Booklog #9

Happy New Year!

As this is my first proper post (excluding the extra Book Challenge one that I did last week) of 2011 I'd like to take a moment to wish you health, happiness and prosperity for the coming year.  I hope you had an enjoyable festive season - apart from being struck down with a bit of a cold, I enjoyed my twelve days off work very much.  Received some nice new books as Christmas presents, including the phenomenally heavy Nigella Kitchen...seriously, it weighs a ton...I hope hubby isn't expecting me to have a go at every single recipe in it!  I also got Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, which I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into - it includes two previously unpublished Poirot stories! *hysterical squeee*

Excitingly (for me, at least) I have at last joined the smartphone community that I have envied for so long and am the proud owner of a shiny new HTC Desire.  Of course the first app I downloaded was 'Kindle for Android'!  I didn't think reading on such a comparatively small screen would be enjoyable, but it actually isn't as bad as I expected - very smooth page turns and good clear text.  In a pinch, if I don't happen to have the Kindle with me (though this is rare) it makes a very good alternative. 

Of course it wouldn't be a Booklog post without me confessing that the Kindle 'To Be Read' category has increased (again).  It's not my fault though - they had a 12 Days of Kindle sale where loads of books were either free or £1!  How was I supposed to resist?!  The TBR count now stands at 91, which is a good thing really as it means I'll have a lot of choice when it comes to getting through those 100 books for the challenge...

Speaking of that very challenge I should have a lot more to post in these Booklogs from now on, as I hope to get through at least one or two shorter books within each week, as well as plodding on with the longer things that I'm reading.  Luckily for me, I've always been a fast reader, so it's not like I'll be skim-reading or anything (that would be cheating anyway!) - I assure you that I savour everything I read, be it 10, 100 or 1000 pages long!

Since the last Booklog I've started:
* Murder on the Flying Scotsman ~ Carola Dunn (this is for book club, it's an Agatha Christie style 'cosy' whodunit - hurrah!)

* In Search of Adam ~ Caroline Smailes

Since the last Booklog I've finished:
* Shatter (The Children of Man) ~ Elizabeth C. Mock
If you recall, I was unsure about this when I started it.  It was a free Kindle download and as such, I couldn't help but wonder whether that might be a sign of the level of quality of the writing.  It's a fantasy story and there were a lot of peculiar names and places, and references to the particular theology/magic-use to get to grips with very quickly.  I'm glad I stuck with it though because once the story really got going it was very good.  I'll be honest - I can't remember most of the places or different 'religious' orders that were involved, but the main characters are well-written and very memorable, which is probably more important really.  If you have a Kindle - and it's still free - I would recommend you give it a go, though be prepared...the ending is quite abrupt and clearly a set up for another story.  Not a huge fault, but I was hoping for a bit more resolution than I feel I got.  3.5/5

* Wish List ~ John Locke
One of my Kindle sale downloads (only 49p!), this is a short thriller with an dark edge of comedy to it.  It's difficult to describe how I feel about it as the idea of the story - that the main character types his wildest wishes into a mysterious website and later finds them coming true, but at an unexpected price - is good, but I didn't really enjoy the execution of it.  Some unpleasant stuff happens, which is not usually a problem for me, but for some reason it made me feel quite uncomfortable, as did the ending.  If you like edgy reads and this is free or very cheap then do try it (there are also others in the same series), but otherwise I couldn't say I recommend it.  1/5

* Clover ~ Susan Coolidge
The fourth (and previously unknown to me) book in the 'What Katy Did' series.  I loved the Katy books when I was little and read them over and over.  Something about the way everything was described was just magical, so heart-warming and homely - I very much wanted to live in olde America!  I was a bit worried that the story of Clover (who is the second sister of the family, after Katy herself) wouldn't live up to my nostalgic memories of the other books, but was pleased to find that it is just as lovely.  It's so nice - and very relaxing - to get absorbed in something simple, something that isn't out to shock, thrill or otherwise provoke an extreme reaction in you, just a nice tale of the lives of ordinary people from a different time.  5/5

I'm still reading:
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett (Kindle says I'm 45% through it)
* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (I'm up to chapter 31 of 53...was hoping to get it finished over Christmas but there were too many other more interesting things to be doing!)

Till Wednesday then, when optimistically I'll be back to doing some writing...but realistically I'll be working on the OU assignment that's due next Friday!  ;o)
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100 Books In A Year - 2011

Find it here!

I came across this challenge by chance, having seen it mentioned on a blog that I get via the Kindle (I seem to subscribe to so many blogs that they're coming out of my ears!).  What better and more enjoyable challenge could there be than to read 100 books in a year?!

