2012 Mount TBR Challenge

Last year I wished I’d joined this challenge, and as I’m going to make my book buying ban a yearly thing now (or at least see if I can beat the 3 months I achieved last year!), it seems like a good tool to encourage this. Basically it is what it says on the tin. Hosted by My Readers Block, you pick a level and the idea is to read just books that you already owned prior to January 1^st, 2012 (excluding ARCs and library books, and re-reads don’t count!). The levels are:

Pike’s Peak: 12 books from your TBR  pile

Mt. Vancouver: 25 books from your TBR pile

Mt. Ararat: 40 books from your TBR pile

Mt. Kilimanjaro: 50 books from your TBR pile

El Toro: 75 books from your TBR pile

Mt. Everest:100 books from your TBR pile

Because once you’ve signed up for a level, you must read at least that number of books, and given my failure rate on challenges this year, I’ve decided to go for Mt Vancouver, which is 25 books. I’ve actually even made a list to encourage me, although doubtless this will change, but for now, here it is!
(Books in blue are the ones I've read! Eventually they will hopefully all link up to a review!)

2012 Mount TBR Challenge Reading List

1.       Dear Fatty – Dawn French

2.       Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties – Lucy Moore

3.       So Many Books, So Little Time – Sara Nelson

4.       One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson

5.       Started Early, Took My Dog – Kate Atkinson

6.       Shirley – Charlotte Bronte

7.       The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte

8.       North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell

9.       Stephen Fry in America – Stephen Fry

10.   Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

11.   One Day – David Nicholls

12.   Bel Canto – Ann Patchett

13.   Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovich

14.   Essays in Love – Alain de Botton

15.   The Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean M. Auel

16.   Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud

17.   The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson

18.   The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

19.   Fun Home – Alison Bechdel

20.   The Merlin Conspiracy –Diana Wynne Jones

21.   Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke

22.   Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

23.   The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors – Michelle Young – Stone

24.   The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters

25.   1602 – Neil Gaiman

Even writing this list I started thinking of loads of books I have that aren’t on it that I want to read, so the chances are that I will increase my level at some point. I’d really like to make some space in the house, so hopefully this challenge will allow me to do that. Undoubtedly I’ll go on to refill the space created with different books, but still!

Anybody else participating in this challenge? 

October Summary

October was a really quiet month on the blog, for which I apologise. I’ve been married coming up to two months now, and the time’s just flown by! As well as returning to work and the run-up to Christmas (yes, I know it’s early, but that’s what you get for working in retail!), we’ve had a family situation to deal with, and are also in the process of confirming dates etc for moving house! I’m really excited about the move, as it will mean that we’ll have a second bedroom, which I’ve been given permission to turn into a reading room! I am literally *so* excited I’ve been pretty much running round in circles since we found out. Also since the new place is on the ground floor, I’ll finally be able to get a piano, the lack of which I’ve been feeling severely for the past year! The bad news is that it may mean that our internet connection is even more sporadic than at present, which to be honest I can’t even imagine, but hopefully we’ll be able to find a way around it!

What I have managed to post this past month or so has been mostly rambling and updates rather than actual reviews, and I am so behind that I think it’s unlikely I’ll actually manage to catch up with myself before the end of the year, but I will try!

And now for the exciting news!

Drumroll........

On January 9^th An Armchair by the Sea turns one!

I actually cannot stress how much of a gigantic achievement this will be for me. I’m the kind of person who is forever getting really excited about projects and fully immersing myself in them for about a week before getting bored and giving up, so the fact that I’ve actually kept this going semi-regularly for an entire year is nothing short of a miracle. I think it may actually be the first project I feel like I’ve succeeded in since I was a little kid, and I cannot describe the awesomeness of the feeling that gives me! Obviously, I want you lovely readers to feel as awesome about this as I do, so I’m currently trying to think up something fun to celebrate with. Any suggestions or ideas will be greatly appreciated, and there will undoubtedly be an incredibly gushy, rambling post about how much I love blogging and you book bloggers nearer the time!

