Banned Books Week Giveaway

This coming week is Banned Books Week in the USA, and Sheila of BookJourney is hosting a huge event with loads of blogs hosting reviews and things. I was meant to be posting about The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I've been wanting to read for about three years but when I went to find my copy so I could read it for this, it's disappeared. I was going to post about The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie but the reason for originally wanting to post on The Perks of Being a Wallflower is that I knew that I just don't have the focus for The Satanic Verses at the moment, much as I want to read it. I currently have 9 days to go until my due date and it's all getting a little hectic around here, so this is basically my apology for the fact that there isn't actually a review up here as such.

I have lent the book to my sister though, so somebody is reading it during Banned Books Week, and there is still a giveaway. Keep reading for details! My thoughts on banning and censorship in general will be up tomorrow!


The prize for this giveaway is one book of your choice from the ALA list of frequently challenged books. There are three lists; 1990-1999, 2000-2009, and the list of banned and challenged classics. You can pick any book from these lists which is £10/$15 or less from The Book Depository. The giveaway will run until Saturday 6th October and (allowing for my due date being the next day!), I'll email the winner to get their choice of book. 

The Rules
1. To be eligible to enter you must fill in the form 
2. You do NOT have to be a follower, although obviously all followers/subscribers are greatly appreciated!
3. You must be from a country that The Book Depository ships to
4. The book you choose must be £10/$15 or less
5. Giveaway ends Saturday 6th October 2012.
That's it!


*Update* Neil Gaiman tweeted this link to a list of banned and challenged Graphic Novels this morning, which I found really interesting as it contains loads of my favourites!!

Nora Ephron and some serious Julie & Julia love

I love food. I love cooking, and I really love books about food and cooking. There's been a lot of talk about Nora Ephron of late, and my association with her is very flimsy - I pretty much knew her name from repeated watching of You've Got Mail (although I somehow still don't actually own the film!), and then when she died last year people started mentioning how her writing was hilarious and I hadn't even realised that she wrote...

Around the time that Julie & Julia came out I was in Bath rescuing a friend from an awkward situation and I had a spare couple of hours which I (obviously) killed in their awesome Waterstone's and came across Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell, on which the movie is based. I read it, loved it, and shortly after bought the movie for about £3 ex-rental in Blockbuster. I watched it, I fell in love, and that's where I've stayed ever since. 

This evening I bullied my sister into watching it, as she has no appreciation for Meryl Streep and I was trying to encourage her (it kind of vaguely worked). Also I had a bit of what turned out to be a themed impromtu trip to the library today because I knew they had I feel bad about my neck by Ephron and I wanted to grab it and give it a go to see if it was as happily hilariously awesome as her movies are, and then while  we were there I succumbed to this horrible weakness that I have for books with the word 'Club' in the title. The Friday Night Knitting Club sparked an obsessive reading of all of Kate Jacobs' novels; The Jane Austen Book Club pushed me to finally get on with reading Emma and Persuasion, The Chocolate Lovers Club inspired me to eat a lot of chocolate... You see where this is going? So if the library are going to stick a copy of The Meryl Streep Movie Club on the stand right next to the door, I am going to borrow it. It's just inevitable. And yes, I know I have far too many half started library books at the moment (library books I've started to read which are lying around the house include: The Sisters Brothers, The Pirates in an Adventure with Moby Dick, and Let's Pretend this Never Happened. Plus Let the Great World Spin is staring reproachfully at me from a chair and I really want to get to it because it sounds much better than I thought it would be...), but it will probably only take me about a day to read and that will be motivating because of my whole not having finished any books in recent memory thing. Anyway! The point of this post wasn't really to ramble about the library. I think (although the inception of the post now feels so far in the past it's difficult to remember) that was I was really talking about was Nora Ephron and how late I am to the party of her awesomeness. So. 

