under the sun' bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all - JI Packer, 'Knowing God', on Ecclesiastes We were all struts in a rickety scaffold, holding each other up. We were all falling down. "He is as delighted as he is wet" - Soccer commentary, rai...

Going into the century of books challenge I wasn't really sure what I was going to read but I knew one thing- I wanted to read some Proust. Though Remembrance of Things Past (the version that I read used that title, so I'll stick with it) is a somewhat daunting proposition, I felt like I could handle reading just one part, and after all I had heard so many good things from people. So my trepidation was mixed with optimism as I started pt. 1- Swann's Way . I may have been familiar with the name of Proust, but I really didn't know much about what to expect when I started the book. I was even unsure whether Swann's Way really counted as a book, after all it's only part 1 of 7, and I discovered it's also been published in two separate sections itself. To make matters more confusing, the version that I read had the first two parts in the same volume. Part of the complication of reading an old, long, work in translation I suppose. Really the book falls into tw...

I've just started reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past , I'm hoping to blog about Swann's Way for the century of books, for the 1910s. I'm not sure if I'll get it done by the end of February, but I thought it was a great opportunity to read this book that I've heard so many great things about. I do most of my reading on the train, and this morning on the way to work I was standing in a train carriage, reading my book, when a lady interrupted me to ask if she could take my picture. And I was flattered because yes I was wearing what I thought to be a pretty good outfit at the time, but as you may have guessed she wanted a picture because I was reading Proust. She said something like "seeing a young person like you reading Proust gives me hope for the future." Then she asked if I was on my way to uni. She may have overestimated my youth, I'm not really sure, would she have done the same if it wasn't casual Friday and I was wearing my ...

I said in my previous post that I didn't understand E.M. Forster's books, and that's not entirely true. In fact, I found A Room With a View quite accessible, and really in many ways a straight-forward story. But I felt, as I did with Howards End , that I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at, that somehow Forster and I do not exactly get along. The Man Who Was Thursday , by G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, is quite straight-forwardly puzzling, starting, as it does, as a thriller, and progressing to farce, before unexpectedly turning into a religious allegory. I'm not really sure where to go with that, so I'll review A Room With A View instead, and hopefully get some thoughts in order. I'd love to hear what other people thought as well, and whether I should be so flummoxed. I'd like to talk about the ending too, so be warned! Unfortunately I left this a bit late to write, and late night blog posts are not my most considered blog posts. But it'...

Since I don't read much from the 1900s usually I thought I should make a list of options to make sure I found something to read, but then I couldn't choose so I read three (unfortunately two ended up being from the same year): The Man of Property by John Galsworthy (1906) The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (1908) A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) Basically I decided to use this challenge as an excuse to read some of the books I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't gotten around to. It's taken me a while to get around to blogging about them because I just wasn't sure what to say. I said to a friend the other day that I used to judge whether books were good or not by whether I could understand them. If I had no idea what a book was about by the end of it, it must be very high literature indeed. By this token The Man Who Was Thursday is incredible, and E.M. Forster should be my favourite writer. On the other hand, reading Th...

Last year I wrote about reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, and how relevant it felt reading about Egypt's history in light of the Tahrir Square demonstrations and the revolution that was happening. I wondered how Ahdaf Soueif would feel about it, and whether she would write her book differently if she was writing today. Well, apparently she's written a new book about the revolution in Cairo (in which she was involved), and there are what I think are extracts from that book in the Guardian here . It's a very personal account of Egypt and revolution, interesting to read as Egypt's new Government holds its inaugral session , although the extracts end before the elections. And my reading around the world posts will come soon! I hope.

It's been a good year in reading, even though I haven't been doing so much blogging. As always, this is the list of books I've read all the way through for the first time this year. I don't include rereads, but then again I don't think there have been many... Links to books I've mentioned on the blog, * for my top picks, and a summary post coming later for those of you who don't like reading through lists. There are a lot I haven't mentioned on the blog, but for many of those I've added some short notes. Some themes from the year's reading: War - from WWI ( A Very Long Engagement ) to child soldiers in Nigeria ( Song for Night ) and the experience of everyday life in war-torn Iran ( Persepolis ), war dogged my reading this year. While it was diverse, reading this year (and planning for next year's reading) has really brought home how big the influence of the world wars has been on Western literature. Oh, and I dislike war more than...

Another end of year post as promised! Albeit a little late. I am officially declaring my reading round the world challenge done! Although I did end up cheating a bit... Reviews of earlier books here . Here's what I read (with brief reviews of books I haven't mentioned earlier): Africa :  Song for Night  by Chris Abani (Nigeria). I thought this was cheating, so added The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif (Egypt) (also kind of cheating, since it is set in Egypt but written in English). I'm counting The Map of Love  because I felt like I ended up learning a lot about Egypt by the end. The book is split between the turn of the century and the present day (when the book was written in the late 90's), following two parallel love stories which bridge the East/West divide and are linked by family history. It also deals with Egyptian politics and identity, and the relationship between Egypt and the West. The first love story was a bit idealised, but I still found it compelling...