First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday, hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea, is a weekly meme where you share the first paragraph (or two) from a book you are considering reading.
My choice this week is from Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale. I’m not normally attracted to books heavy on historical fact but this work of non-fiction apparently reads like a story. Continue reading
You could really spend a lot of time blogging, couldn’t you? I refer to my blog as a ‘fabulous time-waster’ because it is. It’s ace fun but the fact remains that while I’m busy writing book reviews, it’s time not spent on writing the stuff I’m paid to write. Which doesn’t matter because it’s my hobby and hobbies are meant to be fun, fabulous time-wasters. That said, if I participated in everything that the book-blogging world had to offer (memes, reading challenges, read-alongs, online book groups), my arse would become permanently affixed to my computer chair.
Until now, Tuesday has been ‘Top Ten Tuesday‘ for me. But it’s a new year and I thought I might just dabble in a few other memes (but limiting myself to just one a week because of the whole arse/ computer chair thing).
First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday, hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea caught my eye. You basically post the opening paragraph or two of a book you’re considering reading. I really like the idea of this because – Kindle. Samples. My samples are out of control. I have more than a hundred. I think of them as my ‘reading transit lounge’ – books that haven’t made it to my shelf but also haven’t been ignored. No one likes being in a state of limbo.
So every few weeks, I’m going to actually read a couple of those samples, participate in First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday and decide whether to buy or bin the book. Continue reading
I’m not mad on New Year Resolutions. Well, not the ones that require an effort to keep. Resolutions such as ‘Eat Mint Slices and read more books’ are fine though.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a new ‘top ten’ challenge is posted – anyone can join in. This week’s topic is Top Ten Bookish Goals for 2013. I haven’t quite made ten… don’t want to over-extend myself and all that.
1. Buttoning my lip when it comes time to selecting the book at book group – Just SHUT-UP KATE and let others suggest books. Continue reading
I only just discovered the neat little feature in Goodreads which shows the covers of all the books I’ve read this year (there’s a few short stories and a couple of books I noticed missing but you get the idea). So, here is my year in books:
Reviews of all these books can be found here.
I read 65 books in total. According to Goodreads, that’s 19,696 pages. Continue reading
Being a baseball fan is not a pre-requisite for enjoying The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I like baseball – it’s obviously not a major spectator sport in Australia but I think if I lived in the US, I’d be a fan (Yankees all the way). I enjoy the theatre of baseball – batters winding up, umpires yelling “Strrrriiiiiiike!”, and of course the glory of a home run. Harbach puts it all on paper in an unlikely combination of college campus story meets baseball, bromances and books.
“Reading aloud was already borderline intimate, one voice, two pairs of ears, well-shaped words…”
At first this book seems a bit of a trick – it ambles along, albeit beautifully written ambling – “Pella woke into the charcoal hum of predawn.”
But with the sporting theme, Harbach is given licence to add lots of climatic baseball-related plot points. They’re gripping. You can’t help but cheer on the team. Continue reading
You’ll either love, love, love Emily Perkins’ sinuous, dreamy writing in her newest novel, The Forrests, or you will find her style unbearably tedious. I Continue reading
I came across an interesting article in The Age today – it’s well worth a read.
“Michael Heyward is on a mission to bring out-of-print Australian literature back into the cultural ether.
THE Miles Franklin award is arguably Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. It was won three times by David Ireland. His books are out of print in this nation. This seems absurd, a cultural shame, as does the fact that Miles Franklin’s celebrated My Brilliant Career can only be bought in Australia in an American edition; it is out of print here.”
The article explores the potential loss of Australian literary heritage and the importance of making Australian literature available on e-book devices such as Kindles. I whole-heartedly agree. First on my list from Text Classics will be Careful He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliot. I remember crying my way through the movie in the eighties but I’m quite sure I have never read the book. Perhaps that’s because I couldn’t get my hands on a copy?!
Without question, my favourite authors are John Irving and Henry James. I like them for much the same reason – their characters are so finely detailed that as the stories unfold you know EXACTLY why they behave the way they do. In fact, at a certain point, the characters actions need no explanation because you, the reader, understand them intimately. So you couldn’t imagine my surprise when, whilst reading Irving’s memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, he mentions that one of his least liked authors is Henry James (Graham Greene being the favourite)!
The list of my most favourite books is peppered with Irving. If someone asks me which Irving novel they should read first, I’m paralysed by indecision.
There are a million reviews of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and you’d have to be living under a rock to have avoided hearing about the movie, which is out now.
It’s the story of sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the fictional country of Panem where the countries of North America once existed. The Capitol, a highly advanced metropolis, holds absolute power over the rest of the nation, which is divided into twelve districts. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each district are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive. The ‘winner’ secures glory and food for their district.
I found The Hunger Games compelling reading but in addition, it got me thinking – not so much about the book itself but about the ‘genre’ that it has been put in. I saw the movie trailer for The Hunger Games when I was at Breaking Dawn* in November 2011 (no, I’m not a Twi-hard but I can answer the question “Are you on Team Edward or Team Jacob?”). I hadn’t heard of The Hunger Games at that point but later downloaded the book onto my Kindle (it’s always book first, movie second for me). Continue reading
I’m not sure why A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter ended up on the top of my reading stack. My book group read Tranter’s first book, The Legacy, and whilst they were enthusiastic about it, I was less so. I found The Legacy all a little too obvious, a bit strained, characters lacking true feeling. But in the spirit of giving authors a decent go, especially Australian authors, I picked up A Common Loss.
First off, I should mention that I read the book on my Kindle, some months after a I had actually downloaded it. When I started reading, I had forgotten what the story was about (you don’t have easy access to a jacket blurb on a Kindle – this can be a good or a bad thing!). It’s essentially the story of five college friends, who reunite every year in Las Vegas. However one year they are only four – charismatic Dylan, the mediator, the man each one turned to in a time of crisis is tragically killed. The four remaining friends, sharing their ‘common loss’, meet in Vegas and question who their friend Dylan really was.
I note not revisiting the story blurb before I started the book because I was at least a chapter or two in before I realised that the narrator is a male character, Elliot. Up until that point I assumed the narrator was a female (probably because of the opening scene where an account of moving a dead deer off a road is described with many observations about physical appearances and lack of strength). Whether the narrator is male or female doesn’t really matter but when I realised my error, I had flashbacks to The Legacy, with its unconvincing characters. Were we headed down the same path? Continue reading