If you’ve never read any Haruki Murakami, it’s tricky to describe his style. And at the risk of causing the book-blogging corner of the interwebs to implode, his style is not really my cup of tea.
South of the Border, West of the Sun tells of Hajime, a middle-aged man reflecting on his youth and in particular, his relationship with Shimamoto, a fellow only-child and his only true friend. Continue reading
So before someone yells at me “Enough with the lists!”, I took that list of Best Books of 2014 – A List of Lists and I made another list – the books that appear most frequently on all of those lists.
Trawl through all the lists or save time by simply adding the 2014 Commonly-Agreed-by-the-People-Who-Publish-Best-of-2014-Book-Lists-in-November top 22 books to your To-Be-Read stack. Continue reading
The latest Readings newsletter arrived in my letterbox this week. I dare not open it because I know I’ll find reviews and snippets about all sorts of good books that I haven’t yet read.
My pile of books waiting to be read (both physical and ‘virtual’) is embarrassingly huge. In fact, if I didn’t buy another book for two years, I would probably have enough to read. I keep making vague pledges to stop adding to the stack but then I read about a new book – for example Novel Girl’s interview with author Eowyn Ivey about her debut novel, The Snow Child – and my resolution disappears.
So here are the hard facts about my reading stack – 144 titles sitting on my Kindle (*blush*) and 47 unread books on the shelf (*blushes again*). That’s actually about three years worth of reading. Lordy.
What’s ahead? Well The Snow Child of course, The Freudian Slip by Marion von Adlerstein, A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami and I’ll probably cave and read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – those and 186 other books!