This post is going to be where I upload my progress (via Comments I guess, haven't quite decided yet).  Feel free to follow along, or ignore as you please...it's more for my own records really.  :o)

Booklog #5

This week I finished: 

Let me describe the book I finished this week and see if you think it sounds familiar:

Socially awkward teenage girl is forced by circumstances to start a new school in a dreary grey place where she feels trapped.  She meets an alluring boy who constantly blows hot and cold towards her, leaving her unclear where she stands with him.  She tries to find out more about him from other students and school records.  Along the way she ends up in hospital after a terrible incident.  Eventually she confronts the boy about his feelings for her only to find that he's a supernatural being and has been trying to put her off him in order to keep her safe.  Despite this eventual declaration of love (which she has yearned for) she continues to fret that she's not good enough for him and wonder how he could possibly be interested in her.  When they have to part she pines for him.  

Okay, so things do take a different path in the second half of the book, but up to that point you'd have been hard pushed to deny that I was describing Twilight wouldn't you?  It's actually Fallen, by Lauren Kate, but despite the fact it felt a tiny bit 'been there, read that' I still enjoyed it a lot and really got caught up in the action.  The supernatural beings aren't vampires, which makes a nice change - you can probably guess from the title what they actually are...plus I think I gave it away last week!  There's a good balance of action and dialogue, and the school and its colourful cast of pupils are described very well (though I wouldn't want to visit).  I like this because I find it really frustrating to finish a book and still have no real grasp of how any of it looked.  I think you enjoy a story so much more if your subconscious is able to use the words provided to paint a picture as if it's going on around you, making you feel involved as opposed to just a spectator.  Definitely something to aspire to with my own writing!  4/5

Other than that, it's been a quiet week in terms of reading.  I haven't had chance to start anything new, mainly because I've got such a backlog of magazines built up that I've had to try and clear some before they take over the house!  However, my book club should be starting a new book this week, hopefully a good ol' whodunit this time. 

I'm still reading:
* Pillars of the Earth ~ Ken Follett
* The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt (I've slogged my way through another chapter, now up to 22!)

Till Wednesday then - happy reading!  :o)
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Booklog #1

Happy Halloween!  Okay, so now that's out of the way let's move on.  I'm not a fan of this festival, or at least of what it has become (I have no problem with the original Pagan Samhain, which is actually very interesting).  I don't see why I should be obliged to use my own money to buy sweets or whatever and then hand them over to children/teenagers I don't even know, just because of the date.  I get that it's fun to dress up, have a party and all that, but walking the streets going to strangers' houses and asking for sweets...isn't that the exact opposite of what we're taught as children?!

Anyway, onto this week's books! 

I haven't finished anything this week (too much studying getting in the way!) but these are my 'in progress' reads:

Image by Pickersgill Reef via Flickr

The Children's Book ~ A.S. Byatt

Be prepared to see this one listed every week for a loooong time - it's really heavy-going because there is so much detail stuffed in there, not a single thing can be mentioned without a long ramble about a bunch of other topics and history related to it, diverting your attention from the plot.  I know A.S. Byatt is a well-established and highly-respected author, but I can't help but feel that there could have been a lot of pruning done to this book before publishing it!  I can only manage a chapter per sitting, so it's going to take me a long time to get through it, which is not like me at all.  But I hate not finishing something I've started! 

The Book of Secrets ~ Tom Harper

Much more my cup of tea - I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to Dan Brown-esque 'race to find historical artefact/secret before bad guys do' stories!  This one concerns the very earliest printed books and alternates between the present day chase and the historical story of what they are searching for came into being.  A book about the invention of books - what could be better?  I may well have finished by next week as it's very fast paced and every time I pick it up I find it hard to put down...

Angels ~ Marian Keyes

I've read a fair bit of 'chick lit' - Cecilia Ahern, Sophie Kinsella and Lindsay Kelk being my favourites - but never any Marian Keyes.  Given that she is considered to be one of the best I thought I'd try one - after all, if I want to write one myself, I need to see some good examples of how it's done!  Amazon is recommending all sorts of different authors of this type to me at the moment, so I plan to go on and download more samples onto the Kindle to get a feel of whose work I might like. 

The Redbreast ~ Jo Nesbo

As I mentioned last week, I’m reading this because it’s the current selection of the mini ‘crime’ book club that I’m in at work (don’t worry – we meet at lunchtimes, not while we should be working!).  It’s of the ‘dysfunctional alcoholic police detective’ vein of crime novels, but I have to say that it’s not doing much for me.  It was written in Norwegian originally, so obviously takes place in Norway, but this means it uses acronyms that I’m not familiar with, and there are so many  characters with similar sounding names and jobs within government/the police that I can’t remember who’s who.  Not that I’m really that bothered though, as I don’t feel any connection with or sympathy for any of the characters, even the main detective.  There’s a lot of reference to WWII, Nazis, neo-Nazis and political stuff that – not to sound like a total airhead – just doesn’t interest me.  Overall it feels very grey and two-dimensional...perhaps you need to have read Nesbo’s earlier books to ‘get’ the detective more, but to me he just seems really sulky and overly critical of himself.  I want to tell him to pull himself together!  Needless to say, I’ll look forward to when this one is done and hopefully our next selection will be something more like Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes where there are a list of suspects and a bunch of clues and we can try to guess whodunit before the sleuth reveals the answer. 