Anyway, back to October. I may not have blogged a lot, but here’s what I read:

1.       A Conspiracy of Violence – Susanna Gregory

2.       A River in the Sky – Elizabeth Peters

3.       Blood on the Strand – Susanna Gregory

4.       Death: The Time of Your Life – Neil Gaiman

5.       Fables: Legends in Exile – Bill Willingham

6.       Franny & Zooey – J.D Salinger

7.       Persuasion – Jane Austen

8.       Snuff – Terry Pratchett

9.       The Annotated Peter Pan; The Centenary Edition – J.M Barrie & Maria Tatar

10.   The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

11.   The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender

12.   Whip It – Shauna Cross

So all in all, a pretty good reading month! It also saw the arrival of my first ever 24 hour readathon, which I adored and will definitely be participating again in April!

From a sense of great achievement, to a bit of a disappointment.... I went to work out how I’m doing on all my various challenges, and realised that I basically suck and haven’t got anywhere near target on any of them. This being my first year of blogging and given my obsession with lists, I think that I *may* have got slightly carried away, so next year I am definitely going to take on less! There will be some posts going up during the week about some of the challenges I’m planning to participate in next year. For 2011, I’m focusing on The Graphic Novel Challenge and The Historical Fiction Challenge, as they’re the two that I’m close enough to completing to finish by the end of December!

If all goes to plan, I should have quite a lot on the blog for you guys to read this coming week, hope you have a good one! I’m going to get back to the packing.... :-/

*forgot to mention - I also joined NaNoWriMo this week. Late, I know, and with no discernible idea of what it is I actually want to write, but I'm hoping it will get me into good habits. Plus two of my younger sisters are doing it and they were shaming me!*

Author Obsession

For the last few weeks, I've had a completely insatiable craving to re-read Chocolat by Joanne Harris. As far as I can tell, there's no particular reason for this, and since I initally read Joanne Harris because my mum loved her and don't actually own any of her novels, I had to get hold of Chocolat from somewhere (ReaditSwapit), and then of course I had to have the sequel, The Lollipop Shoes as well. Since it arrived it's been sat on the table, begging me to read it and I will, but meanwhile a copy of Blackberry Wine caught my eye online today...

Does anybody else either read one book by an author and then have to immediately go out and find every single word they've ever written, or decide to re-read a book and then just go on a huge splurge of reading  like all of one particular author's books, or only that particular author for a while? A good friend of mine regularly has what she calls 'Jodi Picoult phases' and 'Sarah Rayne phases' (by the way, why does nobody ever talk about Sarah Rayne? She is amazing), and then of course there's the biannual re-reading of Harry Potter... Is it just because once you finish a book which gives you *that feeling* you can't face the thought of reading anything less awesome? I recently discovered this problem after reading The Night Circus - cue jumping up and down squealing 'ohmygoditsthemostawesomebookeveryoumustreaditnow!'  - and have only recently pulled myself out of it through the combined genius of Terry Pratchett and Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf . If Erin Morgenstern had written other books, I would have been devouring them and not leaving the house. The other thing is that with some authors (mine are Terry Pratchett, David Gemmell, Douglas Adams, Scarlett Thomas and the ever indomitable Louisa Alcott), reading their novels just feel comforting. I know I'm always going on about Little Women, but every single time I read the first sentence of that book, I feel better about everything. An author I've discovered this year whose books I did (and will be doing again) this with is Sarah Addison Allen. I got Garden Spells from the library totally on spec and fell in love with it. The combined amazing of the library and RAK provided me with The Sugar Queen and The Girl Who Chased the Moon respectively, but I'm stuck on The Peach Keeper, and if nobody gets it for me for christmas, I may just cry for days...

Anyway, I digress. My question is, do other people do this? Is there a book you'll re-read and then have to read everything else you own by that author? Is there an author you've discovered recently and then had to rush out and get hold of all their other books? I'm interested!

Update.

Firstly I need to apologise for never putting up my Classics Circuit post on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This past couple of weeks it’s felt like if it’s not one thing, it’s another. We’ve been going through a bit of a stressful time, and the blog has (as usual) suffered because of it. I know I keep saying I’ll stop letting it happen, but I think that I probably need to accept that, for the moment at least, this is just the way I operate. That said, I have got a little way into The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and while I’m not loving it like I expected to, it is definitely getting more gripping, so hopefully I’ll be able to stick with it and let you know what I thought of it when I eventually reach the end! People have asked me why I don’t like it as much as I thought I would, and if I’m honest, it’s probably mostly down to the rambling pages of descriptions of Paris, which feel fairly similar to all the interminable descriptive passages in Frankenstein, which are still the one thing I despise about an otherwise awesome book, and which my first inclination is still to just skip over. That, and the fact that it’s not a Disney movie. There are no songs, and I know this is horribly blasphemous of me, but I sort of feel that so far, the story suffers from the gargoyles not talking back to Quasimodo. I am sure that by the time I finish the book I will have re-evaluated and retracted most of these opinions. Anyway!

