Tag: reading

Top Ten Tuesday – Books with a high page count

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. This weeks top ten is books with a high page count. I’m sometimes wary of reading long books because I hate not finishing a book so usually make myself carry on reading even if I’m hating it but here are 10 with 500+ pages

  1. Middlemarch – George Elliot – 912 pages – This was a lot better than I expected. Elliot’s prose was enjoyable and the story was fairly interesting. I’m not sure it really needed to be so long though.
  2. A Widow for One Year – John Irving – 576 pages – My second Irving and while not as good as The World According to Garp it was suitably weird and interesting.
  3. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides – 529 pages – Very enjoyable tale of three generations of the same Greek-American family.
  4. Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay – 676 pages – A second attempt at this one. An excellent fantasy novel. I’m glad I persevered this time.
  5. 11/22/63 – Stephen King – 849 pages – A interesting time travel tale, much better than the TV show with James Franco.
  6. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel – 653 pages. I read this last year and it was a bit of a slog. It started well and ended well but I felt a bit bogged down in the middle. Still unsure if I am going to read on.
  7. Moby Dick – Herman Melville – 720 pages – This was a bit of a slog. There are some good moments of adventure but also lots and lots of information about whales.
  8. Labyrinth – Kate Mosse – 515 pages. I really enjoyed this holy grail fantasy. It’s much cleverer than the Da Vinci Code although it’s just as absurd. I probably will read on but I haven’t yet.
  9. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon – 776 pages – I did not enjoy or understand this one but I slogged my way through it. Not sure it was worth it.
  10. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – 1392 pages – This was a bit up and down. Some of it was really enjoyable but I found the war elements less interesting than the personal relationships of the various characters.

Top Ten Tuesday – Genre freebie – Horror

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

How it works:

I assign each Tuesday a topic and then post my top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join me and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.

This week’s Top Ten is a genre freebie. I have decided to choose horror as it is a genre I have read for a long time and one I still enjoy.

  1. Let the Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist – I read this after watching the film and enjoyed this much more. It’s darker and more disturbing’
  2. Thinner – Richard Bachman – For some reason this book has stuck with me. I read it a long time ago but it still gives me the creeps to think about it. The way he just keeps getting thinner still makes me shudder.
  3. The Rats – James Herbert – Another book that I read in sixth form but that had a long lasting effect on me. I’m not normally freaked out by animal stories but Herbet hits the right note of horror all the way through.
  4. The Stand – Stephen King – It’s hard to pick a Stephen King book – I easily could have picked 10 by him for this list – but this is one of the first post-apocalyptic stories I read which sent me down a new reading avenue for a while afterwards.
  5. Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin – This is a masterclass in suspense and even though I had seen the film, the book was still incredibly tense.
  6. I am Legend – Richard Matheson – I recently re-read this and I had forgotten how good it is. A vampire tale with a difference. Difficult to say much without spoilers but needless to say the film of this is one of the worst adaptations of a horror film that I have seen.
  7. The Road – Cormac McCarthy – More post-apocalyptic horror from McCarthy. I had read a couple of his westerns before this which blew me away. Shame he didn’t write more in this vein.
  8. Dracula – Bram Stoker – A classic and another story that the films don’t really do justice to.
  9. Some of Your Blood – Theodore Sturgeon – This is a disturbing tale which starts with the psychological evaluation of a soldier and doesn’t reveal what he has done until the very end. Very dark.
  10. The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells – I think this is my favourite of Wells’ books. Again, this is different from the film with a dark description of one man’s descent into madness/

Top Ten Tuesday- Top Ten Titles to do with Spring

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

How it works:

I assign each Tuesday a topic and then post my top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join me and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.

I’ve changed this weeks Top Ten a little as it related to book covers that are spring like. I’m not very good at remembering what book covers look like so I’ve gone for titles that relate to spring and nature.