Awkward confessions which will probably make Ephron lovers throw stuff at me a lot: 
1) I have never read any of Nora Ephron's writing
2) I have only seen When Harry met Sally once. And that was almost ten years ago.
3) I really dislike Meg Ryan. Except in You've Got Mail. I also really dislike Tom Hanks. Except in You've Got Mail which 
4) I still don't own.

And so I've decided to do my own mini Nora Ephron project, because if my very limited previous experience is anything to go by it will be fairly easy to focus on in my imminent (1.5 weeks!!) post baby life, and because Julie & Julia makes me feel eternally happy. And hungry, but you know. Also because Amy Adams is just so cute and I want to put her in my pocket. Which is totally a legitimate reaction to have to Amy Adams. So yes. According to Wikipedia I have these things to get through:

Films

• Silkwood
• Heartburn
• When Harry met Sally (rewatch, because it's been toooooo long!)
• Cookie
• My Blue Heaven
• This is My Life
• Sleepless in Seattle (which I actually own but have never watched because it was on when I was on a train from Melbourne to Adelaide for 10 hours but I had been sleeping in a train seat all night, so I wasn't very awake)
• Mixed Nuts
• Michael
• All I Wanna Do
• You've Got Mail (I've seen it at least four times, but I still plan to actually buy a copy)
• Hanging Up
• Lucky Numbers
• Bewitched 

Books

• Wallflower at the Orgy
• Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women
• Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media
• I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (I have this from the library so hopefully it will get me off to a resoundingly successful start!)
• I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections

I also have a copy of the book of Heartburn, but Wikipedia doesn't seem to think that's a thing.... :-/ So yes, library books and Sleepless in Seattle up first. I have duly added all the films (except Cookie and Lucky Numbers which they don't seem to have) to my Lovefilm list, and the books to my wishlist. We shall see how we go. 

I know there's a lot of Ephron love out there at the moment, so please tell me your favourites and where I should start!

Top Ten Tuesday - Unfinished Series

I’ve been up since 5.50am this morning. I’m not at all happy about it, especially since my house is cold, I refuse to put the heating on when it’s not even winter yet, and my slippers are in with my hubby who is ill and sleeping. Anyway, what better way to make use of time than to make a TopTen Tuesday list, right? Would be a great plan, except my internet is currently not actually working and hasn’t been for a couple of days so when you see this post be happy for me as I will be doing an internet victory dance. Yes, it’s a legitimate thing J

1)      A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R Martin – I really enjoyed A Game of Thrones but kinda got bored somewhere in the middle of the second book. People tell me it’s worth reading and I probably will someday but the major problem I have with fantasy is that I don’t necessarily want to read eleven or twelve books by the same author in a row, and if I don’t read them in a row I tend to have forgotten what happens by the time I read the next one....

2)      The Elder Gods series by David Eddings – By the third book, I felt like I was just reading the same story over and over rehashed from ever so slightly different but not so different you’d really notice angles. And Eddings has two or three seriously infuriating phrases he overuses so much I just couldn’t anymore.

3)      Delirium etc by Lauren Oliver – I read Delirium. It was ok. I’m still not sure if I liked it enough to read more in the series. I think I preferred Before I Fall if I’m honest...

4)      Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome – I was seriously in love with Swallows and Amazons as a child. I wanted to sail away and spend my summer on an island despite the fact that a)there are very few islands where I live and b)neither I nor any of my siblings have any sailing expertise whatsoever. Anyway I read maybe three of these as a child but I’m really quite excited to get the whole series together and have a read!

5)      The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan – By now you’re probably sensing a pattern. I don’t really like fantasy series (unless they’re by David Gemmell. Or Terry Pratchett, but the Discworld doesn’t really count as they can all be read as standalones. Ditto Gemmell, so win for both of them), and especially not the ones which for some inconceivable reason seem to go on for hundreds of books. Also WOT kinda read like a bit of a LOTR rip off and as I’m a huge LOTR fan that wasn’t really a big selling point for me...