In other exciting news (for me, anyway), after nearly a year of hearing me talk about my blog, and seeing how much keeping it has helped and inspired me, my wonderful husband has finally caved and started a blog of his own! He’ll be talking sporadically about music (he’s a singer and music graduate), drama, and all theatre related things, at www.twomasksandmusic.blogspot.com. If it sounds like the kind of thing you’d be into, go visit him, I know he’d appreciate it! J

I’ve been reading a lot lately, but not quite finding the time to write about it, and I really do hope to be rectifying that soon, but for now, here’s a quick update of my recent reading life:

Last weekend I took part in my first ever 24 hour readathon! Despite work and family commitments keeping me from a lot of it, I still managed to read for 7 hours, enter two mini – challenges, win a prize, and finish three books! Reviews of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (which was good), Whip It by Shauna Cross (which was very good), and Franny & Zooey by J.D Salinger (which I’m still trying to figure out..) will be forthcoming, and I will most definitely be participating in the next one, in April!

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing my annual Christmas pre-reading of people’s presents before I give them to them thing (I know people think this is cheeky, but in my defence, I’m always very careful with the books, and I do need to make sure they’re suitable for the person receiving them!). Every year I buy my mum a new Elizabeth Peters, Susanna Gregory, Alexander McCall Smith, or (if such a thing still exists!) an Agatha Christie she doesn’t already possess, because these are the things she likes. This year, it was A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters, which I read in two days and thoroughly enjoyed, as always. It’s the latest in the Amelia Peabody series of detective novels, and if you’re into either detective fiction or historical fiction (they’re all set late 19^th/early 20^th century England and Egypt and are about archaeology and feminism), I’d recommend checking them out! For my dad, it’s always the latest Terry Pratchett, and Snuff arrived in the post today, so I’ll be starting that next and I’m excited. Sir Terry has never let me down yet!

Lastly, I just wanted to share something I’m super excited about! A couple of weeks ago I was sent a gorgeous hardback copy of The Penguin Anthology of 20^th Century American Poetry by the lovely people at Penguin. The anthology is gorgeous, very informative, and contains a host of poets I’ve never read. I used to read a lot of poetry when I was a student, but since then, not so much, so I’m hoping that the arrival of this beautiful book will help to rectify that! The book is out in the States pretty much now. As some of you may know,  I have been trying for a while to get a regular poetry feature going on the blog, so maybe this is my chance to do that! Watch this space!

That’s all for now. It’s getting colder here by the sea, winter is most definitely on its’ way, and I’m off for a big hot chocolate and to curl up in a corner, under my first (ever) knitted blanket, with a book. Hope your last few weeks have been less stressful than mine!!

End of the 24 Hour Readathon!

So I've managed to post at the beginning and at the end of the event. I loved my first readathon, and I will definitely plan to participate more fully the next time around! With work, the theatre, and family commitments, I only managed to read for around 7 hours, during which time I read 3 books, so I'm fairly proud of myself. I just had a bit of a nap to recover from going to bed late and getting up early, and I'm now feeling lots better, so here's my end of event survey:

1. Which hour was most daunting for you? probably the last hour or so between 12 and 1pm - I started to feel really rushed and wasn't really taking in what I was reading...
2. Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? graphic novels (I wish I'd read more of these this year!), stuff like the Percy Jackson novels with quite fast paced plots, short books in general. 
3. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? I think it was brilliant this year!
4. What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? cheerleaders were brilliant, cheering me even when I wasn't actively there... 
5. How many books did you read? 3
6. What were the names of the books you read? The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, Whip It by Shauna Cross, & Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger
7. Which book did you enjoy most? Whip It was a really enjoyable read
8. Which did you enjoy least? Franny and Zooey I think.. I'm still processing it, it was a very strange experience.
9. If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? n/a
10. How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? I'd love to participate again, and I may well sign up to be a cheerleader next time :-)

Next time, I will take both days off work, make sure I have loads of snacks and drinks, and attempt to get my internet to work better so I can update more consistently. Hope everyone else had a great readathon!

