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

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

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!!

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

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

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!

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! 

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:

1. Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and LIfe was a Catch 22 by Erica Heller
2. Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky
3. A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve
4. Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan
5. The Last Picture Show - Larry McMurtry
6. The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith 
7. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua
8. The Lost Art of Gratitude - Alexander McCall Smith
9. Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian - Rick Riordan
10. The Cookbook Collector - Allegra Goodman
11. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
12. Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams - Jenny Colgan
13. Fairytale Ending - Gigi Levangie
14. The Borrower - Rebecca Makkai
15. The Resourceful Mum's Handbook  - Elen Lewis
16. Secrets to Happiness - Sarah Dunn
17. Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers - Marika Cobbold 
18. Let's Pretend This Never Happened - Jenny Lawson
19. The Meryl Streep Movie Club - Mia March
20. I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Reflections on Being a Woman - Nora Ephron
21. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading  - Nina Sankovitch
22. Last Christmas - Julia Williams
23. The Pi**ed Off Parents Club - Mink Elliot
24. Peaches for Monsieur le Cure - Joanne Harris
25. Moranthology - Caitlin Moran
26. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

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

Mixing It Up Challenge 2012

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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte

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 - The Patchwork Marriage - Jane Green

Science Fiction and Fantasy - Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

Travel - Stephen Fry in America - Stephen Fry

Poetry and Drama

Journalism and Humour - I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman - Nora Ephron

Science and Natural History

Children’s and Young Adult - Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan

Social Sciences and Philosophy - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua

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.