What's with today, today?

 It's taken me almost to the end of January to start on this, but it's time for the annual book list for 2025! As always, this is the list of new (to me) books I finished in the year. Last year it was 63- but I feel that a significant proportion of those were books read to kids and graphic novels I read after my 10 year old brought them home from the library. In other words, not a particularly impressive personal reading list. I also reread around 5 books, I think these were all books I read to the kids- including a bunch of Chrestomanci books which is always a pleasure. So, to the summary! Shortest book was Cairn by Kathleen Jamie. She writes such beautiful essay collections, about life and nature and the world. This is a blend of essays and poetry- and this is I think one of the sadder collections of hers, with the sense of seeing the effects of climate change really starting to hit home, and a sort of grief over that, and about getting older. Longest book was Swallowdale b...

Happy new year one and all! Time to look back over the reading year that was 2019. This was the highest number of new books read of any year since I had my first baby, so that seems like a positive thing! 36 books- not huge but I did feel like I had some time to read this year. So what was 2019 like? Let's break it down: Longest book - Lethal White by Robert Galbraith vs shortest book - Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell. Shortest book wins here- it was a charming and pithy essay extolling the virtues of children's literature. Lethal White was the latest installment in a detective series that seems to be losing its way, or rather the author has different opinions on where it should go than I do. Reading themes I feel like a large part of the year was dominated by Dodie Smith. It started when I read 'Guard Your Daughters' by Diana Tutton, a book which I'd seen compared to 'I Capture the Cast...

So this blog has been a bit neglected lately, much as I try to at least update it monthly, BUT this time I've written something elsewhere on the Internet. It's for Kate's blog Women on the Shelf , which is a blog about books written by women. There are a whole lot of different things by different contributors, and I've written a review of Luminaries by Eleanor Catton . Spoiler: I loved it.

I've been meaning to write about this a while, but have been wondering how I can do it justice. The first thing I read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was this short story online- ' Jumping Monkey Hill ' (which I found on A Striped Armchair), and I think it was a good introduction. There are a lot of the same themes that crop up in her novels (at least the two I've read) and especially in Americanah - she takes on race and colonialism and identity, as well as the idea of authenticity. The real greatness in her writing, I think, is that it tackles these themes in a thought-provoking, confronting and not at all tired way. I read Purple Hibiscus last year and enjoyed it, would highly recommend it, but for me Americanah is a stand-out book. Americanah is the story of two Nigerian high-school sweethearts- Ifemelu and Obinze- who are separated when Ifemelu moves to America for college and Obinze is unable to get a visa to follow her. Instead, he ends up spending some time in t...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 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'...