Readathon - I'm finally here!!

Hey everyone, it's hour NINE of the 24 hour readathon, and I am finally able to actually just sit down and read!! This may be the only post I will be able to put up for the duration, as my internet, as some of you will know, is ridiculously temperamental. Please come see me on Twitter (@fairybookgirl) where I will be tweeting my progress via my phone. Since the start time, I've actually read about 50 pages of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, and I'm aiming to finish it at some point very soon. 


I know (and knew before I signed up) that my participation in this awesome event will be nowhere near as total as I would like it to be, however I'm hoping to use this experience as a learning process for the next one! Very late, here's my introductory meme so everyone knows some stuff about me!


1)Where are you reading from today? Broadstairs, Kent, UK
2)Three random facts about me…1) i don't like coffee 2) I just bought a really bright patchwork rug 3) this is my first readathon!
3)How many books do you have in your TBR pile for the next 24 hours? a very ambitious 8...
4)Do you have any goals for the read-a-thon (i.e. number of books, number of pages, number of hours, or number of comments on blogs)? nope, just to do at least a few hours of uninterrupted reading (believe me, not easy in my house!)

If I don't manage to post again, I will be tweeting, I will be commenting, and I will be updating the books I've read on the readathon website, so see you there! :-)

The 24 Hour Readathon is Coming!!

Soooo for those of you who have been living under rocks, this weekend is the return of the 24 hour readathon! It runs from 12 noon GMT on Saturday 22^nd October, until 12 noon Sunday 23^rd October, and despite the fact that I’m working till 5.30 on Saturday AND going to the theatre straight after, I’ve signed up to participate! This seems like it’s probably going to be madness, not least because my internet will almost undoubtedly not work properly the entire way through, and thus prevent me from writing update posts. However, I’m trying to prepare myself for this eventuality, and the performance on Saturday is only a couple of hours so after that I should have a good few hours of reading left before I eventually need sleep, and then plan to get up early on Sunday and read until noon. I just love the idea of being able to use books as a legitimate reason to get people to leave me alone, rather than feeling guilty for not talking to people... I know, I'm a terrible, antisocial human being, and to be fair, my husband is generally very good at knowing when I'm really engrossed, but still. With so much going on lately, I feel like I just need this time to destress and switch off for a while. If we had a bath, I'd be reading in it to maximise the relaxation, but I don't think it would work so well with a shower... After all the events and craziness going on when the readathon took place back in April, I couldn’t not join in this time around. If anybody wants to join in, sign up is here. It’s going to be great!!

Here’s a picture of the pile I’ve complied for reading:

After my recent post on the effect that reading The Night Circus had on me, I did one of my super –geeky amazon searches, and The Magicians and The Girl with the Glass Feet were both recommended as being similar books, so we shall see how good Amazon’s ‘people who like this also liked’ facility is... Also, I need to read them as they are both library books! The Percy Jackson series has become a bit of a readathon standard for me. I was given the first one as an RAK, and read the second during my first ever readathon. Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse is the third in the series and I’ve had it ever since the last readathon. I’m hoping it’ll be perfect, as the other two have been really light, easy, fun reads. Whip It was lent to me by my friend after we watched the awesome film, starring Ellen Page, who’s one of my current favourite actors, and will apparently take me no time at all to read and is amazing, so I’m looking forward to that, as I am to Franny and Zooey. I’ve never read any Salinger other than The Catcher in the Rye about five hundred times, so I’m excited to expand my repertoire, especially since Adam from Roof Beam Reader is always raving about him. Finally, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society has been on the shelf for ages, and I keep hearing people saying good things about it, plus, it’s a little book, and I need little books to keep me motivated! I also have Bill Willingham’s Fables: Legends in Exile, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on standby in case of a graphic novel emergency.

I know it seems like a lot of books, but I like to give myself a variety, and it’s likely that I’ll dip in and out of lots of them during the time. There’s a lot of personal stuff going on right now which makes it a bit difficult for me to concentrate, so I’m partly doing the readathon as a distraction, but at the same time, I think it will probably be difficult for me to settle down to it. I’m super excited about all the mini challenges that will be going on during it, and I’m soooo hoping I can convince my internet to work properly at least part of the time, otherwise I will probably write all my update posts and then just have to condense them down into an overall one to post after the event! Wish me luck!