An Armchair By The Sea

Sunday Sunday Sunday...

2012-02-26T17:38:00.001Z

This week has been very weird. I've spent the past few nights not sleeping well because of some health issues which have (finally) been resolved today after a twenty hour wait for a call back from NHS direct, so I'm feeling lots more relaxed this evening and hopefully ready to dive back into the blog in the coming week. Although things will still probably be a bit quiet for a while due to the thing I'm can't mention, I do hope to be around a bit more than I have been! As the hubby is watching football (groan), I thought I'd take the chance to write one of those rambling 'here's what I haven't achieved this month' type posts.

I signed up for the Year of Reading Shakespeare pretty much purely because I wanted to read Macbeth. Despite years and years of studying Shakespeare, I've somehow never managed to get around to this, and I really really want to. I have a giant adoration of Shakespearean tragedy - I used to quote Hamlet at people randomly and was pretty addicted to the Kenneth Branagh film for a while - but despite that and the fact that February has actually been a pretty good reading month for me, I've still not read it! In fairness, I blame Louisa Alcott, because after reading The Woman Behind Little Women, what else was I supposed to do but re-read Little Women? Of course that inevitably leads to a re-read of all four books (I'm currently at the beginning of Good Wives and can never stop until I finish Jo's Boys) but I refuse to feel bad about the disruption to my February schedule, because Louisa Alcott is great, and Little Women is even more so.

I've read some brilliant books in February, and despite my deviations I've still got a fair amount of challenge reading done, now I just need to get some reviews written! I'm not 100% sure on when that will happen as I'm participating in Adam's Magical March event and have some pretty big titles lined up for that, but I will do my best - I hate getting this behind! The books I've read this month are; Kick-Ass, Fables Vol 3: Storybook Love (for the Graphic Novels Challenge), A Wedding in December, Bleeding Kansas (for the 50 States Challenge), The Magician's Nephew (for the Narnia Reading Project), Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Little Women (for my Year of Reading Louisa May Alcott) and The Year of the Flood because Margaret Atwood is great.

So not a bad reading month, terrible reviewing month, but on the plus side I did just make cherry and dark chocolate muffins and raspberry jelly as well as starting on roast dinner. Then we're going to watch the '70s film of Jesus Christ, Superstar! because my siblings are doing a youth performance of it and I've had the music in my head all week. Hopefully watching it will exorcise it from my head!

Hope you're all having a brilliant Sunday!

Review: - Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

2012-02-22T11:31:00.002Z

I know this is my blog and I shouldn't feel like I have to apologise if I've not managed to post anything for a couple of weeks, but I do and so here I am, apologising yet again. In the past two blog-free weeks I've read quite a lot, but just been generally too exhausted to function outside of work. Today is my first free day off in aaaaaages, and I just finished The Woman Behind Little Women - the first book I've read for my Year of Reading Louisa May Alcott.

Here's a quick synopsis of the biography from Goodreads:

A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has delighted millions of readers
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott’s life: the effect of her father’s self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family’s chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott’s journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author’s classic rags-to-riches tale.
Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.

When my mum first read Little Women to us I remember telling her that I wanted to be Jo, and I remember her telling me that Louisa Alcott was the basis for the character of Jo, but I didn't realise quite how much that was true. As I was reading this book so many scenes and event in the lives of the Alcotts were just straight out of Little Women or one of its' sequels. The lives of the four March sisters are the idealised versions of Louisa's own life. The reality of Louisa's childhood was in reality often a lot closer to the experience of the Hummels, the German family the Marches feed and take care of in Little Women. Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott was one of the major founders of the Transcendentalist movement and originally a teacher along the kind of lines of Mr Bhaer, however his ideas about equal education, even allowing a black girl into his classroom alongside his white pupiles, were way ahead of their time and led to failure after failure and to the Alcott family fleeing their debts and moving time after time. Throughout her life, Louisa's father was much more of a man of ideas than of action. Early on he befriended such greats as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom provided Louisa with inspiration for numerous characters. Although Louisa has made a better version of her father in Mr March, his ideas of childraising are still clear throughout the books. Plumfeild is based on Fruitlands, meant to be a kind of transcendentalist commune but eventually a great failure and some of the hardest years of the Alcotts lives.

I was also happy to see the chapter where Beth dies in Good Wives described as "among the most affecting scenes in all fiction" (p272), as people always have to repress a snigger when I tell them that that scene is pretty much the only one in a book that is guaranteed to make me cry every single time. The character of Beth is an immortalisation of Louisa's sister Elizabeth (Lizzie), who also died young, although not as young as Beth March. The last time I read Jo's Boys I found a note I'd never read before about how the real life version of Amy had died prior to the book being written, which is why she doesn't feature so much in the last volume. Basically, the Little Women books are Louisa's life with the bad bits taken out.

There were a lot of things I already vaguely knew in Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, but to have the detail behind them made a huge difference. For example, the entire early part of Louisa Alcott's writing career was spent in her writing thrillers and the 'blood and thunder' tales that Jo March eventually becomes so ashamed of in Good Wives. I also solved my issues with the episode of Friends where they go on and on about how Beth dies in Little Women when I was always convinced she dies in Good Wives. Apparently that's a geographical thing, as in the States the two volumes are published as one, under the title Little Women, whereas in the UK they are more often published in the original two volumes under two seperate titles. This is good as it means I can finally forgive Friends and move on with my life...

I'm glad that I read this before diving into any of Alcott's major works, as I now feel that I have a solid grounding of knowledge going in. It's also the kind of book I'm going to be pushing into the hands of everybody I know who has even a vague enjoyment of Little Women, and yes, I've come away from it with quite a reading list, not only of particular Alcott titles I want to read (particularly Transcendentalist Wild Oats, Louisa's account of the Fruitlands episode), but also a renewed desire to read Thoreau's Walden, which I picked up a gorgeous copy of in a charity shop back in January. This was always a book I was going to want to read, and I'm glad that it was so well written, well presented and engaging. Yay for Louisa Alcott, breadwinner of her family, crusader for justice, and creator of the Marches! :-)

Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Dickens!

2012-02-08T09:00:00.000Z

I have a difficult relationship with Charles Dickens. On the one hand, I find his work heavy going and often difficult, and I really really have to psyche myself up to face one of his novels, but on the other hand, the ones that I have stuck with have been incredibly rewarding and I have ended up loving them! It was the 200th anniversary of his birth yesterday, and I saw this survey on Jillian's blog and thought I should mark the occassion by filling it in, as it will be probably at least another 50 years before I'll have as good a reason to feel bad about the lack of Dickens reading I've done again. Hopefully by that point, I'll have read a lot more! Also, I just really enjoy surveys!

How were you first introduced to Charles Dickens?

In terms of knowing the stories, I had a tape of Oliver Twist when I was quite a young child - probably about seven or so. I also don't remember the first time I watched Oliver! (which I still persistently refer to as 'Oliver-exclamation-mark' so as not to get it confused with other, more serious film versions..), so it was probably before I was three, atlhough I know that I was completely unaware (somehow...) of pretty much all of the more sinister undertones until I was about ten or so. Yes, I was a deliberately oblivious child...

Which Charles Dickens novels and stories have you read? Which are your favorites?

Not as many as I would like...Hard Times (after much debate and forcing myself through the incredibly boring first half of the book... eventually I loved it!), Great Expectations which was awesome, and A Christmas Carol which was even more awesome and so easy to read!

Which Charles Dickens novel(s) do you most want to read?

A Tale of Two Cities

Oliver Twist

Nicholas Nickleby

The Pickwick Papers - mostly because of the references to it in Little Women!

What are your favorite Charles Dickens quotes (up to three)?

I am terribly, terribly bad at remembering quotes. I'm trying to start up some kind of system for marking the passages I really like again but so far I'm failing. Any tips are greatly appreciated!!

Who are your Top 3 favorite Dickens heroines? and why?

I don't think she counts as a heroine, but I kind of love Estella from Great Expectations, despite the fact that she's kind of a bitch..

Who are your Top 3 favorite Dickens heroes? and why?

Bob Cratchit!! Also Pip, but only off and on, when he's not being lame...and Fagin, although he's also not a hero, and I'm speaking here strictly of the Ron Moody 'I'm Reviewing the situation' Fagin. Currently I know no other...

Which three Dickens villains do you most love to hate?

Bill Sykes (again, as played by Oliver Reed in Oliver! He terrified me as a child... Still does, if I'm honest) and Miss Havisham although I'm not sure if she's strictly considered a villain. Clearly I'm not too good at this whole categorising of characters thing!

Which Dickens characters (up to three) do you find the most funny?

Funny isn't really a word I'd associate with Dickens from what I've read so far....

If you could authorize a new film adaptation of one of Dickens’s novels, which would it be and why?

To be honest I think any of them aside from Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, as it would help the stories to become better known - especially with children.

If you could have lunch with Charles Dickens today, what question would you most like to ask him?

Why, oh why, did you die without writing down somewhere what your intentions were for the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood??

I'm scared to read it now because I know it will frustrate me not knowing how it ends!!

Have you ever read a Dickens biography or watched a biographical film about him?

Not yet, but I'd like to!

How many Dickens adaptations have you seen?

Oliver!, The Muppet Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol (animated Jim Carrey version), a fairly awful animated version of A Tale of Two Cities, also Oliver! on stage in the West End.

Which Dickens adaptation is your favorite?

Oliver! In case you hadn't guessed from my pretty much continual mentioning of it.

Have you seen multiple versions of A Christmas Carol? Which version is your favorite?

The Muppets of course! Michael Caine is brilliant!

Who is your favorite Dickens villain and (if applicable) who does your favorite portrayal of them?

I don't really have a favourite portrayal yet...

Have you seen any musical adaptations of any of Dickens’ stories? If so, which is your favorite song from it?

Either I'd Do Anything or Oom-Pah-Pah from Oliver!

So this survey has made it abundantly clear that I really, desperately need to actually read Oliver Twist!! It's also clear that when it comes to Dickens I prefer the loud, musical and often irreverant versions to the by the book adaptations... I think I need to work on my levels of classiness.... :-/

Epic Giant Review Fail...

2012-02-07T19:14:00.003Z

So here I am, once again, with one of those 'here are the reasons why I totally fail and am a suckface at keeping updated with my reviews' type posts. I have (once again) been reading a lot, but the past couple of Sundays have been spent going back and forth between Kent and London, so my regularly scheduled review writing time has gone out the window, hence why things have been a little quiet lately.

However on the plus side I went to see my first ever ice hockey game on Sunday and it was AMAZING. As kids my siblings and I were (who am I kidding, we still are) massive fans of The Mighty Ducks movies, featuring really young Joshua Jackson with giant hair and Emilio Estevez who never aged, and I just thought ice hockey looked like the coolest sport. Due to the serious shortage of proper ice in the UK though, it took me another fifteen years or so before I managed to get to a game, and granted the Guildford Flames aren't quite on the same level as the Ducks, but you know. We do what we can with what we've got. And I think I have discovered a new love :-)

Things may be a little quiet around here in the next month or so due to some family events and also the fact that I'm currently entirely exhausted all the time for no discernable reason at all, and generally not feeling too great so I'm hoping to get myself back to full strength by snuggling in bed and reading The Chronicles of Narnia! To cheer myself up, I'm going to make a list - because I love lists - of the books I've read since my last review, and I'm not going to let it be an insurmountable pile of pressure, but more a triumphant list of achievement. Here it is:

The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings (for the 50 States Challenge. I ADORED this book & have been trying to finish my review since January...)
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (serious eeeeeeeeekkkkkkk!!!! Is Margaret Atwood ever not awesome?)
Kick Ass by Mark Millar (for the Graphic Novel Challenge)
Fables Volume 3: Storybook Love by Bill Willingham (for the Telling Tales Challenge and also just for awesome. Also I found out that my local comic shop has a graphic novel loyalty card where you get a stamp every time you buy a graphic novel and when you have ten stamps you get £10 off, which pretty much equates to a freeeeeeeeee book!!)
A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve (for the 50 States Challenge. My first Shreve although she's been staring at me accusingly from the library shelves for years now and I will most definitely be taking the proper advantage of this from now on!)

So that's it. Where I've been and what I've been doing. I'm off to Narnia now, hope you're all enjoying the snow/rain/horrible ice wherever you are!

The Telling Tales Challenge February Review Link Up!

2012-02-02T09:00:00.000Z

We're one month in to the challenge, and I'm completely overwhelmed by the amount of participants we have - I thought it would be just me and Esther but we've got more than 20 of you awesome fairytale lovers!! We are so glad to have you all and your brilliant suggestions of fairytale related reading! Last month I only managed to read one book for the challenge, but this month I have The Chronicles of Narnia on my list, plus I plan on reading some of my Complete Grimms Fairytales, so February should be better!!

If you still want to sign up to join the challenge, we'd love to have you and you can do so here!

There is a list of what people read in January here.

Here is the place to link up your reviews for the challenge in February. As well as being a great way for you to keep track of what you've read, they also provide the rest of us with inspiration!!

Some book - related babble, but mostly not...

2012-02-01T13:43:00.000Z

So far in 2012 I've been really book - focused on the blog, and been reading a lot and such, which is obviously great, but in order to feel like An Armchair by the Sea is a proper representative of my interests like I want it to be, I thought I'd write a quick little post about some of the other things going on around these parts...

Some of you will have read about how I never ever finish anything I start, and obviously my first Blogoversary recently was a big boost in that direction, but I have another project which is along the same vein of finishing projects nobody ever thought I would. Last year, I learned to knit. For a year I just knitted - I decided early on that I couldn't teach myself to purl from the book I was using (Stitch n Bitch by Debbie Stoller), so I resigned myself to making purely scarves until I started getting left with all these random little bits of wool so I started to think wouldn't it be cool to use them all up making a patchwork blanket, and so that's what I've been doing. The other week, my mental block towards purling finally cleared so I'm moving on to some more advanced projects really soon hopefully, but yesterday I finally sewed together the first half of my blanket and I feel really proud of myself so I wanted to show you guys a picture!

The colours are entirely random, but I love it, and it gives me something to do with my hands when I'm watching hours of mindless Greys Anatomy and Gossip Girl! When it's finished it will be at least twice as big as this, depending on if I make another two 7x7 blocks for it or four... For those of you who are not at all craft minded, feel free to not read the knitting posts, but I would like to post a bit more about my craft activities on the blog. There aren't usually a lot of them, but it would be cool to keep track of the big achievements!

The other thing I've been gradually easing myself back into since Christmas is the acquisition of new music. As a teenager music was my obsession (along with books, obviously!), and a lot of my time was spent listening to music, talking about music, and discovering new music. Lately I'd kind of got into the habit of listening to the same old stuff over and over. I love jazz and blues - Ella Fitzgerald is a big favourite of mine, and for Christmas my husband got me Hugh Laurie's album, which is surprisingly great. I'd forgotten how it is to listen to an album and immediately find a song that you just want to listen to over and over again. The last album I bought before this was The Red Hot Chili Peppers' By the Way, so it has definitely been tooooo long! While obsessing over Laurie's version of Hallelujah I Love Her So (which I orginially heard him doing as a duet with Jamie Cullum - excellent!), I discovered that I already have a version of the song by Ray Charles, which led to much more listening to Ray Charles. Basically, I've spent a few evenings browsing around HMV lately, and I am remembering how great finding new music is! :-) Anybody got any music in this sort of genre (I do have very broad tastes outside of jazz!) they think I should listen to? I'm always up for suggestions!!

Anyway, that's my rambling over for now, I just felt like I needed to get these non book related things out of my system. Now I'm going to go back to ruining my February reading plans with The Year of the Flood. It's not on my list, and has made me want to do loads of Margaret Atwood re-reading!!

Norwegian Wood Readalong - Final Post

2012-01-31T23:22:00.002Z

I finished Norwegian Wood a while ago, and I didn't post last week because to be honest I forgot and also I'd finished the book quite a while previously and couldn't remember most of the things I wanted to say about it. It's pretty similar with this post... I'm glad that I finally read the book, but oh my goodness it was depressing!! What was up with everybody killing themselves? It seemed like every time I started to like a character, they killed themselves. I know I'm exaggerating, but honestly by the end I just it all to be over. I was kind of sick of everybody and their self -examination. I'm not sure whether or not I still want to see the film. I'm thinking I probably will at some point, but meh, I don't know. I think I might have to give myself some time to stop not caring about any of the characters first...

Sorry about the extreme brevity of this post. I wanted to write it so that I felt like I was done with Norwegian Wood, but I really didn't have much else to say but 'meh'. I think I will probably read more Murakami in the future as there were lots of things I liked while reading the book, just by the end I was sooooooo tired!

