Get Steampunked! Challenge

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

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

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

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!

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

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!!

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!

If you’d like to join, please leave a comment with a link to your sign up post. 

Participants:
1.Bex  (An Armchair by the Sea)
2.Esther (Always Look on the Bright Side of Life)
3.Jennifer (An Abundance of Books)
4. Hannah (Once Upon a Time)
5. Kailana (The Written World)
6.Tom (Life, Love and the Universe)
7. Lindy
8. Alberta (Alberta Reads)
9. Nicola (Back to Books)
10. Kim (Page After Page)
11. K (Very Simple Secret)  
12. West Virginia Red (West Virginia Red Reads)
13. Tobe (Wading Through the Ocean of Life)
14. Michelle (The True Book Addict) 
15. Jenny (Stone Soup Books)
16. Jackie (Books n Tea)  
17. Mirjam
18. Ricki (Reading Challenged)  
19. Eden Mabee (A Garden of Delights)
20. Michele A (NinjaInk)
21. Lisa (Lit and Life)
22. Hanna (Booking in Heels)
23. Kristen (A Writer's Wife)
24. Sary (Some People Use Their Imagination)

  
Master list of reviews here.