  1. Hag-Seed – Margaret Atwood (2016) – One of my favourites of Atwood’s recent novels. A rewriting of The Tempest set in a prison, where Felix plans retribution for losing his job.
  2. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep – Joanna Cannon (2016) – This coming of age story started well and I enjoyed the narrative voice but unfortunately it became unconvincing.
  3. Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes (1966) – A thought experiment about the effects of intelligence on the way other people treat you. An excellent read.
  4. The Swan Thieves – Elizabeth Kostova (2010) – I enjoyed reading this – I gave it 4 stars – but I admit I can’t remember much about it. It’s about art and Impressionism but it clearly didn’t make a huge impression on me.
  5. The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt (1986) – When his son comes out, a father begins to question his own sexuality. An excellent family tale.
  6. Black Swan Green – David Mitchell (2006) – My favourite Mitchell – probably because it is the most straightforward. A coming of age tale.
  7. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens (2018) – Unlike almost everyone else, I didn’t get on with this book. I found it unconvincing and didn’t get on with the characters.
  8. Rabbit Run – John Updike (1960) This was a depressing read and although it was well written I didn’t enjoy it and I haven’t been able to make myself read anymore of the series.
  9. Cloudstreet – Tim Winton (1991) – An excellent family drama set from the 40s-60s in Australia.
  10. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham (1957) – When all the women in one village become pregnant at the same time, the children are bound to be a bit unusual. As ever, Wyndham is most concerned with how people react to the children and their telepathy. Much recommended.

Top Ten Tuesday: The Most Recent Additions to my TBR List.

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday, a topic is suggested. This week’s topic is Top Ten Books that are the most recent additions to your TBR list.

I have decided to try to read books that arrive on my TBR list more quickly. I bought Thirteen, Doppelganger and A Heart Full of Headstones with my birthday money and was given Faith, Hope and Carnage by my brother in law. So far I have read two of them and am reading a third. I will try to read Thirteen after that. Next on the list is Postcards from Scotland which I received for Christmas. I’ve put them into a pile on my bedside drawers rather than onto the shelves which has helped me to focus on them. It’s harder to keep track of books on my kindle but I’m hoping I can keep on top of them as well.

  1. The Human Condition – Hannah Arendt
  2. The Boy at the Top of the Mountain – John Boyne 2/5
  3. Faith, Hope and Carnage – Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan Currently reading
  4. The Peripheral – William Gibson
  5. Thirteen – Tom Hoyle
  6. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World – Naomi Klein 5/5
  7. The Passenger – Cormac McCarthy 4/5
  8. Postcards from Scotland: Scottish Independent Music 1983-95 – Grant McPhee
  9. A Heart Full of Headstones – Ian Rankin 4/5
  10. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World – Naomi Klein.

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Genre: Academic, politics

Narrative Style: First person academic

Published: 2023

Rating: 5/5

Format: Kindle

Synopsis: Naomi Klein kept finding people confusing her with Naomi Wolf which only worsened as Wolf took a trip into the land of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Klein became obsessed with following Wolf’s Twitter account during Covid 19 and found herself unable to look away. Doppelganger is the result of this obsession, detailing Wolf’s fall from grace and the wider issues of misinformation, conspiracy theories and where it all leaves us as a society.

It was only recently that I discovered that Naomi Wolf had become a darling of the right, promoting conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines and appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. She just hadn’t come up on my feed – not even since Musk’s takeover. I was surprised to say the least. I remember reading The Beauty Myth while I was at university and was impressed enough to go to see her talk at Waterstones in Manchester while promoting Fire with Fire: New Female Power and how it will Change the Twenty-First Century. While I didn’t like this book quite so much, I assumed that she would continue to be a respected academic writer. Boy was I wrong!

Klein begins by discussing the fact that people often mistake her for Wolf and the ramifications of that now that Wolf was promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Klein also does a good job of invoking the strangeness of the Covid 19 lockdowns which contributed to her becoming worryingly obsessed with Wolf and her cronies. At first, I wasn’t sure where Klein was going to go with this – it was interesting to read but seemed to lack Klein’s usual political commentary. However, as the book progressed, Klein widened her argument to include fake news, wellness vloggers, the situation in Palestine and her own Jewishness, bringing each topic back to what she calls the ‘mirror world’ and discussing where that leaves us.