Norwegian Wood Post 2
Norwegian Wood Post 1

Review: - Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2012-01-30T19:44:00.003Z

I’m doing pretty well with my Mount TBR Challenge at themoment – not so well with Support Your Local Library, but that will berectified next month when the library reopens! Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of those books which has beenon my TBR list for about the past six or seven years, and I just never got toit despite it being sat on my shelf for probably around four of those years...I have read so many glowing reviews of it over the years and now I see why! Aswell as being a great, well –written and totally intriguing novel, it is alsoone of those books which made me want to know more about the author and aboutits’ social context. I’m a total geek, so I love books that give me an excuseto find out new stuff! As has been previously mentioned I know next to nothingabout American literature and the history thereof – terrible for a literaturegraduate I know, and I’m working on rectifying it. I feel like this book helpeda lot.

Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabamaand moved as a toddler to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first blacktownships, and the setting for much of TheirEyes Were Watching God. Her mother died when she was 13 and she didn’t getalong with her stepmother – eventually she joined a Gilbert and Sullivan troupeas a maid to the lead singer. At age 26 she passed for 16 in order to be ableto finish high school for free. Zora became part of the Harlem Renaissance (ifyou’re as clueless as I am about American history and cultural movements as Iam, Wikipedia and this website have lots more information!), and Their Eyes Were Watching God waspublished in 1937. Her second novel, it is generally regarded as hermasterwork, but she never received the financial reward she deserved for bothit and her other novels. She died in 1960 at the age of 69 without enough moneyto pay for her funeral and was buried in a grave which remained unmarked until1973 when Alice Walker placed a marker on it as a tribute to the writer who soinspired her.

Their Eyes WereWatching God is basically a love story. It is the story of Janie Starck, awoman who refuses to accept life without love, and follows her in her pursuitof it from age 16 and an arranged marriage to a much older man, through variousmen and adventures, to the final love of her life. It isn’t a happy story atall, but I often find that I’d rather read a novel which feels like it tells astory that people may actually have experienced, and although it is nice whenpeople are happy in everyday life, not everything ends with happy ever after.Having said that, although it is not a happy book per se, Their Eyes Were Watching God didn’t make me feel sad, maybe becausethe novel begins with Janie returning to Eatonville alone and telling her storyto her friend Phoeby, so from the outset there is no expectation for it to turnout well.

The thing that I loved most about this novel was the writing– it was so unbelievably beautiful! This is possibly one of my favouritedescriptions of anything, ever:

“She knew that God tore down the old world every evening andbuilt a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sunand emerge from the grey dust of its making”

The novel really takes form through Janie’s emotions, andthe description is really vivid and immersive. It took me a while to get into Their Eyes Were Watching God, because itis written in dialect which is kind of hard to follow, but once you relax andstart to read it as if it were being spoken, it’s a really easy read. Apologiesif this review becomes a little quotey but I want to remember the things whichI really loved. It’s been a while since I discovered a book where I enjoyed thelanguage this much:

“She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath thesurface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out intothe future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she livedbetween her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shadepatterns in the woods – come and gone with the sun”

Hurston manages to combine two totally different tonesreally successfully in her novel. The descriptive passages are as above –flowing and full of imagery, but the narrative is voiced in the Afro-Americandialect of Janie (mostly) and various others. The important point to make,though, is that the novel (published in 1937, remember), focuses entirely onJanie, a woman. And she is a strong woman; she doesn’t let men tell her what todo, and she follows her own heart. I have to admit, I loved her!

Their Eyes WereWatching God left me feeling hopeful and invigorated and I definitely wantto get hold of Zora Neale Hurston’s other books now, as well as reading somemore Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and various other authors who were inspired byher work.

January RAK

2012-01-30T09:00:00.000Z

Random Acts of Kindness is an awesome monthly event hosted by the amazing girls at BookSoulmates. Every month you want to participate you sign up with your wishlist, and the idea is that then you send out books to other people from their wishlists, and hopefully somebody will send you something from yours! I first participated in this way back last summer, but haven't received anything for a while although I've still sent out 1-2 books every month. However, this month I have been a very lucky girl!

Firstly, here is what I sent out:

Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon to Sarah at Whispering Words. I went on a bit of Turgeon obsessive last year, and I hope she loves it as much as I did!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I adored & cannot wait to see the film of, and......

... Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by David Levithian to Amy of Lady Reader's Bookstuff (whose blog design is gorgeous!). I really want to read this book!

Laura from The Scarlet Letter sent me not one but two books, both of which I've been desperate to read for ages. She absolutely made my day, and I'm so excited to read both of them!

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen - one of my favourite new discoveries from 2011, this is the only one of her novels I hadn't read, and I pretty much got stuck in as soon as it arrived and adored it!

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Reuben - A while back this was all over the blogosphere, and I have to admit to loving this kind of thing. I enjoy memoirs, especially of the self-improvement/potential fulfilling variety. This will also be making an appearance on the blog in the near future I would imagine.

Thanks so much, Laura!

I have to say one of my favourite things ever is finding an email from somebody saying that they want to send me an RAK. It really brightens up my day, and I enjoy sending them out almost as much. I love the added surprise of not knowing what's coming until it arrives, and it really makes me feel good about the state of the world to know that there are lots of people out there spending their hard earned money on sending books to random strangers purely because they know how great it feels to get an unexpected book :-)

January Summary & February Reading Plans!

2012-01-28T09:00:00.000Z

HOW is it February already? I swear the older I get, the faster time goes, it's mad. Anyway! January, my first month of making proper reading plans, and I did well. Really well, in fact. I planned to read eight books and the first part of Les Miserables, and I read seven books and almost the first part of Les Miserables. The only book I didn't read that I planned to was 1Q84 Books 1 & 2, and that was because after reading Norwegian Wood I was pretty much all Murakami'd out (yes, that's a valid word).

Sooooooo onto February reading plans! Obviously I need to read the next part of Les Miserables. Aside from that I have no reading commitments at all, which is nice. I'd like to read at least one other classic as well as my monthly graphic novel. Here are the books I plan to read. As with last month I will link up reviews as the month progresses!

The Awakening - Kate Chopin
One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson
Dear Fatty - Dawn French
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S Lewis (any or all of)
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
A Wedding in December - Anita Shreve
Bleeding Kansas - Sara Paretsky
Kick Ass - Mark Millar

Also the rest of Aunt Jo's Scrapbag Vol 1 by Louisa May Alcott which I am reading (because it is short stories and I can just about cope with short stories) on my laptop... I've read the first two stories and so far it's just like tiny snippets of things which could just as well have come out of LIttle Women. Needless to say I love it!

Magical March Event!

2012-01-27T20:27:00.000Z

Those of you who regularly read this blog will know that one of my major goals with my reading is to continually challenge myself and push myself to read new and different genres. As a teenager I was an absolutely gigantic fan of fantasy, but lately I've not been reading as much and I miss it. Granted, this is probably due to the lack of new Neil Gaiman titles and the fact that I've read everything David Gemmell ever wrote at least three times, but still it won't do! Adam of Roof Beam Reader is hosting a Magical Realism and Fantasy event during March and I can't think of a better way to make sure I get to the titles I have listed for the Mount TBR Challenge!

There are different levels of participation. I plan to go for the Sorcerer's Class which requires me to read and review 3 -5 books during March. The books I plan to read are:

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones
Till We Have Faces by C.S Lewis

I have some pretty heavy family stuff coming up in March, so I hope that the fantasy will provide some escapism from it all! Hopefully I will be able to get through this list and review all of them. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell has been on my shelf a particularly long time, and after reading Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu last year and loving it, I cannot wait to get to this one!

For more details and to sign up for the event (which you should totally do, go on, you know you want to!) go here! :-)

Review: - The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

2012-01-24T10:45:00.000Z

You know when you're a little kid and you can't sleep at all Christmas night because you're *just too excited* about what Santa will bring? I am like that when I know people are going to send me RAK's. Not that I don't sleep, but I do literally hold my breath coming in my door every day to see if they have arrived yet, and I am always super psyched to open them and see what I've got. This month, I got The Peach Keeper (thanks again, Laura!) which is the last remaining Sarah Addison Allen book I hadn't read. It also just happens to be set in North Carolina, and so it counts for the 50 States Challenge!

I don't think I can overstate how much I love Sarah Addison Allen. I first discovered Garden Spells last year and fell in love. Her books are about magic, food and the meaning of home and every time I read one of them I get all nostalgic and have an overwhelming urge to bake...

Here's a synopsis of The Peach Keeper from Goodreads:

It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept secrets surrounding the troubling remains have also come to light, seemingly heralded by a spate of sudden strange occurrences throughout the town.

Now, thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerous passions and tragic betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover truths of the long-dead that have transcended time and defied the grave to touch the hearts and souls of the living.

Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.

Friendship, love, and tradition pretty much covers it. It's not a particularly complex plot. Willa's family used to be rich, Paxton's family are still rich. In high school Willa liked to pull pranks which were attributed to Paxton's twin brother, Colin, until the last day when Willa finally announced that she was the 'Walls of Water High School Joker' to the world. Her classmates, especially Colin, still expect her to be the same as she was back in high school, and when Colin comes back into town for the opening of the hotel he finds out how much she has changed..

As ever food is involved although to a lesser extent than in either Garden Spells or The Sugar Queen.
In this case it's coffee. Willa runs an outerwear store which also has a cafe producing products containing coffee. I have to say I don't like coffee, but some of the stuff sounds amazing - you can get some recipes at Sarah's website, and I may well be giving them a go in the not too distant future!

The characters in The Peach Keeper were a little predictable, but in a good way; in the end all everybody really wanted was to come home and be loved and accepted, which is probably all most of us want, really. I guess that's part of why I like Addison Allen's books so much - she always seems to strike the right kind of note to resonate with me. I can almost always see myself somewhere in her books, and I love that. Also, all of the characters care and that's unusual. Although Paxton and Colin and even Sebastian, Paxton's gay best friend who turns out not to be gay/man she's secretly in love with, are a little bit mixed up and their stories are a bit tangled and confusing, really all they want is for the people they care about to be happy. With the world in the state that it's in at the moment (and yes, I know I'm always going on about this!) it's really nice to read something where nobody has ulterior motives and people look out for each other rather than trying to destroy eaach other or drag each other down.

So basically, yay for The Peach Keeper. It was snuggly and comforting and magical and I loved it!

Review: - A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000Z

I have always studied English Literature, all the way from secondary school through to my BA degree, and I'd love to do an MA one day soon, so I've had a lot of experience with Shakespeare - some good, some bad, some downright repetitive (I've studied The Tempest a grand total of five times!), but my very first Shakespearean experience was with A Midsummer Night's Dream at the grand old age of ten. I was in an after school drama club where the teacher thought it would be good to cast me as Helena because (and I quote) 'you're tall'. I should add that I have all the dramatic ability of a stick insect. Oh, and I'd had a giant crush on the guy playing Lysander for about two years but was always too cripplingly shy to talk to him... As you can imagine, it was an interesting experience! Despite the agony of the actual performance, I fell in love with the play. I found it hilarious and romantic at the same time and I loved learning my lines - they were so beautiful and poetic and sounded so great said aloud. Reading it again I found myself smiling at lines I remembered vividly. A particular favourite was "thou painted maypole" (Hermia, Act 3,Scene 2), which I remember finding absolutely hilarious at the time (ah, ten year old humour!).

A Midsummer Night's Dream is believed to be Shakespeare's fourteenth play, performed around 1595. It's also probably one of the most well -known of his plays, and is performed annually in Regents Park in London on an outdoor stage. It has (according to Wikipedia!), four ballet adaptations, nine film adaptations, two television productions and countless literary adaptions. Also, for me 2012 is the year of all things fairytale and folklore, and this definitely counts!

For anybody who doesn't know, A Midsummer Night's Dream basically takes place in a wood outside of Athens. Four Athenians are the central characters: Lysander and Hermia are in love and planning to elope together, Demetrius wants to marry Hermia and although her father says she must marry him, she refuses, and Helena is in love with Demetrius. The problems arise when the Athenians unknowingly wander into the middle of a dispute between Oberon, the fairy king, and Titania, the fairy queen, and become subject to the meddling of Robin Goodfellow, otherwise known as Puck. People are made to fall in love with other people, different people are given asses heads, and general hilarity ensues until eventually they all live happily ever after (it's not a tragedy, after all).

I am always really apprehensive of starting to read Shakespeare - for some reason part of me still thinks it's going to be really difficult to read, although I know it isn't. I read A Midsummer Night's Dream in a day, and periodically had to remind myself to put it down and do things like go back to work. I got so swept up in the language, and I just wish that I could write things like this:

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And as I am an honest puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpents tongue,
We will make amends ere long,
Else the puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends."

Robin Goodfellow, Epilogue

I know that there is much more I could say about the play, but basically I would just recommend that you go and see it. I plan to go in Regents Park this year if I can get tickets, as it's on over my birthday which would be amazing. Even reading it is just such a magical experience, and although the human characters are a little bit on the whiny side, and Oberon and Titania are frankly a bit petty, Nick Bottom is hysterical (with or without his asses head!) and Puck is a chaos - making genius. I think he was the forerunner of Peeves from Harry Potter.

Shakespeare wrote his plays as entertainment for Queen Elizabeth and various other noble people. I really really wish that some of the people who script for TV shows nowadays would take more than a few leaves out of his book. Why can't we have stuff this good to entertain us??

Norwegian Wood Readalong Post Two....

2012-01-20T19:50:00.001Z

I had a bit of a panic on Monday night because I suddenly remembered the next day was Tuesday and Norwegian Wood had been languishing in the corner to which I banished it last week when I made myself stop reading and as far as I remembered I hadn't read past the end of chapter five.. After I'd been panic reading for about ten minutes, it transpired that I was well into chapter 7, at which point I thought it was probably better to just keep going...

Because of that I've finished the book, so I'm going to keep it short this week, and still talk about the allotted chapters next week and the following so as not to ruin it for any of you who haven't yet finished it.

Chapters 5 and 6 were reeeeeally Naoko-ish (yes, this is a word). I missed Midori. I liked that we found out where the hell Naoko had gone off to, and in a way I kind of liked the insular nature of Toru's visit to the sanitorium, but the entire two chapters were basically more about Naoko and Naoko's problems. I still like Murakami's style I think. It's difficult to tell because the things I think I like about it - that it's really simple and kind of mundane in its' description - are the same things that can make me really hate a writer. I think the thing that keeps me reading Norwegian Wood is the same thing that kept me going when I read Kafka on the Shore, which is the quirkiness. He goes on and on talking about bus routes and what Toru ate and drank and what time in the morning it was, and then suddenly he throws in a character like Midori or Reiko, seemingly just for flavour. Also I really like a lot of the descriptions:

"Her face had lots of wrinkles. They were the first thing to catch your eye but they didn't make her look old. Instead, they emphasized a certain youthfulness in her that transcended age. The wrinkles belonged where they were, as if they had been part of her face since birth" p123

I kind of like how visual the book is in general, but especially these chapters in the sanitorium - I really did get the feeling that it was a place outside of reality. Like it had its own time zone and life was kind of suspended while you were there.

I find Toru and Naoko's relationship increasingly weird though. It kind of seems like the only reason they are really together at all is because Toru feels responsible for Naoko because she was his best friend's girlfriend, and his best friend killed himself, which is clearly not a great thing to base a relationship on. Also it would be good if Norwegian Wood could get out of its' own head a little. It makes my head spin a little bit - they always seem to be talking about really deep stuff, which is fine, but to me it's kind of no wonder they're all a bit messed up if they sit around analysing everything all day.

These two chapters weren't the greatest for me, I have to admit. I feel like the story is a little lifeless without Midori!

Fill in the Gaps...

2012-01-19T22:18:00.000Z

I have not blogged at all this week, and I feel ridiculously bad about it so I thought I'd just put up a little update post more to try to motivate myself with what I need to be doing than anything else! The big news is that I totally failed in my book buying ban already.... I went into Waterstone's the other day while waiting for my husband and bough him Kick Ass by Mark Millar because we watched the movie for the first time the other day and he was dying to read the book. I figured that didn't count, as it was a gift, but then they were having a sale and you all know what that means.. I bought The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas at 50% off because I've been reading good things about it and I read the first paragraph and it seemed interesting, and The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings at 15% off because of the movie that's coming out soon. The Descendants also happens to be set in Hawaii which is convenient because I didn't have a Hawaii book for the 50 States Challenge yet and I started it yesterday and I adore it so far.

So yes, I am officially a giant fail - face but I don't feel bad about it - I also bought River Cottage Veg Everyday as we've been watching the series and I'm really interested in doing more vegetarian cooking, so I'm going to use it as an incentive and feeling productive rather than guilty. I'm doing brilliantly with the reading so far this year but terribly with reviewing, which I hope to rectify tomorrow. Hubby's on a late at work, so I plan to sit on the laptop with a lot of tea and get all caught up and scheduled on reviews as well as doing some (*gasp*) online reading for my Year of Louisa May Alcott... Wish me luck!

