An Armchair By The Sea

Thursday, 11 July 2013

The Weekly List

When my sister was about to start A Levels (16, for the non-Brits reading this!), she asked me to write her a list of books she should read over the summer. To give an idea of time scale, she's now 19, so this was a list I made preblogging. I just found it last week and it got me thinking about book lists and what makes them good. Some of the titles on this list I haven't even read myself and looking at it now, I've really no idea why some of them were on here, but it made me wonder why I haven't turned my obsession with bookish lists into a feature on the blog before now. So here it is. This week, part 1, is the list I made for my sister, and next week I will publish a list of internet recommended reading for similar aged kids. This is how it will go; one week my list of certain subjects/genres, the second week an outside source (e.g 1001 books to read before you die, Guardian top 100 etc). I'm aware that this may not appeal to anyone but me, but if you're a similarly list loving person then I definitely welcome your input on things I've missed, things that you thought were awful and so on. It's all about the debate :-)

So here it is, Esther's A Level reading list, with the comments I wrote for her at the time:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Paradise Lost - John Milton (and tell me if it's good, cos I've not read it )
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (this book is genius - if you don't love it, I will have to disown you)
Don Quixote - Cervantes (Dad has it - nick it)
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (stick with it - its worth it!)
A Passage to India - E.M Forster
Howards End - E.M Forster
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (Do NOT watch the film)
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter (I have it. Just bloody brilliant. Read it. Now)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- Anne Bronte
T.S Eliot poetry - especially... The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, and The Wasteland but also Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and others... he's a genius poet
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (WATCH WATCH WATCH the film starring Marlon Brando (very often shirtless :D) and Vivien Leigh... pure brilliance)
Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Film Recommendation - Kenneth Branagh.. don't bother with Mel Gibson...)
Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (Baz Luhrman, obv)
The Tempest - William Shakespeare (Return to the Forbidden Planet :p)
Othello - William Shakespeare (don't watch the film.. go see it at the Globe)
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas (absolutely GENIUS writer)
Our Tragic Universe - Scarlett Thomas
The Hunchback of Notre- Dame - Victor Hugo
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Odyssey - Homer (Dad has, but I'm reading atm so you can have it after :p)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R.L Stephenson
Wild Swans - Jung Chang
Quo Vadis? - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translations - Brian Friel
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
True Notebooks - Mark Salzman
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (due to Stalin, he wasn't allowed to leave Russia to get his NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE for Dr. Zhivago. This is one of the many reasons why we hate Stalin..)
Poetry of W.H Auden
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Unhand me, grey beard loon!)

Looking at it now, this list could otherwise be entitled 'All the books I'd loved at this point plus the ones I wanted to read but was too scared/lazy to have got around to yet'.

It's not necessarily the books I'd recommend now, but I know that she's read a fair few of them now on my recommendation, and loved a lot of them :-)

What would you put on a list like this? What have I missed, and what shouldn't be on here?

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

The First (Annual?) Summer Ninja Book Swap

A while ago I posted about how Hanna and I were organising the first Summer Ninja Book Swap, so that people didn’t have to wait till Christmas for secret santa style awesomes. So, a few people signed up for it and we’ve been quietly organising away for the last few weeks. Yesterday was the deadline for sending things out, and every single person who signed up (even the one whose emails didn't get through to her till two days before the deadline!) managed to send their parcels on time!

Because the person who was sending my parcel was super organised and sent it early, I got it on Friday and it was amazing.

There was going to be a super awesome picture here, which I took properly so it was nice and well lit and stuff, but our home internet is dead at the moment (it was the BT WiFi thing and it stopped working so we cancelled it and now it turns out that none of the other wireless options will work in our area, so it will be down for at least a month while we work out if getting a landline and broadband is a viable financial option for us) and all the internet I've tried to use today seems to be massively opposed to this picture :-( I cannot understand why, because it is awesome. Anyway! My swapper was the lovely Charlotte from Lit Addicted Brit, and she sent me an amazing parcel with not one but two awesome books, a box of chocolates and a great, bookish card. The books I got were both ones I've been after for a while as well; Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, which I read an extract from in The Library Book and have wanted ever since, and The Outsider by Albert Camus, which has been on my list since A Levels but I've somehow never got around to! Those plus a box of yummy Thornton's chocolates equal a parcel made of awesome I think you'll agree!

I don't know how everybody else (especially Hanna, who did all the matching up!) would feel about it, but I think this is something definitely worth repeating at least on an annual, if not more frequently (Halloween swap anyone?) basis. And yes, that's me volunteering to organise it again :-)

In other news, I had to break my partial library ban today because they had The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente and as I read the first one this time last year and have had to be forcibly restrained from buying this several times I thought I couldn't not borrow it, really. And they also had The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I'm on a bit of a John Green kick at the moment. So it was unavoidable, really.

If things are a little quiet around here for a few weeks, I apologise. It will be due to the aforementioned lack of internet, and also because we're going on holiday to Devon for a couple of weeks. I promise to be back to regularly scheduled programming soon though! I'm also planning a kind of feature with bookish lists that I've got the first few posts on the go for, so if you're a list person, watch this space...