The main topic of this book is disorientation – something that I often feel these days when watching the news or looking at tweets on X (something I can’t seem to stop myself from doing even though it is not a pleasant place these days). I had observed the increase in conspiracy theories during lockdown with a sort of grim humour, sometimes congratulating myself that I wasn’t so stupid. What I hadn’t realised was exactly how apt the term ‘mirror world’ really is. Those who are worried about vaccine shedding are responding to a real worry – the spread of infectious disease. Those who worry about enslavement via the QR codes used to check in to venues are responding to worries about privacy and data usage. Not that I’m suggesting that Wolf is correct when she suggests that vaccine technology can cause time travel and make the vaccinated into robots – these claims are patently absurd – but to dismiss these people as merely stupid is also unhelpful. Klein suggests that it may be that there is something lacking in the way the left has dealt with both these issues that has helped push people towards these theories.

By the end, this seemed more like a typical Naomi Klein book as she suggests that somehow we have to start looking for ways to work together rather than focusing on the things that separate us. As suggested in 2017’s No is Not Enough, Klein ends her book by saying everyone needs to work together if we are going to combat the climate crisis. This means looking beyond surface differences and beyond party politics. We need to stand together despite the fact that our politics and identities might differ. Fighting climate change is more important than all the rest.

Having said that, I find it hard to be especially optimistic about this happening. As I write, Donald Trump is about to be inaugurated for his second term as president with Elon Musk firmly at his side. Both men have used the disorientation that Klein describes to their advantage and I would imagine they will continue to do so. Mark Zuckerberg recently said that there would be no more fact checking on Meta platforms and X already seems like a free for all in this respect. It’s hard to be hopeful for the future.

Top Ten Tuesday – Books I DNF

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This weeks list is top ten books I did not finish. It isn’t often that I DNF a book. I’m not sure what I think will happen if I abandon a book but I tend to struggle on. The ones on this list really annoyed me.

  1. Whatever Love Means – David Baddiel – Tedious exploration of masculinity and sex which is neither exciting or clever.
  2. Lorna Doone – R. D. Blackmore – I had seen an adaptation of this and really enjoyed it but the novel was slow and lacking in tension.
  3. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith – Peter Carey – This was a very strange book. The style was hard to read, the events made no sense and I didn’t care for the characters.
  4. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky – I really wanted to enjoy this but I didn’t really get that far. The protagonist was annoying and the narrative was stodgy.
  5. The Virgin’s Lover – Philippa Gregory – This was about Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley and reads a bit like Carry on Tudors. Ridiculously bawdy.
  6. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne. The prose style was unreadable.
  7. On the Road – Jack Kerouac – Sexist nonsense. Perhaps he should have taken longer than three weeks to complete the first draft.
  8. Atonement – Ian McEwan – I finished this but I genuinely wished I hadn’t bothered. I won’t spoil it but to me it felt like McEwan had said ‘and then they woke up’ at the end. It felt lazy and annoying.
  9. The Time Traveller’s Wife. – Audrey Niffenegger I did in fact finish this but only because the thing that annoyed me was right at the end. To be fair, I was already a little irritated but when I realised Clare waited to see Henry one more time, it tipped me over the edge. I know it’s supposed to be romantic but if I’d realised that was the end, I’d definitely have stopped earlier.
  10. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer – Another time the film was a lot better than the book. Very disappointing.

It’s been a while…

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I decided this year not to do any reading challenges or make any lists of what I was going to read. I finished the TBR challenge last year but I didn’t finish the blogs so I decided no more challenges. My only plan was to read some of the fatter books on my shelf. I didn’t even sign up to the Goodreads challenge as I find that stressful if I get too far behind – which I would if read some long books. I didn’t realise the impact this would have on my blogging but suddenly it is April and I haven’t written a single one. Not good.

It is a little weird not to have a plan. For the last five years, I have always known roughly what books would read and it is weird that everything is now open to me. My only thoughts at the moment are I will probably read Wolf Hall, The Green Mile and A Prayer for Owen Meany as they have been on my shelf for a while but I am currently reading The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt on my kindle and I suspect that is going to take a while so I don’t want to read another long fiction book until I finish that. As such, I am reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow at the minute which is a bit lighter.