Review: - Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

2012-01-16T22:08:00.002Z

I don’t know if I mention it enough, but just in case I don’t,I really like graphic novels. Like, reallylike them. I have a lot of t shirts with really geeky graphic novel relatedthings on them, and I refuse to be ashamed. I love the effort that goes into themand I love their general thick glossiness and how the stories themselves aregenerally totally kick ass. As part of the Graphic Novel Challenge last year Idecided to branch out from my almost solely Neil Gaiman based graphic novelcollection and try some different styles. FunHome came on my radar when I was looking for books the internet thoughtwere similar to Perspolis by MarjaneSatrapi. Any of you who have been reading my blog over the last year will probablyknow that Persepolis was my ‘oh mygod what is this book and why did nobody tell me about it before??!’book of 2011. I LOVED it, and up until I read The Night Circus, it was the book I was recommending to everybody,so I had incredibly high expectations of FunHome going in.

Alison Bechdel’s autobiography centres around the familybusiness; a funeral (‘fun’) home, and her childhood and growing up, althoughreally it focuses on her issues with her father, Bruce Bechdel, and coming toterms with being a lesbian. Alison’s father is painted as a remote man, unpredictable,angry, and distant from his children. The reasons for this – that he was acloset homosexual who was having affairs with male students, and Alison’sbabysitter – don’t become clear until later on in the book, but they have aconsiderable effect on Alison herself both consciously and unconsciously. Shefeels as a child that he loves their big, historic house more than hischildren, and is more interested in renovating it than in spending time withher and her brothers.

Although I didn’t love it like I love Persepolis, I can see where the comparison came from. Both are stories of growing up in unusual anddifficult circumstances (just to be clear, I’m not comparing Bechdel andSatrapi’s situations – they are clearly not the same, but they are both storiesof a young girl feeling very lost and uncertain of who she was and where shebelonged), and their style of illustration is similar – both are done solely inblack and white and are very clear and easy to follow. Personally, it’s a styleI find more relaxing than the full, aggressive colour of many other graphicnovels.

The story isn’t told chronologically but jumps around a lotwhich I found made it more engaging. Both of Alison’s parents are prodigiouslyintelligent people; her father is a professor, and her mother is an actress.When I originally wrote that sentence, it came out in the past tense, andalthough Alison’s mother is still acting during the course of Alison’schildhood and adolescence, she feels like one of those women whoseindividuality became subsumed by her husbands’ personality and her children’sneeds. Her mother seems very disappointed with life, resigned to living with aman who doesn’t really want to be with her, and whose interests are totallyseparate from her own. Bechdel talks about her mother with a sort of sadness,and actually I just found out that she is bringing out a new book in May 2012entitled Are You My Mother, seeminglyto even things out a bit.

Throughout the book, Alison’s parents are not often seentogether, and when they are they are violently arguing, but still it takesAlison’s mother until Alison is nearly twenty to ask her father for a divorce.Her parents seem to both have very creative and intellectual lives, and her motheris in many ways an incredibly positive role model for Alison – acting andcompleting a Masters thesis while raising three children, but despite all theachievement she is shown as disappointed, lifeless, and worn out. The facialexpressions in Fun Home were one ofthe things which made it most effective for me. Bruce Bechdel’s face is alwaysthe same – closed up and emotionless even when he is talking to Alison abouthaving to visit a psychiatrist because he is ‘bad, not good like you’ (p153).Because Bechdel obviously knew what her father had done while writing thenovel, the underlying accusation is always there throughout the story , givingthe reader a different perspective on events than Bechdel herself would havehad at the time.

People say that to a degree, every family is dysfunctional.I personally don’t have an experience of this – my family is big and loud andwe all have similar interests and are always talking and ringing each other toborrow books, movies, clothes. We go to the pub together, to the cinema, someof my siblings came to stay for New Year and we had an awesome party... So I amlucky, but I know a lot of people who are less lucky than me, and everybody hastheir secrets it’s just that some are bigger than others, and Bruce Bechdels’secret was definitely one of the bigger ones.

Another thing that I liked about Fun Home though was the other thing that makes it so comparable to Persepolis. It is filled with books.Throughout Alison’s life, she reads. Her father reads - he recommends her booksfrom time to time. When she begins to think that she is a lesbian, she readsabout it – all the books she can get her hands on. I can completely relate tothis, and I’m sure many other readers can. When I want to learn aboutsomething, I read about it. Although I really enjoy a good debate, I am thekind of person who likes to be sure that I have all my facts straight first,and so in many ways I would rather learn intellectually first, before puttingideas into practice. I learned to knit this past year from a book, which I know is not really comparable tolearning about your sexuality from books, but it can be so comforting to readabout somebody who has been through the situation you have been through andbeen confused as you are confused and to see how they resolved their situation.

Fun Home won’t begoing on the list of things I rave at people about, but it will be staying onmy shelf so that I can recommend it to people.

The Sunday Salon - Giveaway Winners & Progress Report

2012-01-15T11:41:00.001Z

Hello all! I hope everybody is enjoying their Sunday - it's actually disgustingly sunny where I am, considering it's January and all.. I'm wondering if we're actually going to get proper winter at all this year... Anyway! To business! I drew the result of my Blogoversary Giveaway this morning, and here's what happened:

The winner of the International Giveaway iiiiisssss

Iris

which is kind of fitting, as she was my Secret Santa for Persephone Secret Santa this year, so I'm glad she won!

The winner of the UK Giveaway is:

Ellie

who I will be sending a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran!

Congratulations Iris and Ellie, and thanks to everybody who entered and wished me happy things :-)

Now that's done, I thought I'd continue my whole scheduled reading plan by doing a quick update of what I've read so far in January...

Of the books I planned to read, I have finished four of the eight. These are:

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (for the Graphic Novel Challenge)
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (for Mount TBR Challenge)
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (for A Play a Month Challenge)
The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen (for the 50 States Challenge)#

I have half finished a review of Fun Home which I hope to put up either later today or tomorrow, but I really need to get my act together with writing reviews - I'm accumulating quite a pile! I have also read nearly half of Norwegian Wood for the readalong and would have finished it if I wasn't trying desperately to pace myself to fit in with the schedule. Basically, I'm impressed with myself. This week I want to read the first part of Les Miserables for the year long readalong I'm taking part in, and finished The Folklore of Discworld by Terry Pratchett & Jacqueline Simpson for the Telling Tales Challenge, and also just for awesome.

I know my reading is incredibly challenge centred at the moment,and to be honest I thought that would bother me a lot more than it actually does. I appear to have chosen well this year :-) Who knows, maybe I'm learning?

Happy Sunday everybody, hope you have a great, relaxing day!

The Way I Write Reviews

2012-01-13T14:00:00.000Z

I've been thinking about the way I write reviews. During the course of the last year my reviewing style has changed and probably for the better - I scrapped the idea of giving books ratings towards the end of 2011and I've felt much more comfortable for it, but I kind of feel that a bigger change needs to come about.

More and more lately I've found myself just scribbling out whatever comes to mind when writing about books, and not really putting too much thought into the structure or whether I've said everything that I want to say about something. I dislike this. I'm getting sloppy and I feel like I'm not giving some of the awesome books I read the respect that they deserve. I think my problem is that I've been easily distracted for the past month or so. I'm not sure why this is, but I really need to stop writing reviews while watching movies/knitting/reading other books, and actually make sure I have dedicated review writing time each week.

This sort of falls in with my plans for our new spare bedroom. Since we found out we were moving and getting a spare room I've been super excited to turn it into a sort of reading room/office, but I've not really got around to it yet for various reasons, mostly laziness, but also that what I really want is one of these:

Picture from here

However within my budget and given the fact I have no way of picking it up from anywhere should I actually manage to get hold of one, it's proving difficult, and without it I have no table on which to write which is somewhat of a problem (I know, I know, excuses excuses right?). The room does currently have a piano, a sofa and four big bookcases in it, although I haven't really got around to sorting them out yet, and the wardrobe is still kind of a dumping ground. My project for the coming weeks is to get this room sorted out, with some kind of space for me to write in and for the husband to compose stuff, to maybe get a few more bits of officey type furniture and just basically straighten it all out and get it sorted. Hopefully this will allow me to really get myself organized for 2012 on the blog... (If anybody knows where I can get a desk for cheapish, let me know!!)

That's my plan anyway, you may hear me whinging about its' lack of progress in the not to distant future...

The Books I Started But Didn't Finish Challenge

2012-01-11T09:00:00.000Z

I have a serious problem with starting books and then never quite getting around to finishing them. It's not that the books I start are no good, it's just that I'm easily distracted by other things. Some of the books I've not finished are meant to be great, and I would feel really positive if I could finish some of them this year. Jillian at A Room of One's Own is hosting the Books I Started but Didn't Finish challenge, and I am so joining!

This is my list of the books I want to finish this year:

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak - This is my definitive unfinished book. I have been reading this book since I was thirteen, and I've started again on at least three seperate occassions. I have really enjoyed what I've read and I really want to finish it this year, as it's probably the book that's been the longest on my shelf unfinished.
The Swan Thieves by Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian is one of my favourite books, and I was super excited to find out that Kostova had written another one. I started this book and was really enjoying it when something else (I forget what) got in the way and I never finished it.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas - I started this as part of Allie's readalong last year, but never finished it. Again, disracted. I read about three quarters of it, though, and that was great. I'm excited to read the rest!
Bleak House by Charles Dickens

There are more, I may add them to the list as the year progreses depending how all my other reading goes, but I've decided to try not to pressure myself with too much to get through in 2012. I think I'll feel happier about everything if I keep my goals manageable and am actually able to complete some of them!

Norwegian Wood Readalong Post One

2012-01-10T19:46:00.002Z

I was excited about starting Norwegian Wood for Reading Rambo's Readalong. Murakami's style is kind of similar to Kazuo Ishiguro's, and he's one of my favourite authors. People warned me that I wouldn't be able to only read four chapters for this week's section, and they were half right. I did manage to only read the first four chapters, but I literally had to force myself to shut the book, put it down and in a different room...

I am a big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, and stylistically at least, Norwegian Wood is quite similar. It's incredibly immersive. So far, the basic story is thus:

As the novel opens, 37 year old Toru Watanabe is on board a plane about to land in Germany when he hears Norwegian Wood by the Beatles. It takes him back to his college days, and the strange relationship he had with Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend. In their hometown, Toru and Naoko are both victims of a tragedy which affects both their relationship, and the rest of their lives. A little later while at University in Tokyo, they accidentally meet again and rekindle their uneasy friendship. It's unclear what are the boundaries of the relationship between them, and just when Toru begins to try to find out, Naoko vanishes. Following her disappearance, Toru meets Midori, a girl without much of a family who plays the guitar terribly.. By the point at which I forced myself to stop, Toru and Midori have had a date during which they watched a house burn while Midori played the guitar, and he hasn't seen her since. He has, however, managed to have a very early morning encounter with two strange girls, and has just got home from spending the night with one of them, to find a letter from Naoko...

I really, really, really wanted to know what was in the letter. It was actually physically difficult to stop myself from turning the next page. Norwegian Wood didn't immediately grab me - I struggled with the first couple of pages, but once the story got going, it really got going! It is told solely from Toru's perspective, and despite his confusion and inconsistency, I like him. He feels like a very honest narrator to me, and I know this will probably come back to bite me and he'll turn out to be like a fifty year old, serial killing woman or something (if he does, this book is totally not what I think it is...), but I like that he doesn't try to hide the fact that he goes from Naoko to Midori to finding random girls to sleep with, and his confusion about all of his various situations are always made very clear. I would love to be able to read Norwegian Wood in the original Japanese, rather than in translation, but as I'm notoriously crap at learning languages, I don't see that happening any time soon. However, even in translation the language is very clear and precise. As a reader I'm not particularly a fan of having to decipher loads of cryptic prose - although I have been known to do it I really do have to be in the mood for it, I'm very much a fan of clarity, and Norwegian Wood has it by the bucketload so far.

However, it also has just the right level of mystery in the plot to keep me totally engrossed. I want to know what's going on with Naoko, where Midori keeps disappearing to, not to mention whether or not Toru will actually ever sort himself out or not...Basically, I love the book, and I know that I'm going to find it difficult to impossible to stop reading again after next weeks' segment.

I'll have to wait until I finish to be sure, but I'm fairly sure I've found a new author...

One Whole Year of An Armchair by the Sea!

2012-01-09T09:07:00.126Z

I am a terrible procrastinator. I am also one of those people who gets wildly excited about a project, and for about a month will live and breathe that project and then totally lose interest. When I first started this blog, that's what everybody (myself included) thought it would be, but it's been a year and I'm still going strong!

I know, my graphic skills are brilliant...

Originally started back in January 2011 as a response to my frustration with never being able to remember what I'd read when people asked me to recommend something brilliant, An Armchair by the Sea (originally entitled The Tangled Web We Weave - what was I thinking?!) has been awesome in so many unexpected ways. Always an avid listmaker, I've discovered reading challenges with a vengeance, and have expanded my reading comfort zone beyond all recognition in 2011! I am hosting my first reading challenge in 2012, and I've learned lots (and still have LOTS to learn) about the babble that is HTML. In a year where I've relocated to a completely new part of the country, started a new job, moved house again, and got married, it's been amazing to have a place that's entirely my own where I can just immerse myself in books and related things and forget about the world for a while. Also, living in a rented flat, we can't paint the walls (a horror to my former self - as a teenager I changed the colour of my room approximately every six months to coincide with my mood!), so I substitute changing my blog design around and it stops me from going white-wall crazy.

By now I hope you can tell that I'm going to make a MASSIVE deal of this whole blogoversary thing. I know it's probably not that exciting to lots of people, but in lots of ways I feel like this blog has helped save me this year. 2011 has been tough in many ways and having a focus has helped immeasurably. I just want to give a shout-out to some awesome people (some of whom will have no idea who I am but hey) who helped inspire the blog and have made me smile a lot this year! Firstly Sam, whose blog, Tiny Library, was the first I ever read I think, and who was the first follower I had who wasn't related to me! Her comments back when I wasn't getting any were a big motivation, so thank you! Also, Hanna, who I think I probably mention too much but oh well. She's pretty much my reading twin - reads all the things I've been wanting to read for years, sends me unexpected presents, writes hilarious reviews, understands the mania of car boot sales, and is generally awesome! Go and read her blog and thank me later :-) Then to the blogs (other than the two already mentioned, of course) which are my favourites. These are the ones I know will inspire me to make my own blog better. They are all brilliantly well written, inspiring, and always manage to make me add to my TBR! A Literary Odyssey, Sophisticated Dorkiness, Amused, Bemused and Confused, A Room of One's Own, Dead White Guys, English Major's Narrative, Estella's Revenge, Musings of a Bookshop Girl, Roof Beam Reader, The Book Ladys Blog, Your Move, Dickens, and a couple of recent additions, Delaisse and Reading Fuelled by Tea.

Just to demonstrate the kind of effect blogging has had on my reading, these are the books I read in the past year because of blogger hype/recommendations from bloggers/RAK/Review Copies:

Of No Consequence by Sonia Rumzi
Olga: A Daughter's Tale by Marie- Therese Browne
The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition by J.M Barrie
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, & Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
You Are Next by Katia Lief
The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen
Coming Up For Air by Patti Callahan Henry
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek
The Art of Forgetting by Camille Noe Pagan
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark
How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Bake Sale by Sara Varon
Happily Ever After by John Klima
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, Legends in Exile, and Animal Farm by Bill Willingham
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
An Autumn Crush by Milly Johnson
The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory
Jane Austen Made Me Do It by Laurel Ann Natress
Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Out of these books, ten have ended up on my 'best of 2011' list and are up for grabs (I HATE that expression!) in my giveaway!

Now I shall stop, except to say thank you to everybody who reads An Armchair by the Sea, whether you comment or not! You are very much appreciated, as demonstrated by my Blogoversary Giveaway! :-)

First Blogoversary Giveaway Extravaganza!

2012-01-08T09:00:00.001Z

Tomorrow An Armchair by the Sea celebrates its first blogoversary. A suitably gushing and emotional post will be going up then, but as some of you will know, I love to give people bookish presents, so I thought I'd host an awesome giveaway for all you lovely people. Between now and January 15th you can enter to win one of two amazing prizes!

For those of you in the UK:

A book of your choice from my Top Ten Books of 2011 list, just leave a comment with your choice of book, your email and a link to your blog if you have one below and I'll draw a winner on the 15th.