Wednesday, 3 July 2013

Half Way Checkpoint!

I seriously can’t believe we’re half way through 2013 already! This year has been totally mad and gone by so ridiculously quickly, considering ‘all’ I’ve done is be at home with a baby. I know before I start that I’ve not done a lot of the things I said I wanted to do and not read a lot of the stuff I wanted to read. I will not feel bad about it. Before we start, here’s a list of things I have done in 2013:

· Brought up a gorgeous baby boy who is turning into a proper little person in front of my eyes and now ‘reads’ his That’s Not My...series of books by himself!

· Started a business (so far mostly theoretical) selling my handmade things. If you know a small person and want something bookish for them, check out my Fairytales in a Bag! I love them J

· Signed up for my first craft fair, which is in just over a month and I’m quite scared.

· Met Hanna and Laura! This is a major win for me and my social anxiety and also just for the awesomeness of internet people. They rule.

· Negotiated my part-time return to work in September, specifics of which are still pending. Watch this space.

· Cancelled my TV licence, and therefore freed up approximately 8 hours of the day I used to spend watching Jeremy Kyle and The Real Housewives series to do useful, productive things.

· Made a lot of jams and chutneys (lemon curd, rhubarb & orange jam, strawberry jam, tomato chutney...

Challenge-wise, I signed up for seven challenges in 2013. Here’s what they are and what my progress is so far:

1. The Telling Tales Challenge – My own challenge of all things fairytale related. I’m not doing at all badly on this one. So far I’ve read Fables Volumes 8,9 and 10 by Bill Willingham, and Naming Monsters by Hannah Eaton for the Troll Under the Bridge category, and watched Mirror Mirror and read Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and watched Beastly and read the novel for the Queen of the Silver Screen category. I also watched Alice in Wonderland (the Johnny Depp version, obviously) the other day, so I just need to read Through the Looking Glass and that’ll be another one ticked off! I really like this challenge, I think I’m going to keep running it for ages. 6/10

2. The TBR Pile Challenge – Hosted by Adam of Roof Beam Reader, I am failing dismally at this challenge. So far I’ve read nothing, but that said, Eternals is currently sat on a chair next to me and I could probably read it in about an hour, so that could be rectified by the end of today, and may have to be!

3. Translation Challenge – Hosted by Ellie at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm, this is the challenge I was probably most excited about and also have yet to read a single thing for. I started The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, but I got distracted. This is part of the reason why I’m on a library ban at the moment!

4. Young Adult Reading Challenge – I’ve actually read two for this – Looking for Alaska by John Green and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I don’t think I reviewed either of them but I loved them both. I watched the film of Perks first and I seriously loved both film and book and have been recommending them left right and centre, even to Emma Watson haters, because she is excellent in the film! Looking for Alaska just helped to further reaffirm my growing John Green love (as a side note, everybody I talk to seems to obsess about John Green, even people who read no YA ever love him.)

5. Graphic Novel Challenge – As usual, this is the one I’m doing the best with. By my count (for some reason I’ve totally failed at keeping any kind of list that’s representative of what I’ve actually ended up reading) I’ve read six which is exactly where I should be J A few (Maus, the three Fables I’ve read) are among my favourites of the year, so well done Graphic Novel Challenge!

6. The Wishlist Challenge – I’ve read two books for this (The Library Book, and The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer) and got two more out of the library but had to return them before I could read them. Hopefully I’ll do better in the next 6 months!

7. The Essay Reading Challenge – I’m currently reading Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron for this. Also The Library Book counts, so I’m definitely going to complete this challenge.Hooray!

I think I’m actually doing better than I was this time last year, and hopefully over the summer I’ll do a lot of reading my own books which will be good J

Now, my list of goals for this year. I’m only going to write about the ones I haven’t totally failed at, for the rest, you can just assume...

· Book Buying Ban – My goal was to beat 3 months without buying books. I HAVE DONE THIS!! It’s been six months and I will stress that I haven’t bought any books for myself. I have bought quite a few for Benji and also a couple which relate to selling crafts and so don’t count as they are for business purposes. Either way, I’m extremely proud of myself.

· Go the whole year without buying anything from Amazon (except if I win/am given gift certificates) – Doing well with this one as well, with the exception of Laura’s birthday (basically I left it too late to wrap the stuff myself, wanted an option to send giftwrapped which The Book Depository don’t have (??!) so gave in to Amazon, then totally missed the box to tick for giftwrapping thus rendering my whole argument entirely pointless. Never mind.)

· Get over my aversion to YA – I’m doing well with this as well. Although I’ve not read a huge amount still, I spend a fair amount of time browsing the ‘teenage’ section in the library and I just started Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter which is interesting. Also I still have Paper Towns by John Green sitting on a shelf staring at me with big sad eyes, begging me to read it..

· Read more non-fiction – I’ve read 9 so far, and last year I read 14 so I think I’ll do it easily! I keep picking stuff up from the library which looks interesting, got a lot of Nora for my birthday and also I WANT MORE JESSICA VALENTI!

