Monthly Archive

So I may have mentioned that I’ve been on holiday for a few weeks and have done quite  bit of reading, mostly for Carl’s RIP IX challenge (my proposed book list for that is here and so far I’ve read six and have started on a seventh of the books mentioned with a week to go). One of the things that often happen after my annual break is I start thinking about what I might want to read over the next few months. I also usually buy some new books as I can’t resist popping into every bookshop I can see, and this year has been no exception on either count.

New books

A modest pile for me:

• The Flowers of the Forest: Scotland and the First World War by Trevor Royle
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• Adventures in Stationery by James Ward
• Thomas Cromwell by Tracy Borman
• The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman

but there have also been various Kindle downloads too numerous to mention which would crank the number up if I could make the effort to list them all.

Reading lists

My reading has been very genre heavy this year, which isn’t a bad thing but I feel the need to stretch my wings a little bit.

There are five or six novels which my friend Silvery Dude has been pushing me to read, so that’s a list in itself (including Game of Thrones which I mentioned here, as well as Tigerman, Little Star and Norwegian Wood, which might lead me to a Japanese focussed list as I also have some unread Mishima which has been gathering dust in the stacks for donkey’s years).

I would also like to finish working my way through The Big Re-Read, a personal challenge which I talk about here and which has been chuntering on for ages.

I am also very keen to focus on a couple of my favourite authors, including a re-read of Virginia Woolf and attacking my backlog of Joyce Carol Oates’ books (she is so prolific, I can’t keep up).

But first I would like to do some reading in November around World War I. I probably won’t re-read A Testament of Youth which had a huge impact on me when I was in my late teens, but though the Royle book mentioned above plus a couple of novels (Helen Zenna Smith is somewhere on my shelves) but I haven’t thought it through as yet.

I always find it difficult to strike a balance between planning my reading and keeping some spontaneity so we’ll see how it works this time round!