For International readers:

A choice of either:

Two Waldo Pancake magnetic bookmarks - I know how it ends and Read this instead of book. I got one for christmas, and they're brilliant.

An Oscar Wilde magnet - Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Your choice of colour of a Go Away I'm Reading cotton tote bag.

All of these are from my new love, Something Literary, which you should definitely go and check out! To win, just leave a comment with your choice of prize, your email and a link to your blog and I'll draw a winner on the 15th.

Please remember to leave your email address, as if you don't I won't be able to contact you if you win!

The Telling Tales Challenge - January Review Link Up

2012-01-06T21:33:00.001Z

Hello all! I'm not too sure how to go about this whole linking reviews thing, but I'm going to give it a go. I hope you're all as excited about the Telling Tales Challenge as I am!

I'm going to try to put up a review link-up post at the beginning of every month and leave a link to it at the top of the blog somewhere so you can just stop by as and when and link up your stuff for the challenge! Basically, if you've read anything for the challenge that you've reviewed on your blog, Goodreads, LibraryThing or anywhere else online, leave a link here! If you want to sign up for the challenge, you can still do so here! Happy Reading!

Review: - Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad and Life Was a Catch 22 by Erica Heller

2012-01-05T23:12:00.000Z

Straight up I will say, just so nobody is under any delusions, I have not yet read Catch 22. I started it once, when I was about fifteen, but I got bored and gave up and all I remember about it now is that there was a guy with several of the same name. Many people assure me that it is worth the effort though, and I am hoping to get to it later on this year as part of the Books I Should Have Read Challenge.

Now that's out the way, the next thing that I did wonder halfway through Yossarian Slept Here was if I've not read any Joseph Heller, why bother reading his biography? There are several answers. The first is that Rebecca at The Book Ladys Blog mentioned this book in several places (Twitter, her blog, Bookrageous to name a few) in a very positive way, and apparently I'm lately reading a lot of things she recommends and being disappointed by none of them, I may add. Also, they had it in the library on the shiny and exciting 'New Releases' stand. I love the books on this stand, because it feels (and probably is in some cases) like nobody else has ever read them before me - it's kind of like getting a brand new book for free, and who doesn't love a free book?? And then finally the fact that by the time I wondered about the reasons why I was reading the book, I was entirely absorbed by the book and it was impossible and unthinkable to stop reading it.

Erica Heller’s writing is very enjoyable; she managed to lull me into really enjoying Yossarian Slept Here before I’d realised that I was. Joseph Heller's life was in many ways completely ordinary, and Yossarian Slept Here is in the most part a chronicle of the life of a normal family, but with the addition of things like visits from Mario Puzo and invitations to parties at Woody Allen's house. Having said that, I generally enjoy books which focus on the family dynamic, coming from a big mad one myself, I find other peoples' unendingly fascinating. I was worried that I would feel left out of the loop having not read any of Heller the elder’s work, but in actual fact it is barely mentioned, except as a catalyst for things (i.e. because of Catch 22’s success there was enough money for the family to move apartment/take holidays etc), but to be honest, considering that I have never met a person who hasn’t heard of Catch 22 even if not a lot of them have actually read it, I would have thought the money would have featured more in the Heller family’s lives.

The thing that Erica Heller does brilliantly is that she keeps it personal, while at the same time being detached about it. While a lot of ‘celebrity’ memoirs are all about the shock factor – terrible abuse or drastic surgery – the only shocker in Yossarian Slept Here is that Joseph Heller was a contradiction; an unpredictable and often not very nice man. I have to say, though, that I didn’t really expect him to be lovely, it’s just not the image my brain associated with him. His relationship with his daughter is painted as being a fairly difficult one – while I got the impression that there was a lot of love in it, Joseph Heller seemed to have a pretty hard time interacting with children, and often comes across as fairly self absorbed. I guess if you are a writer then you must need a certain degree of self – absorption, if only to put up with doing a job that requires you to be solitary so much of the time, but to be one of those writers who deliberates over a novel for years – who literally ends up eating sleeping and breathing the novel they are attempting to write, must make you even more so.

In the end the impression of Joseph Heller I was left with is of a man intensely conflicted – who was at once caring and cold, detached and incredibly involved, emotional and emotionless. A man who basically ended up destroying his family for a while with his own distortions of the truth, and lost the love of his life from which he never seemed to have fully recovered. The story of Hellers’ parents romance, marriage, divorce and its’ aftermath was very poignant and really touching in all its’ intricacies. I just found it incredibly sad to read about the destruction of a couple who were once so much in love.

The day before I turned eighteen my then boyfriend was rushed to hospital almost totally out of the blue because all the nerves in the left side of his body had randomly stopped working properly. We were freaked. He had to be transferred from our local hospital to a specialist neurology place where they ran tests on him. All. Night. I got about two hours of sleep and rang him on the hospital phone at the crack of dawn before going to college, sitting an exam, then getting on a bus for an hour to get to the hospital where they told me that he had Guillain- Barre Syndrome, which is basically a post-viral disorder affecting the nervous and immune systems. It can be really terrible, and in cases, fatal. Thankfully in this case it wasn’t, but it was about a month in hospital followed by some intensive physio and probably about a year to pretty much full recovery. The reason I tell you this is that during the time I spent sitting in the hospital, somebody mentioned to me that Joseph Heller had had GBS, and that he had written a book about it. The book, No Laughing Matter, proved really difficult to get hold of at that time, and so I have still never read it, but having read Yossarian Slept Here , I’ve added it to my wishlist and am really interested to read it. Although it probably wouldn’t be too interesting to somebody without experience of GBS, to me it would be brilliant to read about how somebody else coped with the experiences we went through. Also, to make a full recovery from an incredibly debilitating disorder shows incredible strength of character and determination, which only strengthened Erica Heller’s picture of her father as a giant character.

Basically, if there is a biography that you can read and enjoy without knowing anything at all about the person on whom it is based, then Yossarian Slept Here is it. It’s pacy, well-written, and the chapters have awesome titles. It was the first book I finished in 2012 and was a brilliant way to start the year!

Norwegian Wood Readalong - Intro Post

2012-01-03T11:07:00.001Z

During the month of January, Reading Rambo is hosting a readalong of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It's been on all of my lists for everything for ages, so I thought I'd join in..

I must admit to being more of a Haruki Murakami fan in theory than actually in practice. I have very grand intentions regarding his work, but so far all I've managed to get through is Kafka on the Shore, which I loved, but which was weeeeird... From talking to people I know that weird is probably what I should be expecting going into Norwegian Wood (which I have had on my shelf for well over a year now), and I have no problem with that. Weird is good. Weird is challenging. Weird is, generally, awesome. Also, I love the whole white and black theme of his covers - so basic, so distinctive. They are the kind of books I want to collect primarily because they would look awesome. Yes, I know that's shallow, but sometimes I do like to judge books by their covers..

Because I like to know a bit about the author I am reading, I did some 'research' (and by research I mean I googled him...). Here is what I found out: (from www.murakami.ch):

Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto, Japan

In 1974 he opened the Jazz Bar in Tokyo
In 1979 his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing was published
In 1981 he started to write for a living
In 1991 he became an Associate Researcher at Princeton University
According to Wikipedia, which seems to be weirdly more accurate on this than his own website, he has published twelve novels, plus short stories and essays. 1Q84 is also on my January reading list. I feel I may be overwhelming myself, but ah well.

So that's basically it. A lot of people were talking about the film of Norwegian Wood last year. Apparently it is brilliant, and I think that I will have to attempt to see it this month as part of the readalong greatness. Here is a synopsis of the book from Goodreads:

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love .

I'm excited about the book! Hopefully I will finish my current read, Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller today and be able to start...

2012 Goals & Resolutions..

2012-01-02T10:55:00.001Z

Happy New Year everybody! This is the first year I have started as a 'blogger' proper, and I thought I'd mark the occassion by making myself some goals for this year.

Firstly, as of yesterday I'm back on my book buying ban. Although ideally I'd go the whole year without buying a book, I don't think this is particularly feasible and so I'm just going to try to go longer than I did last year which was three months and a week. I think this is manageable. I'm limiting myself to one swap a month as well, and hopefully it will encourage me to use the library tons more.
I'm also planning to go the whole of 2012 without using Amazon to buy anything. For reasons why, see this post.
Make a list every month of what I intend to read and one at the end tracking the books I've managed to complete.
Continue to read more non-fiction that I did last year
Complete all of the challenges that I sign up for, and remember to post a link-up every month for the Telling Tales Challenge.
Comment on blogs and make an active attempt to discover new blogs. I did this a lot until about half way through the year, at which point I inexplicably stopped and I think it's time to start up again!
Schedule posts for the week on Sunday nights. I started doing this a little while back, and while I've been better at it some weeks than others, I find it really helps me keep my momentum.
In 2011 I read 151 books. Of these, I didn't get round to reviewing 58 of them. Although this is gigantically better than I thought, my goal this year is to review 75% of what I read, and to review all my five star reads which I failed dismally at this year.
Participate in RAK every month. It's a fantastic event, and I love that I can make people happy by giving books, and as they're gifts they don't count for my ban so it's like I'm buying them but without them actually accumulating in my house. It's a win-win situation!
Get over my illogical aversion to reading YA. I get really annoyed when people read only YA, and for some reason this means that anybody recommending me any YA will just get sighs and eye -rolling. Having said that, when I caved in a did read some this year, it was incredible! The Hunger Games trilogy, When You Reach Me, An Abundance of Katherines... Clearly, I've inherited a view of what all YA will be from somewhere and am refusing to rethink despite evidence to the contrary. Help me! All you people who read YA, I am appealing to you for recommendations of the best you've read!
I want to re-vamp the blog a bit, but I'm totally crap with design type stuff. If anybody knows anybody/is willing to give me a hand I'd be eternally grateful!

I'm really pleased with how 2011 went in terms of blogging. After almost a year of blogging I feel like I'm finally starting to find my place in the blogging community and hit my stride with what I want the blog to be. In a few days the blog will be one, and there will be an awesome giveaway so watch out, as well as a suitably sappy post about the awesome people I've 'met' in the past year! Happy 2012!

Books I Plan to Read in January

2012-01-01T16:46:00.007Z

Happy New Year, everybody! It's a brand new year full of brand new books to be read and new challenges and excitement. As I'm starting the year from a more experienced point of view, I'm going to try something a bit different to try to help me to complete some of the tasks I've set myself for 2012. The first thing I will be doing is listing the books I am planning to read each month. Then at the end of the month I will do a summary of how many of them I've actually achieved! I don't know if this will actually have any effect but I shall give it a go and see!

January Reading List:

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (for Reading Rambo's readalong the Mount TBR challenge)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (for Mount TBR challenge & The Graphic Novel Challenge)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (for 50 States Reading Challenge)
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen (for the Mixing It Up Challenge)
First part of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
1Q84 Books 1 & 2 by Haruki Murakami (for the Book Addicts Book Group on Goodreads)
The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen (for the 50 States Reading Challenge)

I'm going to use this like a checklist and come back and link up reviews as I finish them, then at the end of the year I'll be able to see where my most focused months were :-)

What I Got for Christmas!

2011-12-29T09:00:00.000Z

I don't know if I've mentioned that I have an awesome family. Christmas will stand me in good stead for the beginning of my book buying ban, I think. Altogether this christmas I received a grand total of twelve books!

Excuse the random Christmas paraphernalia in the photo! The books are:

Eternals by Neil Gaiman from my wonderful husband. Both of us love graphic novels, and our collection is steadily growing, which makes me really excited. I love them because they're so beautiful and so glossy and just generally exciting!

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick also from my husband. It has the most gorgeous artwork. We saw the film just before Christmas and it was excellent. I'm halfway through the book at the moment, and I'm enjoying it. It will be very interesting to see how it measures up when I'm done though!

The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake by Mary Berry also from my husband (he knows me well!).

Shakespeare by Bill Bryson from my mum. I'm a giant Bryson fan and I've yet to read this! It will tie in nicely with the year of reading Shakespeare.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz from my lovely sisters. I recently read this, but it was bought for me before I had, and I'm excited to own it as it was a library book and is one of those books which will probably benefit greatly from re-reading.

From my father-in-law:

The Promised One by David Alric - a children's book that looks really interesting.

Sourcery, Pyramids, Guards!Guards!, Eric, Moving Pictures and Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett - I plan to re-read the Discworld series in order, and these fill in most of the gap I had in the books I owned!!

I'm thinking that I will have to sign up for Hannah's Terry Pratchett reading challenge now. I've been umming and aahing about it, but now I have no excuse!

What did other people get?

Telling Tales Challenge Sign Up Post

2011-12-28T10:46:00.000Z

I just realised I never got around to doing my own sign up post for the Telling Tales Challenge. Obviously there is some serious list making to be done! I'm attempting to find all the fairytale/mythology related stuff I have in the house as I'm not buying books next year, so it should be interesting! If you want to sign up for the challenge, you can do so here.

I'm signing up for Level 1 Classics, and level 3 Mix n' Match. For the classics I have to read five, which are going to be:

The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
The Aeneid by Virgil
Beowulf
The Collected Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

These will also be included in the Mix n Match level, so I need another ten. I don't have all of my titles yet, but here are the ones I do have and I will add to the list as the year goes on:

Till We Have Faces by C.S Lewis
The Ugly Duckling by Iris Johannsen
The Silmarilion by J.R.R Tolkien
Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow by David Gemmell
Troy: Sheild of Thunder by David Gemmell
Troy: Fall of Kings by David Gemmell
Eric by Terry Pratchett
The Magician's Nephew by C.S Lewis

I'm probably also going to watch some adaptations, but I'm not sure quite what or how many yet. The ones I currently have in mind are the recent version of Red Riding Hood, a rewatch of The Brothers Grimm, and several Disney marathons!

I'm super-excited about this challenge, and I hope I'll actually manage to complete it!

Top Ten Tuesday - Top Books of 2011!

2011-12-27T09:54:00.001Z

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

There are so many brilliant books I've read during 2011 - many more than ten, but for the interests of winding it all up in my mind and also for the purposes of my Blogoversary Giveaway, (which will be taking place around about January 8th/9th so keep an eye out), here are the top ten!

1. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. I don't have a review for this, as I never got around to writing one, but I adored this book, and it's made me a die hard fan of Sarah Addison Allen. Also, the cover is very pretty:

2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran - this is probably the most hilarious book I've read since I first read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, aged eleven. Moran is brilliant and talks about all the parts of being a woman that nobody else ever does.

3. Howards End is On the Landing by Susan Hill - I love books about books, and this was the most absorbing one I read this year. It's a brilliant concept - for one entire year Hill only read the books that she already had in her house. I thought that I had a lot of books, but compared to her I'm an amatuer. I came away from this book with an absolutely gigantic reading list, and it also has a gorgeous cover.

4. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi - I discovered this accidentally in the library, and it was my first foray into non-fantasy based graphic novels. I cannot stress enough how hilarious this book is. It's Satrapi's autobiography of growing up in Iran, told in graphic form. I got the film, too, and it's brilliant.

5. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - 2011 seems to have been my year of reading books about Iran, but Reading Lolita in Tehran was another book about books - about Nafisi's love of books, and her experience of living in a country where they weren't readily available. Her story inspired me, and her bravery in teaching women about literature when they were hardly allowed to do anything amazed me.

6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - I don't read YA, but so many people were talking about this and it sounded like the kind of thing I might like, and my local library had it, so I caved. I'm so glad that I did. The Hunger Games was brilliant - it made me cry which is a big achievement for a book! I'm not sure about the movie, but I reckon I'll probably give in and see it. I just hope it doesn't kill it for me.

7. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - this really should have been at number one. It is without a doubt my absolute favourite book of 2011, if not of all time. I have never read anything quite like it before in my life. Not only was it brilliantly written and engaging, it was an absolute work of art, and as soon as I closed it I wanted to read it again. It's been out of our house doing the tour of duty at my mums' for a couple of months, and we are seriously contemplating buying another copy, so we have one to lend and still always have one in the house. If you haven't already read it, read it now and thank me later!

8. The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild - A childhood favourite, I re-read this book this year and loved it just as much as I did as a child. Sort of a sequel to Streatfeild's most well - known book, Ballet Shoes, this is the story of the Winter family and their exploits when they take a trip to L.A.

9. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - Circuses are awesome things. This is less magical than The Night Circus, but I loved the storyline. I have still to see the film, but I'm excited about it.

10. Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O'Malley - a graphic novel about a girl whose soul has been stolen by a cat. If I'd read the Scott Pilgrim series this year, they would definitely be on this list, but as I didn't this one must suffice!

All of these books will be part of my first blogoversary giveaway in early January so make sure you come back and see me then!

Boycotting Amazon...