So far this year I have read the following:

  1. Between Shades of Grey – Ruta Sepetys (2011) 4/5 I was given this for Christmas and I really enjoyed it. It tells the story of Lina a Lithuanian teenager who is suddenly removed from her home by Russian soldiers and sent ultimately to the Arctic Circle. This was a bleak, difficult story about an area of history I was unaware of and it was definitely worth a read.
  2. Big Little Lies – Lianne Moriarty (2014) 3/5 This had been on my kindle for a while. It was okay chick lit with some heavier themes than I was expecting. I did see the twist coming though.
  3. The Evil Seed – Joanne Harris (1992) 4/5 I bought this not realising that it was Harris’ debut novel and had been out of print for a while. It was quite different from the other of her novels that I’ve read as it is a vampire tale but it was still well written with parallel stories and a good amount of tension.
  4. The Sellout – Paul Beatty (2015) 5/5 This has also been on my kindle for a couple of years. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and I can see why. It is a biting satire on the state of race relations in the US, looking at slavery, segregation, celebrity, sociology and stereotypes. First 5 star read of the year.
  5. Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay (1990) 4/5 (The first of the tomes at 676 pages) I had been meaning to read this for a while but I admit I found its length a bit off putting. I had made an attempt at it while I was at university in the nineties but didn’t manage to finish it even though I remembered enjoying it. Although it took a long time to get through, I’m glad I read it. It was a beautifully written fantasy with action, romance and interesting characters.
  6. Mother’s Boy – Patrick Gale(2022) 5/5 I picked this up about a month ago in a charity shop (much to the annoyance of my husband as I’m not supposed to be buying books). It is a fictional telling of the life of Charles Causley. Not that I knew anything about Causley but Gale is one of my favourite authors so I wanted to read it quickly. It is written from the points of view of Causley and his mother who had a complicated relationship and describes his life as a signalman in the navy. Thoroughly recommended.

Round up of last year

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I lost my blogging mojo in the middle of last year. I’m not sure why. I was a little busy but no more than usual. I could have done it but I just couldn’t bring myself to write them. In the end, I wrote the blogs for TBR Challenge 2022 (hosted by Roof Beam Reader) but even then I only just managed to finish by the end of the year. I read the last book – The Princess Bride – by the start of December but didn’t manage to write the review until the end of the month. I’ve been meaning to write this round up for days. I had to make myself sit down and do it.

It isn’t general apathy. I’m reading and writing as much as I can. I haven’t read as many books as previously (33) because I am commuting less and I don’t have a lunch break where I can just sit and read anymore but I’m still enthusiastic about reading. I’m hoping that I’ll get back into it this year as it is something I do enjoy. I’m not going to try to review every book I read – although it is my intention to do the TBR Challenge again because it is enjoyable and helps me read books that have been hanging around on my shelves for ages.

As for reading. it was generally quite a good year. Quite a few of the books I read for the TBR Challenge were very good – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt and Ananci Boys by Neil Gaiman were all excellent and I would thoroughly recommend. Other favourites of the year were Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead. I didn’t manage to finish Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky which was disappointing but I made a decision a few years ago that I wasn’t going to struggle on with a book that was annoying me and I found I had little care about the narrator and his plans. Life’s too short to read a book that isn’t pleasing.

List of what I hope to read this year:

  1. The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimananda Ngozi Adiche – Finished 21/9/23
  2. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis Currently reading
  3. The Man in the Red Coat – Julian Barnes – Finished 28/1/23
  4. The Tennant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
  5. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – 10/3/23
  6. The City and the Stars – Arthur C. CLarke – Finished 8/1/23
  7. Invisible Women – Caroline Craido-Perez
  8. The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan – Finished 2/8/23
  9. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
  10. Munich – Robert Harris – Finished 7/3/23
  11. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A Heinlein 17/4/23
  12. A Widow for One Year – John Irving – Finished 26/11/23
  13. The Children of Men – P. D. James -Finished 20/1/23
  14. Fludd – Hilary Mantel
  15. No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  16. All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
  17. Big Little Lies – Lianne Moriaty
  18. Me Before You – Jojo Moyes -Finished 11/10/23
  19. Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell – Finished 10/5/23
  20. Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  21. Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allen Poe – 29/4/23
  22. The Ministry of the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson – Finished 2/10/23
  23. Touching the Void – Joe Simpson
  24. The Accidental – Ali Smith – Finished 31/7/23
  25. N-W – Zadie Smith
  26. No one Here Gets Out Alive – Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins – Finished 4/7/23
  27. The Magician – Colm Toibin – Finished 17/3/23
  28. The Return of the King – J R R Tolkien – Currently reading
  29. Black Mischief – Evelyn Waugh 26/5/23
  30. The Golem and the Djinn – Helene Wecker 2/6/23
  31. Harlem Shuffle – Colson Whitehead

Do you need to read to be a writer?