6)      Fables by Bill Willingham – OK so I break my not finishing fantasy series rule for graphic novels and I LOVE this series. I’m up to book 8 at the moment and I just haven’t had a spare £14 to spend what with baby madness and other such things...My sister just recently got a library job though and I think she’s magicked it up from her awesome resources so I may just thief it from her as she has thiefed the previous seven from me...

7)      The Cousins War by Philippa Gregory – this is another series that I really like, but I’ve slightly stalled with. The latest, The Kingmaker’s Daughter is out, but I was sent the last one for review and so read it ages ago and as previously mentioned, don’t have a lot of spare new book buying resources at the moment so I’m going to have to wait for the library to get it in I think.

8)      Anne of Green Gables by L.M Montgomery – to be honest I didn’t really realise I’ve never completed this series. It’s another one I was obsessed with as a child (Anne is a loud redhead with an overly active imagination. I thought she was me.) but despite owning the first six books I just never got around to the last three. I recently picked up Rilla of Ingleside in a charity shop so hopefully I’ll get to it sooner rather than later!

9)      The Jackson Brodie books by Kate Atkinson – I read Case Histories and One Good Turn after watching the BBC mini - series with Jason Isaacs being awesome as Jackson.  I own When Will There Be Good News? And Started Early, Took My Dog and they are both on my list of planned reads for this year, I just haven’t got to them yet. Really not sure why as I really enjoy Atkinson’s writing.

10)   The Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich – This is probably my mostly chronically unfinished series. I’ve read the first two, I own the fourth, and the library only ever seems to have about the seventeenth. I really enjoyed the first two but I kind of hate reading them out of order so I just haven’t yet. I will get to it because they’re light hearted and kind of great and I also want to see the film because I have all of the love for Katherine Heigl. So.

And that’s my ten. I’m really surprised that I actually managed to get ten. And some are series that I actually have intention to read! Yay!

P.S - Victory dance!

Inbox/Outbox September 22nd

This is entirely stolen from Bookriot. They want us to tell them about what we've received and what we've finished in the previous week, and I would've done it in the comments like everybody else but I wanted to ramble and put in pictures so I thought better to do it here and bore everybody with it!

Inbox

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Sent to me by the wonderful Ellie, who is the best at ninja RAK ever. I've wanted to read this for years purely because Whoopi Goldberg recommends it to Lauryn Hill in Sister Act 2. Yes, I am that suggestible. It's teeny tiny and I'm really excited to read it!

Love Anthony by Lisa Genova - I read Still Alice by Lisa Genova a while back and really enjoyed it. I also am really interested in books about autism, as both my mother and I used to work with children with autism a lot and so I find it a fascinating subject. I was sent this by Ally from Simon and Schuster yesterday and I'm already 3/4 through it. It's beautiful.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham - I talked about how I was going to get this because of what Laura said about it earlier this week, and I immediately went and swapped for it through Readitswapit. I'm quite excited about it, and I'm also thinking I should probably watch the movie as well..

Outbox

I have finished a grand total of nothing this week....

In the Queue

I'm currently in the middle of a fair amount of books. Probably more than I've read at one time for quite a while:

The BFG by Roald Dahl which I started reading for Roald Dahl Day and have (of course) managed to get distracted from despite its' awesomeness. I'd forgotten just how great it is and there is no excuse I can offer for it having taken me over a week to get nearly to the end...


Continuing the Roald Dahl theme, I've also been reading
Storyteller: a Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock, which is brilliant but has fallen victim to my whole 'non-fiction books take me at least a month to finish regardless of how much I love them' thing. I'm trying to keep up with it though as I'd really like to finish it, and it is realy interesting.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe which I am actually really enjoying (probably unsurprising seeing as how I have a deep and enduring love of 'stranded on a desert island' stories, especially The Swiss Family Robinson, which honestly this reminds me a bit of) but not getting very far with, mostly because I refuse to stop starting other books.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum is on my list for The Classics Club and I have it as an audiobook so I started listening to it this week. To be honest though, this is one that I will probably save for once the baby comes as I will hopefully listen to it and some of the rest of the series during those night time feeds!