2011-12-26T12:20:00.000Z

People are always talking about how Amazon is 'killing' the independent bookshop, and nowhere is this more obvious than in my adopted county of Kent. Currently in Kent there is a grand total of ONE independent bookshop selling new books, and then there is Waterstones. And that is it. There are a fair number of second hand bookshops and charity shops selling books, which is great, but I can't help but feel that the fault lies (mainly) with online shopping in general, and with Amazon in particular. From the point of view of books, Amazon and The Book Depository are definitely the cheapest and easiest ways to get hold of things, and I know I'm very guilty of using them both when I just must have a title right then and there. Also I use Amazon for the purpose of gift buying and sending RAK's, but this is about to change, I hope.

In 2011 in the UK the British Bookshops chain has closed, leaving the high street for the most part without a 'cheap' alternative to Waterstones for new books. In the US, the Borders chain which vanished in the UK in 2009, has given up altogether. All in all, it's not been a great year for bookshops. Although I am not saying that all of this is entirely Amazon's fault, they are definitely benefiting from it, and recently they did something very stupid, that I don't really want to get into because it makes me angry, and if you don't know what I'm referring to you can check it out here - Richard Russo and co put it much better than I ever could!

This actually enraged me. I quite frequently get upset about the state of the world and how horrible people are to each other. Personally, it bothers me that online shopping is destroying communities. I don't want to live in a world where the only option is to shop online or in big, anonymous superstores. I like the personal service. I love that there are still bookshops you can go in and talk to staff who genuinely adore books, and who will talk recommendations with you for ages and get excited about passing on the books that they love. Yes, there is 'Amazon Recommends', but it really isn't the same...

Because of this, I have decided to combine my 2012 book buying ban (which will, let's face it, probably fail drastically at some point during the year) with a boycott of Amazon. For this, I am going to attempt not to use Amazon at all for anything during 2012. I am also going to try to do most of my shopping in the real world, rather than on the internet. I am hoping that for this I can actually last out the entire year. I have no illusions that by doing this I will be making any great impact, but personally I think that I will feel better to be less hypocritical. To put my money where my mouth is and to say no to Amazon and online retailers putting people out of jobs, and preventing me from being able to talk books with equally geeky people. If ever I do have children, I wouldn't want to bring them into a world without bookshops. That would just be depressing. If anybody wants to join me they are more than welcome! Wish me luck!

What are your thoughts about the online shopping phenomenon? Does Amazon make you angry or do you love it with a passion?

Review: - Jane Austen Made Me Do It ed. by Laurel Ann Natress

2011-12-21T08:19:00.000Z

Look how well I'm doing at my reading of Jane Austen related books! I'm very proud of myself. Admittedly I have totally failed at watching any of the films for Advent with Austen, but this is the third Jane - related book I've read in December! I won a copy of it from the 24 hour readathon, but it has been very slow going.

Jane Austen Made Me Do It is a collection of short stories inspired by Jane Austen. Some are about Austen herself, some continuations of her novels, and some completely new stories merely using characters Austen created. I'd read some mixed reviews of this before I started, so I was a little apprehensive going in. Also, while I love Austen, I'm not generally a fan of the Romance genre. The first story, Jane Austen's Nightmare by Syrie James was really good, and so calmed some of my fears, but after that there were a few I enjoyed less and I started to struggle a bit, hence why a collection of short stories has taken me over a week to finish.

Generally the stories I enjoyed the most were either about Jane herself, or modern tales incorporating an Austen character. There were some ghost stories (A Night at Northanger by Lauren Willig, The Ghostwriter by Elizabeth Aston, and Me and Mr. Darcy, Again.. by Alexandra Potter) which I really enjoyed despite them tending towards the slightly ridiculous - although I suppose as a person who doesn't believe in ghosts and such, ghost stories are always going to seem a little bit silly in the best possible way.

Reading Jane Austen Made Me Do It was a positive experience despite the unevenness of the collection. I would say it was probably a 60/40 split and if I'm honest after a while I started giving up on stories if they weren't interesting me after a couple of pages. I'm glad I own this book as it means I can return to the ones I didn't finish at a later date.

I think this will probably be my last Advent with Austen book. I do have Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence sitting on my nightstand, but although I definitely want to get to it in the future, I kind of feel that for the moment I'm all Austened out. I have really enjoyed this event, though, and the fact that (in my eyes at least!) I've been really successful, has set me up in a positive frame of mind for all the challenges and such that I've signed up for in 2012!

Sunday Salon - A few Review type Bits and Bobs...

2011-12-18T22:13:00.000Z

This weekend has been great. My family have been here since Friday night and have been helping decorate the house and suchlike. We've basically been watching movies, playing board games, and having a giggle, but now they are gone and the house is quiet and I am watching Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, which is awesome. The Christmas tree lights are on, we've been eating individually wrapped chocolates out of a tin, and I'm starting to feel a bit festive (and bloated).

In the spirit of Advent with Austen, I've been reading many Jane Austen related things in the last couple of weeks. I'm not sure why, but I've not finished a lot. I started Lady Susan/The Watsons/ Sanditon last week, and I've finished the first two but not the last, and halfway through Sanditon I got distracted by Jane Austen Made Me Do It, a collection of short stories inspired by Austen, which I've been reading for the past week and also have yet to finish.

I'm still unsure of what I felt about Lady Susan. It was written early on but Austen never submitted it for publication, and it was only after her death that her nephew decided it was an important enough part of her legacy that the general public should have access to it. It is written in letter format, and although it is of course well -written, for me it lacked the empathy and depth of character usually present in Austen's novels.

The ambitious Lady Susan Vernon, notorious flirt, scandalous lady, recently widowed, escapes from an unfortunate liaison with a married man to stay with her brother and disapproving sister in law. Reginald De Courcy, Mrs Vernon's brother also comes to stay, fully prepared to be horrified by Lady Susan, but soon succumbs to her manipulative ways.When Lady Susan's young daughter, Frederica is also brought to the house, relationships become strained and tensions run high.

Because of the letter format, I didn't get any of the sense of immediate action that's usually present in Austen - it was much more removed than that. Everything that happened was only learned about after it had taken place, and so didn't feel as gripping. I also didn't personally connect with any of the characters. In every other one of Austen's novels there have been characters I really loved - Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, and even despite Austen herself thinking nobody would like her, Emma Woodhouse - but in Lady Susan there was nobody. The title character was a completely scheming and manipulative, and her lack of feeling for her own daughter at times completely disgusted me. There wasn't really a character that I particularly cared about and I can see why Austen didn't think it was good enough for publication. I still enjoyed reading it, but not as much as I did The Watsons, which I was really disappointed about finishing, because it's really only the first fragment of a story.

Anyway, mini- review I know, but pretty much all I have to say about these. Since finishing Persuasion, I've now read all six of Austen's completed novels, and I do want to finish Sanditon, because I think that her unfinished works are really interesting in terms of what more she could have achieved had she lived longer.

Anyway, this post has taken me so long to write that Mr Magorium has finished, and I'm now watching Star Trek with the hubby. Hope your Christmas preparations are all going well and that the week ahead isn't too stressful. Relax, read, and enjoy. Happy Sunday, everybody!

Persephone Secret Santa

2011-12-16T09:00:00.019Z

I don't know if I've mentioned previously just how great my love for Christmas is. In my house, it's a HUGE deal, from the stresses of Christmas shopping for a family of eight - and that's just the siblings and parents! - decorating the house and tree, to the meal we have on Christmas Eve (to which my mother invites everybody we know who might possibly be alone and a lot of people who aren't..) to our traditional Christmas Eve viewing of Miracle on 34th Street (the 1990s remake, not the original), to presents on Christmas morning, fervently hoping that at least one person will have remembered about how I like books and have got me at least one. Last year, due to my now-husband-then-fiance giving me all of my presents about a month early because he couldn't wait to see my reaction (awww), I received a grand total of no books on Christmas Day, which slightly disappointed me. Although I'm the kind of person who loves presents of any kind - give me anything prefaced by the words 'here's a present', and I'll get ridiculously excited - I do love them best when they are books, mostly because I know that I can get stuck in right away and it makes Christmas Day that extra bit more exciting to know that I can jump from my book to whatever afternoon movie my younger brother is watching, to the new board game somebody got for my parents, to having a gossip in the kitchen with my mum and grandma while sorting out the dinner. Love love love!

So you can imagine how excited I was when I found out about the Persephone Secret Santa. My love for Persephone books is a recently acquired thing, started completely by accident when I asked the lovely man in the most awesome second hand bookshop I have near me if he had any Noel Streatfeild books, expecting him to come up with yet another copy of Ballet Shoes, and he rummaged around in his store room for a while and came back with a gorgeous Persephone edition of Saplings. Then I found a copy of The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding in a charity shop, prompting my husbnad to say 'Oh, you got another one of those grey books', and now I feel like I should be collecting them. Not just because they're pretty, I might add, but because of the sheer underrepresentation of women in the canon of Western literature. Anyway, on to the Secret Santa! It's the same as normal secret santa, except you give Persephone books. I was assigned a Santee, and a list of books that person wanted. I picked one, I sent it, and I waited to receive mine, which I did a couple of days ago, and it's beautiful!

Sorry about the slightly blurry photo, but this is Tea with Mr Rochester by Frances Towers, which I was sent by the lovely Iris of Iris on Books. I am so excited to read it, and I love the bookmark, which is the same pattern as the endpaper, which is another thing I adore about Persephone books. I've sent a couple of books as surprise gifts to blogger friends (which they should be keeping their eyes peeled for!), and I actually can't describe the buzz giving people books gives me. I've bought them for most of my family too. I love that my family read!

So thankyou Iris, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and all the rest! I hope you're all enjoying the season as much as I am!

Festive Review:- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2011-12-15T22:43:00.000Z

I don't know if I've mentioned that Dickens and I do not usually get along. I've only read two of his novels so far, Great Expectations and Hard Times both of which were horrendously hard work and if not for them being required reading for uni, I doubt I would have ever finished either of them. It would have been a shame as I ended up really liking both of them but still, Dickens is not what I usually turn to when I'm in such a lazy reading mood as I have been lately. In light of this fact, you can imagine my surprise when amongst all the re-reads and Jane Austen related reading I've been doing this month I suddenly got an insatiable urge to read A Christmas Carol. It was like there was an actual voice in my head telling me I needed to read it, right that second, and I'm thinking, (whiny voice) 'but it'll be hard work and full of description which means I'll have to concentrate and nothing will happen for the first half of the book...'. I was wrong about all of these things.

Just to clarify, I am aware that this is a picture of the Muppet's Christmas Carol, but my book doesn't have a pretty cover image, and the Muppets are awesome and part of my tradition Christmas viewing schedule, so there we go.

Despite never having read A Christmas Carol before, I don't remember ever not knowing the story. Ebenezer Scrooge has been a character in my head all of my life, and his visitations from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are such a part of my feelings about the point of Christmas that it was kind of as if I was re-reading the story. The classic tale of the tight-fisted, miserable Scrooge who is visited by three ghosts who help him to see the error of his ways and become a much better person was exactly right for my mood. I've been very down about the state of the world recently, and in the space of 184 pages, Dickens managed to restore my faith in people's capacity for humanity and change. I know that Scrooge is just a character in a book, but let's face it, he's got to be up there with the most iconic and well-known characters from books ever, and reading A Christmas Carol has not only made me feel happy and hopeful, but also changed my attitude towards Dickens. I'm actually excited to read more of his books now! I've been trying so hard for so long to get excited about reading Dickens - how weird is it that it just happened like that, by random?

2011 End of Year Book Survey!

2011-12-13T23:43:00.002Z

I know I've been going on about it lots, but I am so intensely little kid excited about coming to the end of my first year of blogging! I've read such awesome stuff this year and added to my already disgustingly giant TBR pile, and a huge amount is due to blogger recommendations. Mostly to try to get all the awesome I've read straight in my head, I'm completing Jamie's End of 2011 book survey. Feel free to read on or not, as the mood takes you!

1. Best Book You Read In 2011?
I think this is the first time I have ever been able to answer this question straight away, without even thinking about the answer. I did add another couple of titles to my answer about two seconds later, but still, result!
Immediate answer - The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Totally lived up to the hype and made me want to read it again, immediately after finishing it.
The two I added two seconds later - Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (my first foray into non - fantasy graphic novels - totally opened my eyes)

2. Most Disappointing Book/Book You Wish You Loved More Than You Did?

Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger. I've been a giant fan of The Catcher in the Rye since I was about fourteen, and this book has been on my TBR literally forever, but when I did get around to reading it, I just couldn't love it like I wanted to...

3. Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2011?

An Abundance of Katherines by John Greene
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

4. Book you recommended to people most in 2011?

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. This is still the most hilarious book I've read all year and just so entertaining. I get the giggles just thinking about sage and onion stuffing now.

5. Best series you discovered in 2011?

Probably the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, or Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. I love Percy Jackson despite it being slightly childish in tone, the books are just brilliantly quick entertaining reads. Thank you Hanna for sending me the first one!

6. Favorite new authors you discovered in 2011?

Sarah Addison Allen, Erin Morgenstern, Carolyn Turgeon, Marjane Satrapi (all women... :-/)

7. Best book that was out of your comfort zone or was a new genre for you?
Before this year I hardly ever read any YA. If I'm honest the snobby 'I have an English LIterature Degree' part of me still dislikes admitting that I do, but my stats for the year beg to differ so... Having said that, The Hunger Games trilogy earlier this year was a total revelation for me. I absolutely adored the series and I go between extreme excitement and apprehension about the upcoming film!
8. Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2011?

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern again! If you haven't read this book, you really really must, it is so incredibly beautiful and captivating. Also Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants which I keep forgetting about but completely adored for being so suspense building and darkly gorgeous.

9. Book you most anticipated in 2011?

The Night Circus or The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Browne (which was good, but not as great as I was expecting...)

10. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2011?

In Your Face by one of my most favourite authors ever, Scarlett Thomas

11. Most memorable character in 2011?

I know she was only in it for like a really little while, but Rue from The Hunger Games. I loved her, she was so brave she broke my heart.

12. Most beautifully written book read in 2011?

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O'Malley

13. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2011?

Reading Lolita in Tehran made me rant at people about women's rights and feminism a LOT. I felt strongly enough about it to do a giveaway (rare occurrence!) just to be able to pass the awesomeness on!

14. Book you can't believe you waited UNTIL 2011 to finally read?

East of Eden and Tender is the Night. Both amazing, brilliantly written and much more engrossing reads than I expected.

15. Favorite Passage/Quote From A Book You Read In 2011?

From How to Be a Woman - sorry if it's not to people's taste, but I find it HILARIOUS:(in reference to periods)

"As part of being a hippy, my mother doesn't 'belive' in painkillers and urges us to research herbal remedies. We read that sage is supposed to help and sit in bed eating handfuls of sage and onion stuffing, crying. Neither of us can believe that we're going to have to put up with this for the next 30 years.
"I don't want children anyway,' Caz says, 'So I am getting nothing out of this whatsoever. I want my entire reproductive system taken out, and replaced with spare lungs, for when I start smoking'"

16. Book That You Read In 2011 That Would Be Most Likely To Reread In 2012? How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (because I want to re-read it just from going through trying to find the above quote)

The Night Circus because, as previously mentioned, it is entire bucketloads of awesome.

17. Book That Had A Scene In It That Had You Reeling And Dying To Talk To Somebody About It? (a WTF moment, an epic revelation, a steamy kiss, etc. etc.) Be careful of spoilers!

It's probably kinda bad that I can't really think of one...There were some scenes in The NIght Circus (surprise surprise), and a few in The Last Werewolf I think but nothing specific springs to mind..

I shall be doing more talking about 2011 before the end of the year, including some stats that I find interesting but probably nobody else will....

Norwegian Wood readalong!

2011-12-13T21:24:00.000Z

I have so far only read ONE Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, which totally blew my mind. There are so many of his novels that I want to read Everywhere I go lately I'm hearing about 1Q84, and I have had Norwegian Wood on my shelf for the whole of 2011 pretty much, besides being desperate to see the film, and when I stumbled on the January readalong hosted by Reading Rambo I had to sign up!

So that's basically it. In January, I will be kicking my 2012 reading year off to what I hope will be an awesome start by finally reading this book, come join me! :-)

Get Steampunked! Challenge

2011-12-12T19:39:00.000Z

After seeing Hugo the other day (which is incredible, if you haven't already go see it now!), I decided on something I've been wondering about for a while. I definiately need to read more steampunk, and so of course I signed up for a challenge!