Question!  If something exists in both book form and TV form, which would you consume first?  I have Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth on the Kindle, but it’s also being shown in a brand new six-part series on TV at the moment, which my satellite recorder is storing up for me.  If I read the book first, the series will be taking up valuable space on my recorder’s hard disc while I read (and it’s quite a long book).  But if I watch the series first to get it off the recorder, then when I read the book I’ll have preconceived ideas of what the characters, places etc look like, which would have been quite different had I read the book first. 

It’s a bit like when the Lord of the Rings films (which I adore, I’m not criticising them) came out – they overwrote the mental pictures that I’d created of everything from reading the books many years previously as a young teenager (and then again several times over!).  I can’t remember now how I used to ‘see’ Rivendell, because all I see now is how Peter Jackson believes it should look.  It’ll be the same when The Hobbit is released I suppose, which makes me quite sad because that book is a real childhood friend.  I can still see the exact mental images that I had as a child of Bilbo in Smaug’s lair, riding the barrel, riddling with Gollum and so on.  Once the film comes out it will wipe these out and replace them, because seeing that with my eyes will undoubtedly create much stronger memories than the ones I made up in my mind.  Having said that though, I’ll almost certainly not be able to resist seeing it anyway!  

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Books, books, books - a new idea!

Hello!  Yes, I know it's Sunday night and you're probably wondering why on earth I'm posting, but I was just reading another blogger's post ( The Taming of the Shelves ) and it struck me that the amount and variety of books which I read must surely impact on my writing.  I thought that looking at this in more detail could be interesting, or at the very least might suggest books that you may not have tried but may like to. 

I'm what you might call a butterfly reader - I flit from book to book depending on my mood, so at any time could have anything up to six or seven different ones on the go.  This has increased since I got the Kindle (oops!), the way that it saves your place within each book is just so handy - and of course popping onto the site and downloading new stuff is so easy that it's hard to resist.  People sometimes find it hard to understand how I can read multiple books without getting confused, but it's second nature to me.  Surely it's no different to watching different TV series?  I've watched Lost, Heroes and Sex And The City, but I never got confused when Carrie wasn't on the island or Sylar wasn't in Bloomingdales! 

So my idea is to post here every Sunday about what I've read during the week, what I think of it, and anything else book-related that occurs to me. Of course if you have any recommendations please do post them - I'll try most things! 

As it's quite late right now - and I have work in the morning - here's a quick starter for ten.  This week I finished reading:

Company of Liars ~ Karen Maitland 
Please Forgive Me ~ Melissa Hill
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ~ Washington Irvine
Heart of Darkness ~ Joseph Conrad
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ~ Lewis Carroll

I'm still reading:
The Book of Secrets ~ Tom Harper
The Children's Book ~ A S Byatt
The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo (this is for my book club)

I'll do some reviewing and scoring next week - but right now my bed's calling me!  :oD
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A Great Day

Why a great day?  Well, there are a number of reasons! 

Firstly, I am in love with my newest gadget - my Amazon Kindle.  Yes yes, I know it's for reading and not for writing, but it's just so amazing that I can't not mention it!  I could harp on about all its features, but it would be easier to recommend that if you love reading, go to Amazon and get one.  Now!  I was dubious about reading off a screen before I got it, but I needn't have worried as it's actually really good.  I actually keep catching myself looking at it and thinking "but surely that's ink printed onto it?" even though I know it can't be...

Secondly, I have had a productive day and got over a thousand words down towards what I'm going to call Project Blake, which is a 'police procedure' crime novel.  Ages and ages ago I had a random idea for an opening scene for a book like this (fortunately I wrote it down at the time), and recently an 'investigator' character started clamouring inside my head to be let out, so the two ideas have been put together into one project.  It's early days of course, but I'm pretty excited about it.  The old adage 'write what you know' seems a good place to start - I work in the forensic department of our local police force so there is a lot of research material and people's expertise sat right there on a plate for me.  (NB Of course I would never use real-life cases, people or details in my writing.  It's just handy that I can check how things would be done in various scenarios.)

Thirdly, well, it's sunny.  And that's always nice! :o)

"All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them" ~Walt Disney
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