So that’s that. June is done, and I’m not doing too badly at all for a person who’s trying to raise a baby, not die buried under piles of laundry, meet new people, do new things, make sure said baby is properly sociable (thanks, Baby bounce and Rhyme time at the library!), see family and friends, run a small business, keep up with two blogs, a facebook page and not make my husband feel totally neglected J I would be doing nowhere near as well if he didn’t do more than half of everything, he is awesome.

Tuesday, 2 July 2013

July Telling Tales Link Up

We're more than half way through the year and I'm still really enjoying my challenge :-) I read two books for it last month, although only reviewed one, and I need to get on with reading Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll as I watched Alice in Wonderland the other day!

As always, the master list is here if you'd like some inspiration. Sign up is here, happy reading!

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark

From Goodreads.

The thing I love most about reading Neil Gaiman is how the magic is so close. His books are never set in different worlds, they’re never far away, they’re always almost right where you are, and that makes the magic seem so much more possible. Neverwhere is set in London below- literally a London below London. American Gods is just America, with differences. Even in Coraline her other life is just through a door and down a passage. Everything is immediate, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane is no different. The majority of the magickeyness of the novel takes place pretty much at the end of the nameless narrator’s garden.

After reading it, I’ve gone on a bit of a Gaiman binge, because quite frankly nothing else will do. Except maybe The Night Circus...I’ve been looking forward to The Ocean at the End of the Lane for pretty much a year, and I’m so glad that it lived up to my expectations. Even as I’m writing this I know I’ll have to go back and read it again, and to be honest I’ll probably write another post about it after I’ve done that because this is going to just glance over the surface and be so much less than it requires and deserves.

Simply put, it’s a beautiful, unnerving, magical novel. It has a child protagonist but is definitely not for children (although to my mind there’s very little Gaiman that is for children, really. Not young ones, anyway), and it also seems very personal to Gaiman. When I was reading it I kept wondering if it was autobiographical (apparently it’s based on the landscape of his childhood, but isn’t biographical in terms of events and suchlike) because it feels so intense. I didn’t just read this novel; I immersed myself in it. I’ve been thinking about it for days since I finished it and I know that once I finish this post I won’t be happy with it. There will be so much more that I wish I’d said but while I’m writing it I can’t find any of those words. Which is why there will be a second part to the discussion at some point.

There’s not a lot I can say about it without being spoilery, because all the stuff I felt the strongest about, which unsettled me the most or that I loved the most revolves around major plot points, and more than anything I think you should go out and read this book. Some people have disliked it, and you can feel free to do so, I just feel very strongly that you should read it first. And if you’re already a fan of Neil Gaiman then you should definitely read it. In fact, why haven’t you read it already? It took me two days, and that was only because the baby was teething or I would’ve been quicker. It’s awesome and thrilling and totally inspiring and I’ll be recommending it to everybody from now until forever.

And thanks to Andi from Estella’s Revenge I read this post by Neil’s wife, Amanda Palmer, and it made me cry, so you should probably read that too.

Friday, 28 June 2013

Off My Shelves: Fantasy!

I’ve put myself on a partial library ban this month because I tend to go in looking for nothing and come out with ten books I had no intention of reading, and because I’ve been re-sorting my bookshelves and have a horrendous amount (approximately 600) of books still to read, I thought it might be good for me to read purely from my own shelves for a bit. Hopefully it will give me a chance to clear the backlog of review copies as well.

Anyway, this is a great idea in theory, except that I have just so many books that I really have no idea where to start, and this is where the internet comes in! I have a lot (really a lot) of genre fiction, and so I’m going to do a little mini-series of posts where I will put up a short list of a few from one particular section that I’m interested in reading, and I’d like you to tell me what you think about them. If you’ve read any, if you haven’t, what you liked, what you didn’t, what I should read right now, what I should avoid forever... Everything.

The first genre I’m starting with is fantasy. As a teenager I read a load of fantasy, and David Gemmell remains one of my favourite authors to this day. Off the back of that I went round buying up loads of things people told me were a bit similar, and I now have shelves and shelves of beginnings of series and I need some serious help working out where to start!

Some things I have:

Aaronovitch, Ben – Rivers of London
Auel, Jean M. – The Clan of the Cave Bear (I think I’m the last person in the world not to have read this series..)
Barclay, James – Nightchild & Shadowheart (I started to read one of them a few years back. I don’t remember which, and they’re from different – but related – series I think...)
Brooks, Terry – The Sword of Shannara & The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara
Feist, Raymond –Rides a Dread Legion (I’ve read Feist before – if anyone’s read this, how does it compare to Magician?)
Hobb, Robin – Ship of Destiny & Shaman’s Crossing (I’ve read The Farseer Trilogy and The Tawny Man Trilogy already and enjoyed both. My sister’s been reading The Liveship Traders and says it’s good so it’s just a case of getting hold of books 1 and 2 before I can start...)
King, Stephen – The Drawing of the Three (I’ve started the first book in The Dark Tower series a couple of times but always failed to be gripped. Is it worth trying again?)
Nicholls, Stan – Orcs
Paolini, Christopher – Eragon

This is less than half of the fantasy I have, but they are the ones that jumped out at me. So come on internet, give me your wisdom!