Hosted by Bookish Ardour, the challenge runs from 1st January to 31st December, and can crossover with other challenges. The definition of steampunk from Steampunk Lab is:

it [steampunk] refers to a genre of fiction where steam power, spring gadgets and modern marvels of the 20th century are thrown back to Victorian aesthetics. Technology in a Neo-Victorian setting. The term has spread on to include not just books, but any real mashing up of technology with more classical style, where Verne-esque and Wellsian science is a reality. Some post-apocalyptic elements rise up on occation, depending on the portrayal.

I am going to go for the Geared level, which is five books. I've made my list already but I'm hoping that I'll end up reading lots more than this!

These are the books I plan to read:

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.P Dahlquist
The Time Machine by H.G Wells

I may incorporate a re-read of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as the challenge allows crossover books from the gaslight fantasy genre.

Review: - The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien

2011-12-09T20:47:00.000Z

Who hasn't heard of The Hobbit? Published in 1937, the book has been continuously popular ever since and is currently being made into a film starring Martin Freeman. The tale of Bilbo Baggins (the Hobbit of the title), and his unexpected involvement in a quest to reclaim the lost treasure of the dwarves from the evil dragon Smaug is generally pretty timeless and awesome. Following the hobbit and his thirteen companion dwarves from Bag End, Underhill, across the Wild, through the perils of Mirkwood and to the Lonely Mountain itself, The Hobbit is both terrifying and comforting, inspiring and relaxing. For those who haven't read it, there are characters you may well recognise from the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy such as Gandalf the wizard, Gollum, and even Bilbo himself.

My first memory of The Hobbit is of my dad reading it to me when I was around four. I didn't really understand what a hobbit was and became convinced the story I was hearing was actually about a worm. I still maintain that as the hobbit lives in a hole and so does a worm, it was a fairly logical conclusion for a four year old brain to reach. Since then I've read it a grand total of five times as far as I can recall. The last before this was around six years ago, though so reading it this time felt a lot like reading a book that you've been recommended by so many people that you already know vaguely what happens before you start. Parts of it, such as the part where the questers run into goblins and Bilbo's encounter with Gollum, I remembered incredibly well, although I was surprised at how close to the beginning of the story they took place, but there were lots of other things I had little to no memory of, and that made it a brilliant, refreshing and nostalgic read.

I'm not sure exactly what it is about Tolkien that makes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so incredibly readable. Yes, the characters are good and generally either very likeable or very hateable (and can I just pre-empt a 2012 re-read of Lord of the Rings by saying, Frodo in the books = awesome, Frodo in the films = completely, inexcusably pathetic), which is brilliant, and the plot is action packed and gripping with just the right amount of respite time including roaring fires, song and dance and copious amounts of food, but I think the thing really is that in Middle - Earth Tolkien has created an entirely real and absorbing world, which is recognisable enough for the reader to be able to relate to the experiences that characters are undergoing, but alien enough to be entirely enchanting and fascinating.

Although The Hobbit was originally thought of as a children's book, the publication of The Lord of the Rings changed perception of it, and it became what it remains today: the prelude to arguably the most epic, sprawling quest - based fantasy saga of all time. If I hadn't signed up to read this in December of this year, it would have been perfect for the Telling Tales Challenge next year, but I'm thinking The Lord of the Rings will do for that! I adore reading books like The Hobbit. My thinking it was about a worm didn't hinder my love of it as a child; I loved it then, I love it now, and I will love it in the future, because it is truly amazing.

Top Ten Favourite Books from Childhood

2011-12-06T20:51:00.000Z

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature at The Broke and the Bookish.

I think my new years resolution is going to be to participate more in Top Ten Tuesday. This week's list was one I could do straight off the top of my head. The majority of books on my list of childhood favourites are books my siblings and I were read for bedtime stories. There are some exceptions, though.

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - I know I go on about this book all the time, but if I had to choose one book to be the only book I could read for the rest of my life, I really think this might be it. The first book I remember reading in one sitting!
2. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild - I remember my mum reading this to me when I was really young, and it's the book that began my love of Streatfeild.
3. The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
4. The Adventures of the Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton
5. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren - No member of my family has ever quite got over the awesomeness of this book. Another bed time story (they were a really big deal in my house), we still make random references to 'the sarkus' and 'pluttification' all the time, and I still dream about making gingersnaps on the kitchen floor :-)
6. Harry and the Wrinklies by Alan Temperley
7. The BFG by Roald Dahl
8. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S Lewis - Still a huge favourite, I'm currently loving the films and planning a re-read in 2012.
9. The Silver Sword by Ian Serailler - I found this on my mums bookshelf aged about eight and fell in love with it. Probably one of the first books about a really difficult issue that I read.

10. Rabble Starkey by Lois Lowry - I got this from a library sale with my pocket money (it cost about 10p) because I was a huge fan of Lowry's Anastasia series, and I read it over and over again. I think I still have it somewhere...

Any of mine on your lists? :-)

Advent with Austen - A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith

2011-12-05T22:04:00.000Z

For anyone who doesn't know, there is an event taking place currently to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Sense and Sensibility. In advent, we are reading Austen, and so far it's making me very happy. I fell in love with Austen aged around fourteen after reading Pride and Prejudice and her books have quickly fallen into the category of 'comfort reading' - the highest honour I can give a book. Having said that, the only books I owned prior to last week were Emma and Persuasion, both of which I have already read this year, as I originally started reading Jane in the form of one of those giganto - books with really thin paper and tiny font, containing all six of her novels, so I've been on a quest. While I haven't yet manged to find a either Pride & Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility in any of my local charity shops (a total shocker in a city full of students that contains not one, not two, but three universities!), I have just today managed to get hold of Lady Susan, The Watsons & Sanditon which is what I plan to read next, and a copy of Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence, the book on which the film (that I've still yet to see) was based. Anyway, the only Austen -related reading I managed to get hold of ready for the beginning of advent was Lori Smith's memoir, A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love and Faith.

From Goodreads:

At thirty-three, dealing with a difficult job and a creeping depression, Lori Smith embarked on a life-changing journey following the life and lore of Jane Austen through England.
With humor and spirit, Lori leads readers through landscapes Jane knew and loved–from Bath and Lyme, to London and the Hampshire countryside–and through emotional landscapes in which grace and hope take the place of stagnation and despair. Along the way, Lori explores the small things, both meanness and goodness in relationships, to discover what Austen herself knew: the worth of an ordinary life.

This book reminded me quite a lot of Eat, Pray, Love, which I read and enjoyed earlier this year. Lori Smith, like Elizabeth Gilbert, is coming from a major life event - in her case a bout of depression and four months of recovering from a mysterious 'virus'. Wanting to be a writer, she saves up and takes a year off to see if she can do it. A dedicated Janeite, she goes to England for a month with the aim of visiting the places which were important in Jane's life and writing, and the sense of adventure she brings to the exploit makes the book a really engaging read.

Starting off in Oxford (where I have never been), A Walk with Jane Austen had a lot of personal interest for me as it travelled through London (where I lived for 23 years), and Canterbury (where I have worked for the past six months). Although I hugely objected to Ms Smith's description of Canterbury Cathedral as "oppressive and lifeless", that is purely down to difference of opinion, for which I suppose I will have to forgive her. The bit about Canterbury was the only bit of the book which made me angry, though - the rest of the book I loved and couldn't wait to get back to reading it.

The journey with Jane is tied in closely with Lori Smith's personal journey, and she uses the trip to explore her faith in great depth, which was another thing that put me in mind of Eat, Pray, Love. Again for me with my own religious beliefs and queries, I actually found that this made the book more enjoyable for me rather than less, as it raised questions for me not just about literature (which is always awesome), but also about the kind of person I want to be and the way that I live my life, which I think I often forget that I need to think about. Despite there probably being more Lori than Jane in the book, she did manage to slip the autobiographical information in with the landscape brilliantly. Austen is so much part of the landscape of the English countryside anyway, but it was nice to read about the real life places which influenced the novels.

With the exception of the Canterbury chapter, and the bit about Lyme, where Ms Smith stayed in an incredibly vivdly described filthy hotel room, all of the places she visited are places that I would love to visit. Box Hill is a place I used to visit a lot as a child, both with my family and on school trips, so I was as excited reading about her visit there as I was reading about the picnic in Emma, and Bath is a beautiful city which I have only fleetingly visited once and would love to return to. A Walk with Jane Austen inspired me to read and re-read all of Jane's novels, and everything I can get my hands on about her life and works, but it also filled me with wanderlust. I want to go roaming aroud the countryside in my hiking boots!
Bring it on!!

The Sunday Salon - I refuse to believe it's almost Christmas!

2011-12-04T17:53:00.000Z

I feel like I've failed quite epicly on the review front lately. For a while now I've been reading a lot and not reviewing much, and after beating myself up over it for a week or so I decided to cut myself some slack. I've already decided to make December an 'easy reading' month, where I will be mostly re-reading plus a few library books (currently Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, which is shaping up to be a lot of fun), so hoepfully I'll be able to catch up on a few reviews in the next couple of weeks.

It's been a while since I've done a monthly summary post, so here's what's happened in November...

I have read the following sixteen books:

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Fables: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham
Chocolat by Joanne Harris (re-read)
Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan
Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott (re-read)
Good Wives by Louisa M. Alcott (re-read)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Little Men by Louisa M. Alcott (re-read)
Jo's Boys by Louisa M. Alcott (re-read)
Saplings by Noel Streatfeild
A Killer of Pilgrims by Susanna Gregory
What Lies Beneath by Sarah Rayne
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Mort by Terry Pratchett (re-read)
Curtain Up by Noel Streatfeild

I also signed up for a lot of reading challenges for next year. I really feel like I'm getting better at reading the books I own and controlling the impulse to buy more. Having said that, I did buy three this week - Amazon just makes it too easy, and there were a couple I wanted to get hold of for Advent with Austen. This past week I was reading A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith, which I absolutely adored, and which got me all inspired to write and to re-read all the Austen I read so long ago. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were the first of her novels I read, and that was about six years ago I think if not more. It really must be time for a re-read! I love that this event is giving me an opportunity to completely indulge myself and get immersed in all things Jane - Austen makes me happy to read and that's what I need right now :-)

Most excitingly (for me at least), I am hosting my first ever reading challenge for 2012. The Telling Tales Reading Challenge is the amalgamation of my passion for fairytale and mythology, several conversations on the subject with my sister, and the fun I had participating in the Once Upon a Time challenge this year. If you want to know more about it, and to sign up, go here, and forgive me for the convoluted nature of the levels - I got a little carried away with the list making!!

In other news, I just got back from seeing Hugo which was entirely amazing. It's been a very long time since I watched a film through my hands, but I had to because not knowing what was going to happen made me so tense! The film was incredibly acted and very moving and now I really really must get my hands on a copy of the book! Anybody read it? What did you think?

Hope you're all having a lovely winter Sunday

Another Challenge - Those Books I Should Have Read 2012 Reading Challenge

2011-12-04T09:00:00.002Z

I keep signing up for challenges, but it's totally ok because this is another one that will help me with my book buying ban, and with the demolishing of my TBR pile! Hosted by Kelly at Reading with Martinis, the aim of this challenge is pretty self explanatory.

The books I should have read stare at me from my shelves every time I go in search of my next read. They're all the ones (Ulysses is the one that immediately springs to mind) that I have somehow managed to not quite get to despite being part of college/university courses or having been on the list of books I absolutely must read for years and years! Soooo this is going to be the definitive list of books I absolutely must read this year! Because I don't want to just end up saying I'll read them again and not (again), I'm going to sign up for level 1, which is just 6 books.

The six books I intend to read for this challenge are:

Ulysses by James Joyce
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkein
The Outsiders by S.E Hinton
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

If you want to sign up for the challenge, you can do so here.

The Telling Tales Challenge 2012!!

2011-12-03T20:24:00.019Z

Picture credit: the Cheeseninja

Welcome to An Armchair by the Sea’s first reading challenge! Some of you may know about my love of/obsession with/totally crazed mania for all things fairytale and mythology based. While chatting with my sister Esther about our shared love of reading challenges and desire to set up a challenge of our own, we came up with an idea (inspired by the Once Upon a Time Challenge) for a challenge based around reading things to do with mythology, fairytales, legends and folklore, and so here it is!

The Telling Tales Reading Challenge 2012

Rules:

· Challenge runs from January 1^st 2012 to December 31^st 2012. You may sign up to participate at any point between these dates.

· Any genre counts as long as it is related to fairytale, folklore, or mythology in some way. If you’re not sure if it counts – as long as you can make a case for why it should, then it does!

· You can re-read books for this challenge as long as the reviews you link are written during 2012, and the challenge can also overlap other challenges.

· Whatever you read must either be a version of a fairytale or myth, or contain fairytale or mythological characters, settings, or sequence of events.

· Every month there will be update posts either here or on my sister’s blog. Please link up your reviews for that month on this post.

That’s it!

Now, the important bit.

The Categories

These are the levels:

Level 1: Read 5 books

Level 2: Read 10 books

Level 3: Read 15 books

Level 4: Read 20 books

Level 5: Read 25 books

You can sign up for any level, and choose to read either purely the categories listed below, or to participate in the Mix n Match category, or the Adaptation Amalgamation category, or all of them if you're that brave!

Categories:

Twisted Fairytales – retellings or modern interpretations of fairytales or myths. For inspiration, look here.

Classics – Myth and fairytale from the classics genre (e.g. Homer, Grimm, Virgil, Hans Christian Andersen)

Graphics – Graphic novels and comics based around or containing elements of mythology and fairytale. Examples include Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and Bill Willingham’s Fables series among others. For a list that barely scrapes the surface, go here.

Poetry & Drama – We’ve put this in because we’re sure there must be some. I've managed to find some, but if you know of any others please let us know!

Non- Fiction – Anything about myth, fairytale, folklore or fantasy in general that doesn’t belong to the fictional genre.

Extra Categories

Adaptation Amalgamation – Watch a film and read the book it is based on. This category can incorporate as many other categories as you like (i.e all your films do not have to be based on graphic novels, but some can be, and some twisted fairytale, some non-fiction etc)

Mix n Match – Exactly what it says. Sign up for a level and pick that number of books from any or all of the other categories.

As you can probably tell, Esther and I like to make lists. If this seems incredibly convoluted and off-putting, we apologise and take solace in the fact that we have each other, so neither of us will be doing the challenge alone! We do hope that other people will join us though, as it’s always fun to find out about new books, and the more people that do it, the more likely we are to finish it!

Les Miserables Readalong, Narnia Project and a slight pre-emptive 2011 round - up...

2011-11-30T12:29:00.002Z

I remember when I was six and the year that I was six seemed to drag out forever. So much of the stuff that happened in my childhood took place in that year. I have absolutely no idea how it is that we're almost at the end of another year - I've been living in Kent for an entire year now, and I've survived! We've just moved house for the second time, to a much bigger, nicer place, and we are (hopefully) finally starting to feel really settled! The weeks seem to fly by now, and sometimes it seems like the only way to measure a month is by how many posts I've managed to write!

All in all, I'm really pleased with how 2011 has gone... At the beginning of the year I was still fairly relaxed about the wedding planning, only working a few hours a week and living in a one bedroom flat navigating my life around my books. Now I'm living in a two bedroom flat with a reading room, working full time, and most excitingly of all, I'm married! I'm starting to feel like a proper grown up, and while that is scary it's also necessary I think. Although it's not quite the beginning of December and there is still another month of 2011 to go, as I plan to spend most of it re-reading old favourites and finishing off the few Noel Streatfeild books I have on my shelf before the year is up (all of which will be re-reads), I thought now would be as good a time as any to talk about some of my favourite books of the year, and some of the books that I wouldn't have read or bought if it weren't for blogging!

From January 9th 2012 until 14th I'm going to be hosting an awesome giveaway for my first blogoversary! For this giveaway, there will be a question you will need to answer in order to win one of the books from my list of favourites from 2011, my first year of blogging! There are a fair amount to choose from, and I'm thinking that I will pick a couple of winners - probably one from the UK and one international, just so everybody can share the excitement! I cannot stress enough how glad I am that I started keeping this blog back in January. It has had such an effect on my reading life, and has got me through some really lonely, homesick times. It has really helped to know that whatever happens there are always blogs to read, and always awesome people I can talk books (and randomness) with, and I so appreciate that :-)

These are a few of my favourites from this year that I've not had time, internet connectivity, or words to talk about before and I thought if I did it here then there would be a point of reference for people entering the giveaway. These will just be very condensed reviews, and the first up is my favourite of all,

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - About a circus which mysteriously appears without warning, I was so blown away by this book that I still have no proper words to describe it. It's magical, awe-inspiringly written and much more complex and entangled than it appears. A tale of love, magic, adventure, brutality, and so, so much more. You must read this book.