And then finally Love Anthony which I will hopefully finish today!




Anybody else done better than me at finishing stuff this week?

Review:- The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

I talked a little while ago about how I went to Haworth and saw the Bronte Parsonage and how totally in love with all things Bronte I am at the moment, especially after reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so when the lovely people at Headline offered to send me a copy of The Taste of Sorrow, a novel about the Bronte family, I couldn't resist! I know lots of people will probably be familiar with the story of the Brontes and how incredibly sad it is;  pretty much everybody dies, and I knew this going in, but it was still a little overwhelming in places. I was reading it while we were away on holiday and had to stop at one point because I was getting too emotional. Do bear in mind that I am currently pregnant and incredibly (I mean ridiculously) emotional, but still. It's not a happy story. 

I am an awful, awful photographer 

It is, however, very well told, and very interesting. Although there is no narrator as such it is primarily told from Charlotte's point of view, as she outlived all of her siblings, and although it is marketed as fiction, it is as informative as reading a straight biography. It's likely that I will retain more information from reading The Taste of Sorrow than I would if I'd gone to the non-fiction section and pulled out a Bronte biography, as the novel has a sense of drama and character which is not usually present in non-fiction. Also, apparently non-fiction takes me about two months to finish, regardless of how good it is, whereas this took me less than a week. Jude Morgan does a wonderful job capturing the individuality of each of the Brontes: Emily's self-contained poise, Anne's obedience and attention to her duty, and Charlotte's wildness and longings for independence. And then there's Branwell. People mention Branwell in passing, usually, or sometimes in an 'oh it's so sad, he could have been the genius of the family if not for the drinking and the drugs' kind of way, and while there is some of this feeling about it, his decline in the novel is pretty much shown as a result of his own actions. The girls are all very stoic and relentless. Branwell on the other hand, spends most of his time wallowing in what he perceives as his misfortune. It is very sad as in childhood he is undoubtedly the leader of the gang, and the inventor of their fictional world to which they all (especially Emily) return often well into adulthood. Having said that, though, I can totally see the appeal; he's a very romantic character, and in a lot of ways there's quite a bit of the Heathcliffe about him. Laura (who I apparently can no longer write a post without referencing) said that she thinks she has the hots for him, and I get it. He's a very compelling character. I think she should definitely read this book...

I knew that the school from Jane Eyre was based on real experiences, but I didn't realise how real. Two of Charlotte's sisters, Maria and Elizabeth both died from tuberculosis while attending Cowan Bridge school, where the standards of the food provided to the boarders among other things, was the cause of an outbreak of typhoid. After finishing this it just made me realise how much I need to read the rest of the Bronte books, as I could see parts of their lives which had been used in their fiction even in the limited amounts that I have read. I loved that despite the slightly despairing feeling that runs through the novel, none of the girls ever give up on each other or themselves, and I particularly loved how resilient Anne was. I've just recently discovered Anne, and as some of you will know I entirely fell in love with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Although I loved Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, for me Tenant is just kind of kick-ass in a way that neither of the above quite are, and in this novel Anne was pretty kick-ass too. 

It's taken me SO LONG to write this review (we're talking about a month here) purely because I found it so engrossing, as I find the Bronte's themselves engrossing, and I didn't want to just go off on a totally fangirlish rant about how great they are. Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to avoid them. Basically, I'm a little bit in love with this book, with all of them, and with Yorkshire in general. 

My New Favourite Reading Place..

In the very distant past i think I've posted pictures of my amazing armchair which I got for 99p from eBay and which was the inspiration for the title of my blog. I don't want to be 'a massive betrayer', but despite its' awesome comfyness, I am currently unable to sit in it without seriously getting stuck, so we had to get another one. 