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This is a response to the frequent appearance of the question Do you need to read to be a writer on Twitter. At least once a week, this question appears in my Twitter feed. The last variation – As a writer, do you feel obliged to read – really annoyed me. The use of the word obliged suggests that reading is a chore. If that is how you feel, I’d have to question why you’d want to be writer in the first place.

There are two reasons I find this question irritating. First of all, to me it seems absolutely natural that reading and writing go together. For me, both are essential to the smooth running of my psyche. It’s not only that. You learn from the one how to do the other. When I first started teaching, there was a fad for teaching reading and writing as separate things. It soon transpired that this was impossible. You need to read models of good writing to know how to do it yourself. This is still true if you are writing a novel and not a letter to an editor of a newspaper for your GCSE exam.

The second reason is I can think of no other medium where people would think they could just go ahead and do it without studying or gaining skills first. Would a musician say do you have to listen to music to know how to write music or a film director suggest you could just go ahead and direct without ever seeing a film. Of course they wouldn’t and people generally recognise that you have to practise and learn skills before you can be good at these things. For whatever reason, we don’t think about writing like this. People think that everybody has a book in them and that they can just sit down at their notebook or keyboard and magic will just happen. This is not the case.

Of course, it’s not for me to dictate how much someone should or shouldn’t read. No one should feel obliged to do anything they don’t want to. Equally, I don’t understand why you would be interested in creating something for someone else to read if you don’t enjoy reading. Furthermore, how could you possibly write a book that might make them think reading is amazing and fun if you don’t even like reading yourself?

The Reading Year So Far

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It’s been a mixed year so far on the reading front. On the one hand, I’ve read ten books so far which is good. On the other, there have been some disappointing reads. The start of the year saw me in lockdown again so I was able to get a lot of reading done. Now I’m back at work, I’m not so sure that I’ll get through some of the very big titles on my list. We’ll see.

The main achievement so far is having finished Middlemarch. I’m not really one for the classics so reading such a long book was a big ask. My main motivation was it is one of my father in law’s favourite books and he doesn’t really approve of a lot of the things I read (Terry Pratchett, David Mitchell, anything with a hint of fantasy or magic realism, in fact) so I don’t think he really believed I’d manage it. It was a slog for most of it. It was only the last two hundred pages where I felt compelled to find out what would happen. Now it’s finished, I’m glad I read it but mostly just because I can now say I’ve read it.

I’ve been trying to read more widely. My default option is male, white authors such as Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Ian Rankin and Markus Zusak. Okay so often they have interesting things to say about masculinity but I’m trying to get out of this comfort zone. So I’m trying to read more women, LGBT writers and writers of colour. So far this year, this has brought me some of my favourite reads – Take Nothing With You by the fabulous Patrick Gale, The Testaments by Margaret Atwood and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead – all of which are much recommended.

The other thing I set myself to do this year was to read more current fiction. I read a lot of contemporary fiction but not usually things that were out in the last couple of years. This hasn’t panned out quite so well. I found Where the Crawdads Sing tedious (as I so often do with things that have been really popular) and David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue was just disappointing. One thing with reading things from twenty+ years ago – it’s easier to know what is good because they have stood the test of time.

Another thing I’ve wanted to do is expand the genres I read in. I try as much as possible to read a variety of genres. It’s at least partly responsible for some of my less good reads. A lot of the people I’m friends with on Goodreads seem to read only one genre and they post a lot of five star reviews but I know that I would be bored with that. I view it as basically reading the same book over and over. My favourite genres are probably dystopia (I’ve already read two this year) and detective fiction and I fall back on them a lot but I try to make sure I step outside them as much as possible. So I’m currently reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre – spy fiction being very much unchartered territory for me – and I’m really enjoying it. I’m not sure how much of this genre I will read in the future but I think I will explore some of Le Carre’s back catalogue.

As it’s nearly the Easter holidays, and once I’ve finished Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I’m going to embark on another of the large classics on my list – probably Moby Dick. And then it will be on to some non-fiction as I’ve not read any of that yet this year. Although often when I make proclamations about what I am going to read, I completely abandon them. One thing is for sure, it will be an interesting reading year.