Garden Spells & The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen - Apart from Morgenstern, Sarah Addison Allen is my favourite discovery of 2011. Her books are gorgeous - fairly lightweight, full of magic, food, and feisty women, they always have happy endings without every being completely predictable. Just beautiful.

Howards End is On the Landing by Susan Hill - A non - fiction book subtitled 'my year of reading from home', Susan Hill sets out to read only the books she already owns for a year, and it's basically my favourite kind of book. Full of literary discussion, exploration and lists upon lists, I came away from this book with a headful of questions and pages and pages of lists of books I now want to read. Very well written and enjoyable.

Going Out by Scarlett Thomas - As some of you may know, this lady is one of my all - time favourite authors. The author of eight novels, for some reason her first five are extremely difficult to get hold of, however my awesome husband managed to do just that for me this year, and I've now read all of them! Going Out is about Luke, a boy who is allergic to the sun, and his best friend Julie, and what happens to them when they decide to go out. Summed up like that, it seems kind of lame, but I promise it isn't. It's daring, funny, and as always with Scarlett Thomas, very human, intelligent, and candid.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - I read this after I watched the BBC adaptation with Jason Isaacs (which I completely loved), and I liked the book a lot. Basically a story about Jackson Brodie, an ex - police officer turned private detective who mostly investigates missing cats, and his foray into the world of real cases, I liked it because Atkinson really humanises her characters, and because the plot was very well thought out. I've recently got my hands on the second in the series, and I'm looking forward to it!

A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters- the latest in the Amelia Peabody series of historical crime fiction, based around Egyptology, this confused me intially because it is published out of sequence with the rest of the story. If you like this genre and want an easy read that is hilarious and engaging, Peters is your woman! Amelia Peabody is one of my favourite heroines, because she's such an unlikely one, and such an independent woman :-)

So, that's pretty much that. Now onto yet another thing I've signed up for in 2012....

Kate is hosting a year long readalong of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in 2012. The idea is to read small chunks of the books to a schedule with the other participants and then talk about it. I've not had much luck with French literature this year - I've DNF'd both Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, and Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I'm hoping that my enduring love for Les Miserables the musical will help sustain me through this one, wish me luck!

Rikki's Teleidoscope is hosting the Narnia Reading Project in 2012. I love this series and am way past due for a re-read so I'm going to join in! There is no schedule, so I will just post about the books as and when I read them! To sign up, use the link above :-)

Food Glorious Food

2011-11-28T20:28:00.000Z

I know I spend a lot of time here at An Armchair by the Sea talking about un-book-related things, but I've decided that I'd like to make the unrelated rambling slightly more specific, and talk about some of the other stuff that I love.

We've just moved and my new kitchen is beyond gorgeous. It's massive, and has so much worktop space that I really don't know what I'll do with it! I've always loved cooking, and collect cookery books as voraciously as I do all other genres, but sometimes in my previous tiny kitchen coming home after a long day of standing up at work, it was difficult to find inclination to cope with the confines of space and actually cook. Especially when nobody's done the washing up and there's stuff all over the place... It's things like this which finally convinced me I wasn't cut out to be a chef, but with this new sparkly spacious piece of awesome (it also has a brand new oven!), I'm hoping that I can get back to cooking often and manging to feed me and the husband better.

I was given a hand held blender as a wedding present, so I want to try mushroom soup from scratch for the first time this week, and I also want to try a tomato and sausage bake. I love food blogs and I love browsing recipe sites for inspiration. Anybody have any good ones for me?

Sunday Salon - The Armchair has moved!!

2011-11-27T17:26:00.000Z

It has been a while since I've done a Sunday Salon - things have been a bit complicated and crazy since we got back from honeymoon in September, but hopefully that is almost all over now, and we will all start to feel a bit happier for the New Year. So, on to the big news! This weekend we've been moving. As a result of this the Armchair is no longer actually next to the sea. We are only around the corner, but I will miss being able to see the sea from my window. However, to make up for the lack of sea, I do now have my own personal READING ROOM!! Currently it's full of boxes, but hopefully soon it will have a little sofabed and desk and a big standing lamp, and the walls will be lined with bookcases. I am so excited about it! :-) It would be nice if people would stop making so many nursery and baby remarks in reference to the second bedroom, but being the eldest of seven it's kind of expected of me so I guess I'll just have to put up with it.

So, the most important query I have this week is one I know lots of people have asked in the past, and is in relation to organising books, as my day off this week will be spend with giant cups of tea, sorting out my reading room. I've organised my books most ways that are possible in the past - prior to moving I'd got them in a system I quite liked. As we only had the two rooms really, in the bedroom I had all my 'keeper' books. Then in the living room I had one shelf for non-fiction, biography, ARCs, classics, poetry and literary criticism, and one big shelf for all my unread books, categorised by shelf. My latest idea is to organise them by publisher and then alphabetically within publisher group. This is mostly because I've recently fallen in love with Persephone books and I think they'd look beautiful all together on the shelves, but I realise this probably isn't the most practical way to organise my collection... Does anybody have any suggestions?

Oh, and the other great thing about moving is that we now FINALLY have reliable home internet, so I should be able to post whenever I want to, rather than whenever I remember to plan ahead and bring my laptop to work with me! Very happy Sunday, everybody, and a late Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans!

Review: - Still Alice by Lisa Genova

2011-11-25T15:42:00.000Z

I’d read quite a bit about Still Alice on various people’s blogs a while back, and then I found it in the library and thought I’d give it a whirl. It was Biopsychologist and Neurologist (wow..) Lisa Genova’s debut novel, and although I was initially apprehensive about reading it because of its subject matter (Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease), I’m really glad that I did.

Alice Howland is a fifty year old Harvard psychology professor, married to another successful Harvard professor, and with three grown up children. She thinks everything is going brilliantly, when she suddenly starts to forget things. Initially small things like forgetting why something is on her to-do list, but progressing to missing a flight to Chicago, and not being able to remember what she is supposed to be lecturing about cause her to seek medical advice. When she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, Alice feels like her world is falling apart, and she and her family must learn to cope with her gradual decline.
This book was beautifully written. At the moment I tend to be looking for books to uplift me and make me happy and I didn’t think that a book about Alzheimer’s would do that, but Lisa Genova’s style was really engrossing and emotive. The structure of the book reflects Alice’s mental state; at the beginning it is very fluid and articulate, but as her disease progresses the gaps in the narrative become greater. Because it is all told from her point of view, when she cannot remember things, you hear that in the narrative. At one point, she sleeps for an entire two days, and when she reaches the point of no longer recognising her children, she assigns them titles; ‘the actress’ and ‘the mother’. I loved Alice’s strength and determination and I thought that her dignity in the face of such an undignified disease was inspirational. Because she is so intelligent and has always been so completely in control of her life, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s when she is only fifty, although always shattering, is probably more so to her than it would be to other people. Genova has given herself an extreme end of the spectrum of humanity to work with, and she portrays Alice’s point of view beautifully.

For me, though, the most interesting part of the story was the effect of Alice’s disease on her relationships with her family. Because of the kind of Alzheimer’s that she has, there is a 50% chance that each of her children will have inherited it, and one of her daughters is trying to have a baby. If she gets pregnant, then any child she had would also have the 50% chance of inheriting the disease. Alice has to tell her children that not only does she have a progressive, degenerative disease which may make her forget them completely, and for which there is no cure, but also that there is a strong chance that any or all of them may also have the disease, which could lead to their children also inheriting it. What an awful thing to have to do and Genova portrays it so strongly. Throughout this and many other scenes in the book, Alice is the pillar of strength – her husband John goes into denial about everything that is happening pretty much straight away and never really comes out of it apart from to patronize her. I have to admit that I really didn’t care much for him at all, but I think that the purpose of the character was to really show the different ways of reacting to a disease.

Still Alice really showed the strains that Alzheimer’s can put on a long and happy marriage, especially at such an early age, where the partner is often still in employment – in the case of John an employment which Alice says is his passion in a way that she never was. I got angry about the fact that throughout the book he seemed to be picking his career over Alice, but of course it is a choice. No matter how much it seems like it should be an obvious one, everybody isn’t the same, and while it may seem a no –brainer to most people, other people have different sets of priorities. To me, it just really seemed like John was used to having this super intelligent, independent, driven woman for his wife and couldn’t really cope when she changed and became incredibly dependent on him.

Despite having thought that it wouldn’t be an uplifting read, I ended the book with a little smile on my face. Without being overly sentimental or predictable, it made me feel that little bit better about the world, which is really what I’m looking for at the moment. Although I didn’t have as dramatic a reaction to it as I’ve had to books like Reading Lolita in Tehran or The Night Circus, it has made its’ quiet way onto my Best of 2011 list, and so will be up for grabs in my Blogoversary giveaway in January. Watch this space...

Review: - Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

2011-11-23T21:28:00.000Z

Saplings was the last Noel Streatfeild novel I had on my shelves that I had never read before, and having finished it I wish that I'd been able to stray from re-reading more and delve deeper into her adult novels. Being brought up on her children's novels (Ballet Shoes and the rest..) I thought I knew what to expect from her, but Saplings proved me wrong. Yes, it was still told with a similar voice to favourites such as Apple Bough and White Boots; it still had that childish innocence and simplicity in the way that the story was told, but the subject matter, to put it plainly, shocked me. Anywhere but in a Streatfeild novel I would have barely blinked at the regular references to sex, the evidence of the psychological trauma created by death, and the dealings with alcoholism, depression, and attempted suicide, but in Streatfeild, it rocked my safe little world.

I came across the beautiful Persephone edition of the book while rumaging in one of the most awesome second hand bookshops ever, and then it sat on the shelf for ages, and only the impending end of the year finally coerced me into reading it, but I'm so glad that I did. I love it when an author (especially one as well - known and loved as Streatfeild) completely contradicts everything I expect of her, while still letting me know that this is still a Streatfeild book that I'm reading. Saplings is a book about the Second World War, but not at all in the same way that When the Siren Wailed was. The latter was a very simplistic childish account of wartime experiences, told through the eyes of the children only, whereas the former is this and much more - told through a variety of narrators, including the four Wiltshire children, both of their parents, their governess and various Aunts and Uncles, it builds up a hugely diverse, varied and intense account of the experiences of one family through one of the greatest struggles possible for an English familiy to live through in recent history.

Saplings starts off on a beach, with the children, Laurel, Tony, Kim and Tuesday, enthralled by the fact that their parents Lena and Alex have arrived to spend the rest of the holidays with them. The opening scene is an incredibly Streatfeild-esque one - the children are pretty much all showing off for 'Dad', who is the hero of the story, and are planning on swimming out to their raft - a difficult feat for Kim, the showoff of the family, who has never done so before. From this innocuous beginning, the story rapidly intensifies, shocking me by the combination of the words 'passion' and 'naked' in the same sentence by page sixteen! The parts of the story told from the point of view of Lena, the children's mother, are integral to the build up of events - Alex and Lena's relationship is an incredibly intense one, and Lena is not particularly fulfilled by motherhood. Alex is what she lives for, and her love of him is very focused and consuming. You could say that it's her feelings for him which dictate the course of the entire novel.

The major reason that I found the novel so engrossing was the fact that it strayed from the usual happy ever after ending. Although the way the story ends is far from hopeless, it comes very abruptly, and there doesn't seem to much cohesion. Whereas usually the happiness of children is paramount in Noel Streatfeild's novels, this is never the case in Saplings. About a third of the way through the novel and incredibly sad and traumatic event occurs, which I don't want to mention because I'd really love you all to read the book, and after that the children's feelings are only considered from the point of view of the multitudes of relatives who feel they know 'what's best' for them. It was incredibly sad. It was also very sad to read children growing up without the healthy, wholesome, loving environments which are what I loved about Streatfeild's books as a child, and for that reason I'm glad that I waited to be twenty four before reading this novel. I know it sounds a bit pathetic of me to say, but part of me feels like I've had an idol smashed by the experience of reading Saplings. Because I am the age I am, I can enjoy it and realise that the experience I've had with this book eventually makes her a stronger writer for me, and one that I can continue to get to know and love from an adult point of view, rather than always reading her work with an eye for nostalgia. If I'd read it when I was younger, I'm not sure that would have been the case.

The blurb for this book talks about Noel Streatfeild's ability to see the world from a child's perspective, and says that what makes the book special is the way that she uses that skill to explore very adult problems, and this is definintely the case. The novel is basically a coming of age of all of the Wiltshire children to some degree, but mainly of Laurel, and her becoming a woman is marked by the many awful situations she experiences.

Not a happy book, but a very honest one, and a portrayal of the awful rammifications of the Second World War, even for those not directly involved in it, that you don't see often. I highly recommend this book. It gave me a totally new experience with an author I expected nothing new from, and that's an achievement.

Shakespeare Challenge & Support Your Local Library!

2011-11-22T09:00:00.019Z

I just wanted to mention another couple of challenges. As these two are both currently quite small, and really will help me towards my book buying ban, I thought I'd just do a mini post about both of them! I really will start posting proper content again soon!

Reading Shakespeare: A Play a Month in 2012

I’ve not read any Shakespeare since graduating over three years ago, and I think it’s time to rectify that! Risa at Breadcrumb Reads is hosting a Shakespeare Reading challenge, which I have signed up for. There was a poll, and these are the results. We are going to read a play a month in 2012!

January — A Midsummer Night’s Dream
February — Macbeth
March — Henry V
April — Much Ado About Nothing
May — Antony and Cleopatra
June — Richard III
July — As You Like It
August — King Lear
September — Cymbeline
October — Twelfth Night
November — Othello
December — Pericles

Yay for Shakespeare! J

Support Your Local Library Challenge 2012

In keeping with my attempt to sign up for challenges which will help me to keep to my 2012 book buying ban, I’m signing up for the Support Your Local Library challenge, which does exactly what it says it does. Hosted by The Eclectic Bookshelf, the challenge runs from 1^st January 2012 to 31^st December 2012. Re-read don’t count, and obviously the books must all be library books! You don’t have to have a blog to participate, so go sign up for it!

With libraries so much talked about lately, and with the threat of closures looming large in my local area, as well as in the rest of the UK, it’s more important than ever to support your local library if we want them to be there for future generations. Personally I can’t imagine what my childhood would have been like without the library, so I’m quite vocal in my support for the saving the libraries!

There are four levels for this challenge which are as follows:

Level 1: Read 12 library books

Level 2: Read 24 library books

Level 3: Read 36 library books

Level 4: Read 37+ library books

Originally I thought I’d come in at about level 2, but I’ve decided to be brave and dive in at the deep end, so I’m signing up for Level 4!

Here are the library books I have read:

Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and LIfe was a Catch 22 by Erica Heller
Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky
A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve

You can sign up here. Libraries are an awesome thing!

Mixing It Up Challenge 2012

2011-11-21T20:43:00.001Z

I’m a challenge addict. I can’t help it. I am still desperately attempting to only sign up for challenges which help me read the gigantic pile of books I already own, or library books. I also want to apologise for the blog being pretty much nothing but sign up posts lately, I will post some reviews soon I promise! Anyway, here’s another. Ellie from Musings of a Bookshop Girl is hosting the Mixing it Up Challenge 2012, encouraging us to broaden the genres we read!

There are sixteen categories which are:

Classics - The Odyssey - Homer

Biography - Dear Fatty - Dawn French

Cookery, Food and Wine

History - Anything Goes - Lucy Moore

Modern Fiction - The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson

Graphic Novels and Manga - Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

Crime and Mystery - One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson

Horror

Romance

Science Fiction and Fantasy - Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovich

Travel - Stephen Fry in America - Stephen Fry

Poetry and Drama

Journalism and Humour - Yes Man - Danny Wallace

Science and Natural History

Children’s and Young Adult

Social Sciences and Philosophy

There are five levels, named after baking type things, and the one I’m going to go for is the second highest: Two – Tier Cake, which means I need to read 13-15 books from the different categories. The books listed are the ones I intend to read, and as I finish them they will be linked to the reviews. Last year I decided I wanted to read more non-fiction, and managed to stockpile a fair amount of non-fiction books which I’m hoping to read for this challenge. There are no genres in this challenge that I’ve never read before, but there are a lot that I’ve not read much of.

Books in blue are the ones I've read - they will be linked to reviews when I get around to writing them!!

If you want to sign up for this challenge you can do so here.

A Year of Reading... Louisa May Alcott

2011-11-16T09:00:00.002Z

(image source)

Some of you who read my blog may know about my Year of Reading Noel Streatfeild. Earlier this year I discovered that Streatfeild, one of my favourite childhood authors, had actually written a lot more books than I was aware of, which led to 2011 being the year in which I tried to read as many of her books as I possibly could, made problematic by being on a book buying ban for the first three months of the year. However, I think I’ve done pretty well, and I’ve had a great time doing it. My reading of Streatfeild has led to some more interesting discoveries about some other favourite authors (J.M Barrie, L.M Montgomery, and Louisa May Alcott among them) who were much more prolific than I’d previously thought.

