I’ve read 135 Kindle samples this year – downloading sample chapters is better than impulse buying books… I think.
Of the 135 I’ve read, I’ve said ‘yes’ to 57. Of those that I’ve said yes to, three I now own and five I’ve read.
However, if I buy the remaining 49 books, it destroys the miniscule gains I’ve made on reducing the TBR stack this year. So, I’ve narrowed it down to 15 that I’m busting to read –
Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson
Ordinary People by Diana Evans
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
French Exit by Patrick deWitt
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Time in Between by Nancy Tucker
A Mother’s Reckoning: Life in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy by Sue Klebold
Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anna Pasternak
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, and Surviving by Julia Samuel
I did the same review in 2018, 2017 and 2016. I still haven’t read all of the books on those lists but I’m chipping away…
Acts of Infidelity is superb and a quick read as is French Exit. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did, Kate.
I think you alerted me to Acts of Infidelity – I have read her previous book and loved it but she’s not an author that I would find front and centre in an Australian book shop, so I had missed this one. DeWitt is a gaping hole in my reading history – someone said I should start with The Brother Sisters but French Exit really appeals.
Some excellent choices there! The Coutts, Skloot and Yuknavitch are superb. The Evans, Klebold, Nunez, O’Farrell and Tucker are wonderful, too.
You probably alerted me to half of them! (Certainly the Yuknavitch).
Hurrah!
Your Saturday Samples are a window into a whole of literature I never otherwise see. Keep up the good work. Just every now and then I see something I would otherwise have missed.
Bloggers often write posts about the books they didn’t finish – I rarely abandon books these days and I do think it’s because I read sample chapters and make the decision to commit or not BEFORE I buy the book (and for hard copies, I just hang around in book shops and skim the first chapter!).
For some reason I am strangely resistant to sampling. It would almost certainly reduce my number of DNFs, though. I rarely buy books but I do hoard library loans and NetGalley downloads if I think a book sounds at all interesting. If I abandon a book within the first chapter or so, maybe that’s the equivalent to your sampling?
The Magie O’Farrell memoir is worth reading. At times it stretched a point in positioning the particular event as a brush with death but th final sections where she talks about her daughter are so powerful…
I love stories about grief (I know! I know! Not everyone’s cup of tea) and this book seemed to be offer a very different perspective on death.
It does but I think its more about survival
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