This is my new favourite place for sitting, and my new chair (it rocks and comes complete with rocking footstool which you can just about see!), bought for the purpose of feeding the baby but already in use for general sitting as it's the only place in our house I can sit without getting backache at the moment! It's ridiculously comfy and has pockets in the side for keeping baby feeding essentials (or books...), and Rhys keeps trying to sneak it while I'm not looking. The room it's in is a little bit of a mess at the moment as it used to be our bedroom and is currently in the process of being turned into a nursery which means that it kind of has the debris of two rooms. It is brilliant though - as well as the comfy chair, the light is better in here than in any other room in the house, it's just been thoroughly cleaned so I don't get any allergic reactions to dust or anything, it has three bookcases in it, and also has awesome pictures on the wall (the one you can see above the chair is the alphabet mural we made for the baby the other day. I'm compiling a really boring baby crafts post with pictures of it and other stuff. Watch this space..). The aim was to make it a relaxing place to feed the baby during the night especially, and a place where he can play during the day as he will be sleeping in our room for the first few months, and I think we've almost achieved that. The play gym and bouncy chair are stashed in the cupboard at the moment but I'm pretty proud of both of them, as they are both second hand but beautiful :-). 

I think I'm going to need to be careful to remember that it's actually his room, not my reading room. It kind of feels like my personal library/craft room at the moment....

Books for Baby #5

It's been a little while since I did a baby books post, and I've managed to accumulate a few more. I'm particularly impressed with this lot though, as one was free and all the others were less than £1.50 which is pretty much winning, in my opinion. 

In the picture: 

• Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak - This was one of my favourite books as a child, but the problem with being the eldest of seven is that all of my favourite childhood books are pretty much owned by my younger brother, who, at age 11 is really too old for them but is clinging on to his 'baby of the family' status by refusing to relinquish them to his nephew. So I had to buy a new copy, but this came from a charity shop and is in pretty great condition so I'm not complaining!
• The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr - I found this at a car boot sale, and the lovely lady who was selling it obviously took pity on the fact that I'd got stuck on the floor looking through the box of books and let me have it for free! Super excited because this is another favourite I've been after for a while. 
• Threadbear by Mick Inkpen - I had totally forgotten all about Threadbear until I saw it at one of the summer fairs they have down by the seafront here. It was 75p and is in lovely condition :-) 
• Mog the Forgetful Cat by Judith Kerr - Picked this up in a charity shop yesterday also for 75p after having a mini freakout about the very small number of board books the baby actually has. Tried to explain to Rhys about the scrunching and grabbing and eating of paper which is normal around small babies and pretty much just ended up shouting 'he needs more books!' at him. He didn't look convinced...
• That's Not My Train... - recommended originally by lovely Lyndsey, we've been looking at the seemingly endless books in this series for a while now, but every time I find a second hand one it's in rubbish condition. I've been wanting to collect only the ridiculously impossible ones (That's Not My Reindeer/Dragon/Spaceship etc), but yesterday we found this and it's in brilliant condition and was cheap. Thus the collection begins!
• A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond - I know we have this on audiobook but I really want to own the collection of the physical books as well and I've never seen them in charity shops before. This was 75p and hopefully I'll be able to pick up the rest at some point. Paddington is quite essential, I feel. 

If you are particularly interested/can be bothered, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. This may well be the last one of these I do before he is born, but to be honest I quite enjoy writing them so I may keep it on sporadically after he's here. Rhys keeps telling me to stop buying children's books as if we already own them all he won't get the joy of going out and buying his own books, but honestly, there are so many books I don't think it's possible for us to have so many he won't want to read other things as well. Also, most of mine (outside of board and picture books which obviously I have to buy for him as he won't be old enough to buy for himself) are classics, so he still has the entire of contemporary children's literature to explore for himself! 

As usual any suggestions or your personal favourites are much appreciated!