I have an enduring love for Little Women and its’ sequels. It is the first book I remember reading by myself, for fun, outside of school, and to this day the books remain very close to my heart. As with Streatfeild, I was unaware of exactly how much Louisa Alcott had written, and I’m quite excited to discover some of her adult fiction. I’ve found an awesome website which has pretty much all of her novels, plays and short stories in full online. However, I’m going to be trying not to read too many of them like this, as I know from previous experience that online reading and I don’t really get along. I’m a diehard fan of ‘the book’ and I always will be. Also, my eyes dislike looking at screens for too long! I may, however, read the short stories online, and other things in desperation, and to facilitate the successful continuation of my 2012 book buying ban.

Little Women is pretty much my all – time favourite book, and as the March girls are based on Louisa Alcott and her three sisters, I’m also going to add biographies and non – fiction to the list of books. I’d like to finish the year knowing a lot more about the woman who wrote the book that has had undeniably the biggest impact on my life so far.

Weirdly, it’s very difficult to get a complete list of Alcott’s works. The most comprehensive list I’ve found (and also the place where they are online) is here and it’s this that I’ll be working from I think. Honestly, I didn’t do brilliantly with reviewing the Streatfeild books I read this year, so my resolution is to do better this year. I’m excited!

Reviews: - Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall & Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham

2011-11-15T09:00:00.001Z

The Fables series of graphic novels by Bill Willingham is one of my newest and most awesome discoveries in the graphic genre. I originally found out about it at Sophisticated Dorkiness, and after doing a bit of research I thought it sounded exactly like my kind of thing. This is really a double review of two Fables books: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which is a kind of prequel, based around the Scheherezade/ Arabian Nights concept, and the first official book in the series, Legends in Exile.

The Fables (Snow White, the big bad wolf, Beauty and the Beast and the rest) have been forced to leave their magical homelands by an enemy known only as The Adversary, and have taken refuge in a suburb of New York which they have named Fabletown. Here they’ve lived among humans for centuries, and here is where Legends in Exile begins. Although it is the first book, I am glad that I read 1001 Nights of Snowfall first, as it explains a lot of the set-up of Legends in Exile, such as how Snow White and Rose Red came to be estranged, how Old King Cole became the mayor of Fabletown, and the beginnings of Bigby the wolf. Fables runs the risk of being ridiculous – anything based around fairytales always has the potential for childishness – but it completely isn’t. Legends in Exile, more than 1001 Nights of Snowfall, is a very adult, raw and complex and I loved it. The fairytale characters are presented with all the uncomfortable edges of humanity – all their flaws are jarringly present and obvious.

Legends in Exile is pretty much a murder mystery. Rose Red’s apartment is found trashed and covered in blood and Bigby, the head of the Fabletown police force, is called in to investigate. Red’s sister, Snow White is the assistant to the mayor of Fabletown, and she becomes involved in the hunt for her estranged sister’s killer. The plot follows the development of the investigation, and the revelation of Rose Red’s entangled love life, starting with her boyfriend Jack (as in Jack the giant killer, of ‘and the beanstalk’ fame), and quickly warping to involve a complex relationship with Bluebeard, the guy who kills all his wives...

I thought that the way the story developed was very enjoyable. Although it wasn’t the most shocking ending ever, the story was still pacy enough to keep me engrossed and wanting to read the next one (which I now have). I always love new takes on fairytales – many of you will know that this is the subject I’m apt to geek out the most about – and I love that Willingham has stripped fairytales back to what they would be like if they were actually about real people in the real world. What I’ve read of the Fables series so far has a ring of authenticity that fairytales generally lack, and I think that’s probably what I found the most powerful about them. I also really liked the artwork, especially on 1001 Nights of Snowfall. It is often quite stark and fairly brazen (as are the stories), while retaining some of the traditional fairytale, ethereal feel.

The rest of the series has gone on my wishlist...

Guest Review: - Wao or Wow? The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2011-11-14T17:52:00.001Z

I’m really excited about the book I’m currently reading, my second Pulitzer winner of the year, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. My younger sister was reading it as part of her college course and recommended it, and I’m loving it so far. As I’m already so far behind with my reviews, though, she agreed to lend out her review of the book for all you lovely people, so here is my very first ever Guest Review! You can find her here, and encourage her to blog more!

Junot Diaz’s novel ‘The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao’ written in 2007 is famed for winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and many other awards afterwards. The novel tells the story of an entire family through four generations and explores the culture, customs and history of the Dominican Republic in great detail.

Diaz especially focuses on the idea of Fuku which Dominicans say is a curse that causes disaster and can be passed down through families causing complete destruction of many lives. It is unclear to us whether Fuku actually exists of whether Diaz created it in order to incorporate the postmodernist literary technique of paranoia in to his work, however it acts as a very effective antagonist throughout the story, even gaining its own imagery of a man who “had no face”. This is used to great effect to strike a sense of anxiety and even fear in to the reader, as firstly the idea of a man with no face is not only strange but creepy although at first he seems unimportant, as we learn the family history and things start to get messy we see the return of this faceless man in Socorro’s dreams and through the eyes of various characters as crisis occurs. What makes this image ultimately terrifying is the fact that without a face this man has no identity, you cannot see him coming and that highlights one of the greatest fears that humans have; fear of the unknown.

‘The Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao’ is a very intense, gripping story that is written in a very unusual way. Diaz uses a lot of intertextuality and pastiche to create the feel of nerdiness but also gives a greater sense of depth to the story. The texts mentioned are always of great significance to the situation and are often used to foreshadow later events. A key example of this is in chapter Two, the narrative voice is now Lola; “you were reading Watership Down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat” this introduces the idea of escape which from this point onward becomes an important theme in the novel. Another brilliant example of Diaz’s skilful merging of texts is before the novel has begun. We are presented with two epigraphs; a poem by Derek Walcott and an ingenious quote from the fantastic four, “Of what importance are brief, nameless lives ...to Galactus??” this may well be one of the most important quotes in the whole book. Even though it is not part of the story it directly addresses the story. We as readers may ask what is so wondrous about the life of Oscar Wao, the answer to which is read the book and find out, but the point that is being made through this quote is that compared to the universe or to Galactus none of our lives no matter how wondrous they might seem are worth anything. Diaz constantly makes references to Tolkien and ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ which for those of us who have read them and understand the references provides us with some amazing imagery and comparisons for the events throughout the book. While reading ‘Oscar Wao’ I began to make my own comparisons to Tolkien and one quote really seems appropriate when talking about ‘Oscar Wao’; All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” This seems to me to be a perfect explanation for the dramas we see in this book. It may be Fuku as Diaz thinks but then again it could just be the consequences of each characters actions. To me Fuku seems like a very interesting idea and it provides the story with a very strong cultural grounding but it also seems like a very good way to get out of having to take responsibility.

The title gives the reader several insights as to what is hidden between the covers of this book. The first clue is in the word ‘Brief’ which tells us that Oscar dies, it also suggests that there will be drama surrounding his death because from reading the blurb we know that he is not anything particularly special, but for his life and death to be of enough note to become an award winning story there must be some element of drama or the unnatural that makes it worth writing about. This idea is supported by the word ‘Wondrous’ which again suggests that there is something extraordinary about the life of Oscar Wao. Through the title Diaz has already managed to capture his audience and evoke a sense of curiosity in them to discover what it is that is so wondrous about Oscar. This in itself shows the mark of a great writer, but he doesn’t stop there he continues to present us with ideas for us to question, new characters to provide depth to the story and increase our understanding of what is happening and he continually provides us with historical information to enhance our contextual understanding. Diaz manages to combine his brilliant work of fiction with a very in depth and opinionated history lesson on the on goings in the Dominican Republic during and after the Trujillato. This is mainly done through the use of extensive footnotes which often just Diaz are taking the narrative in a different direction to give a broader view of a situation but without wanting to lose the flow of the actual story he puts it in to a footnote. Some of the footnotes are abnormally long and throughout the book it is almost as if there is another story running parallel to the main narrative through the footnotes.

In a way ‘Oscar Wao’ could be seen as a continuation of ‘Drown’ a collection of short stories Diaz wrote before ‘Oscar Wao’. This is because the narrator, the character Yunior who we meet part way through the story is the protagonist of Drown. We can see that Diaz does not write a character for a specific part and then forget about them, he routinely brings in characters from earlier in the book towards the end and even as in this case from other books. This leads on the question ‘is Oscar Wao autobiographical or entirely fiction?’ From interviews with Diaz on this topic it can be established that ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ is at least partly autobiographical. Diaz talks about the way he grew up and suggests that Oscar is who he could’ve become if he hadn’t gone to live with his father, but as a result of that he became a character more like Yunior instead. I think that in terms of the characters in Oscar Wao Diaz is Yunior and is narrating the life he could of had, using characters loosely based on real people to explore the possibilities of his alternate life. We know that at least some of the characters are based on real people as we know that Beli’s “scar on her back as vast an inconsolable as the sea” mimics the scars on Diaz’s mothers back. The knowledge that the book is at least partly autobiographical gives it a greater power over the reader as all the horrific things that happen become reality rather than fiction. This also adds to the shock factor that Diaz works hard to achieve, on top of the crude and often taboo language, dark humour and violent imagery.

One of the most obvious downsides to ‘Oscar Wao’ is that it is written partly in Spanish which is left entirely unexplained. This makes the book slightly more difficult to read for those of us who don’t speak Spanish, but also gives a sense of sincerity, authenticity and culture to the book. It presents every reader with a challenge and a possibility to learn some Spanish whilst reading a gripping and emotive story of the gradual destruction of a family subject to the consequences of their history and culture.

Diaz creates unquestionably believable characters that grab our attention and hold on to it throughout the story. He uses women effectively to portray both the sensitive, naive young girl and also the strong unyielding characters that form the back bone of the story. This is especially evident in the characters of Oscar’s mother Belicia and his sister Lola. We see that Lola has gained her mother’s strength but less of her impulsiveness or obsession with love. Lola is a far more refined, rational character who comes across as more a mother to Oscar than his actual mother.

Overall ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ is a book unlike any other. It unashamedly borrows from many other books and comics showing the influences of the author and the characters. Diaz uses numerous literary techniques to enhance his writing, packing out his story with a combination of drama, humour and history making it interesting for many different kinds of people and making it impossible for it to conform to any existing genre. As Diaz himself said; “in the United States if you’re a writer of colour you’re considered a genre anyway.” And i think that Diaz uses that to his advantage creating a story that is a combination of so many genres and combines so many different interests that it is virtually impossible for it to be boring.

New Author Challenge 2012

2011-11-13T09:00:00.000Z

When I said I was going to sign up for less reading challenges in 2012, I may have inadvertently been lying... However, what I am doing is signing up for more manageable challenges (I'm not sure what's up with the italics.. I'm an italic-ey mood today I guess). Instead of getting completely carried away in a sea of lists, recommendations, and books I absolutely must read now, I'm trying to be calmer and going for challenges that incorporate a lot of the books I already own, along with library books, and which can all be used to help each other. As I love to expand my list of authors I love, I am really excited by the idea of the New Author Challenge, hosted by Literary Escapism. The rules are fairly simple:

The challenge runs between January 1st, 2012, and December 31st 2012
You can use books from other challenges but the authors must be new to you, and only a third of your total reading for this challenge can come from anthologies. The rest must be from novels.
Either pick 15, 25, or 50 new authors to try during 2012
After reading a new author, add the review to the linky on the website

Because I don't want to be too mad, I'm going to go for 25 new authors to start off with. This hopefully shouldn't be too difficult as I know there are a fair few I've not yet read on my list for the Mount TBR Challenge to start off with, plus it gives me an excuse to browse the library even more than usual!

These are the new authors and books I have read in 2012:

Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Kick Ass by Mark Millar
A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve
Dear Fatty by Dawn French
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

A Classics Challenge

2011-11-12T11:01:00.001Z

Continuing with my plans for reading my own books and library books only for as long as possible in 2012, I’ve signed up for what seems like it will be an awesome challenge. Katherine at Novembers Autumn is hosting A Classics Challenge, for which all you have to do is make a list of 7 classics you plan to read in 2012. On the 4^th of every month, she will post questions on her blog, and the idea is for participants to answer these questions which will be broad enough to apply to whatever book people happen to be reading. Also, you only have to commit to question answering during three months of the entire year, which is great for people who are a bit rubbish at consistently remembering about all the challenges they’ve signed up for, like me!

So here is my list of the seven classics I’m hoping to read in 2012:

1. The Odyssey – Homer

2. The Awakening – Kate Chopin

3. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

4. Shirley – Charlotte Bronte

5. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte

6. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell

7. A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

All of these are currently on my 'Classics' shelf, and all of them are books I've been trying to get to for a while!

Sorry about all the challenge sign up posts going up at the moment, I’m getting them out of the way and will get back to the reviews soon I promise!

Review: - Snuff by Terry Pratchett

2011-11-11T09:00:00.000Z

Snuff is, unbelievably, the thirty ninth book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. If you haven’t heard about Terry Pratchett, the Discworld, or at the very least seen one of the BBC adaptations of either The Colour of Magic, Hogfather, or Going Postal, then I really want to know how you’ve managed it. Sir Terry also manages to cunningly release a new book pretty much every October/November time, just in time for Christmas, and it has become a tradition for me to buy the hardback for my dad as his Christmas present, and surreptitiously read it before wrapping it and giving it to him, along with my opinion of it. It’s a win – win situation.

On best form, Pratchett is amazingly fluid, engrossing and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Snuff, in my opinion, wasn’t his best form. However, it was still incredibly good.

Blurb-y bit from Goodreads:

As with all of Terry Pratchett’s books, Snuff had a considerable amount of hype surrounding it, and I read somewhere during my pre-publication perusal of Snuff related stuff, that Terry Pratchett’s books are social satires (which I had, not being completely dense, managed to realise), but I never really thought about how they often relate to topical issues. Really, the book is about goblins and their second class status within Discworld society.

According to the writer of the best-selling crime novel ever to have been published in the city of Ankh-Morpork, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.
And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.
He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment.
They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.
But not quite all...

Readers of the Discworld series will know that within the series, there are several mini series focusing on different (and often overlapping) sets of characters, among which are the witches, the Watch, the Nac mac Feegle, and the wizards of the Unseen University. Sam Vimes has featured in several previous novels featuring the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, including Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, and Thud!, many of which are among my personal favourites. The storyline of Snuff was very well thought out and included the requisite amount of sneaking, fighting with improvised weapons, vaguely inappropriate, toilet-related jokes, making-it-up-as-you-go-along and accidental bravery, and it made me laugh out loud in public places on several occasions. It also dragged me away back into the world of the Disc and its inhabitants which I appreciated, as lately the whole separating myself from reality thing isn’t happening as much as it used to with reading. The Night Circus (no, I will never stop going on about it) was the last book to do that successfully and left me worried that nothing else ever would, so well done Mr. Pratchett!

Snuff is also slightly reminiscent of earlier books in as much as Commander Vimes manages to find himself a well meaning but undertrained, slightly bumbling country policeman to train up and mentor, thus turning his ‘holiday’ into work while still preserving the illusion that he has merely been dragged into someone else’s problem as is helping them out as nothing more than his duty as a landlord.

As ever, I loved the characters, from old favourite like Fred Colon and Captain Carrot to new ones such as a harp – playing Goblin called Tears of the Mushroom. Also hilarious was Commander Vimes’ son Sam’s obsession with and collection of different types of animal poo. I find Terry Pratchett very often gets the tone of small children exactly right, hence why many of his books are so popular with them. He also gets the tone of the long suffering parent, answering what feels like the hundredth question of the day about poo spot on.

What starts off as an investigation into a missing blacksmith and a dead Goblin turns into something much larger, and as the quest for answers progresses, Vimes and local policeman Feeney Upshot, assisted as ever by Willikins, Commander Vimes’ loyal gentlemen’s gentlemen, find themselves embroiled in something much larger than simple murder....

Also I’d just like to add that Sir Terry Pratchett has lately garnered a lot of attention here in the UK for his views on euthanasia. As people may know, Mr Pratchett was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers in 2007, and may I just say that anybody worrying about his memory may stop doing so right now. The amount of details from previous books that raise their heads in Snuff is quite frankly incredible. To be honest, I don’t think I, an Alzheimer free person, would be able to keep anywhere near that level of detail straight, so I’m amazed and impressed that he can.

If you generally enjoy Mr. Pratchett, or if you just want something funny and engrossing to read, then I would suggest that Snuff is a good option. I thoroughly enjoyed myself from start to finish and I hope that there will be many more Discworld books to come.