One year ago, I just had finished a lot of light reading to get through the dark Icelandic winter, especially chicklit seemed to be on my mood, among others The Nanny Diaries, the very awful Sex and the City and the surprisingly good Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Now, because of exams and a tighter schedule evolving around courses and their preparation and also rugby, not so many books have been checked off.
I had to read the insightful but somewhat dense Imagined Community by Benedict Anderson for one of my courses, which I recommend to anyone interested in nationalisms and how they were born, give that you can stand through detailed Indonesian examples.
Then, after reading the last pages of A Passage to India by Forster that I started mid-december and did not get a chance to continue because of exams, I speeded through L'étranger by Albert Camus in one of my very boring courses to end it the night afterwards.
I absolutely loved Forster. I do not know how many times I picked up my pencil and marked sentences that were simply beautiful and very strong and universal. I am glad that I finally read one of his works and am really looking forward to pick up A Room with a View and Maurice.
Speaking of this French name, I have recently read The Amazing Maurice and his educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett for Marg's Pratchett challenge. More about this in a review, that I hopefully will not forget to write soonish...
And now, I am currently reading In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz, a story on pre-revolutionary Iran, a setting I am particularly fond of.
Reading updates in January
Watching Castle
Castle's lesson of the day...
In this 11th episode of season 2 I am currently watching, one guy has been saved from a bullet by a copy of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment in his inner jacket pocket.
Beckett: "Good thing he reads"We get it: reading dense (in every sense) literature instead of chicklit will save your life.
Ryan: "Good thing he reads Russian literature. If the guy was a Nicholas Sparks fan, he'd be dead."
What the library let me hunt down
Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, I already finished just now in my beloved armchair. It is a good story to read and reread, the ending is quite different from the movie.
If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.Two by Eva Ibbotson, A Company of Swans and A Countess below Stairs, both often recommended to me and I was n the mood to alternate literature and chicklit. And Eva Ibbotson is a fantastic writer for children/young adults (I absolutely loved Secret of Platform 13), so her chicklit must be good stuff.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a book that I am not sure of having read, because I remember that the husband of my mother's friend gave it to me when I was thirteen and as it was not in a language that I liked to read (and I did not like his taste in books in general, and I did not like the cover, and he was a teacher who basically treated his whole surroundings, even friends and family, like pupils), I just skimmed through it or so I think. So this is a fresh start.
I have always liked novels about China, especially about Chinese women, be it in ancient or modern China or their lives as immigrants or whatever. Amy Tan has produced several novels of that kind now and after I finished The Bonesetter's Daughter totally enthralled, her other novel The Joy Luck Club immediately ended up on my TBR-pile. I found it today and will read it as one of the first.
As I let my eyes float over the bookshelves (because that is how I see it, my eyes are like sliding from one book spine to another, waves of thick paper), I saw the beautiful oriental style book spine of In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz, set in Iran before and around the Revolution. I did not even finished reading the back description, there it already was in my pile to be taken home.
Looking forward to read all of them!
A Thanksgiving quote
I am currently watching the 8th episode of The Middle and obviously it is about all the trouble a family can have on the glorious day of Thanksgiving.
The ultra relaxed Axl goes with his brother Brick (yes..) to a corn maze, loses him there and completely freaks out: "He's got like a green jacket, a yellow hat and ... OMG, HE'S DRESSED LIKE CORN! We are never going to find him in here!" Turns around and there is Brick.
I will try my best tomorrow to find someone about whom I can say that he's dressed like corn. It's simply amazing.
Less reading, no posting, lazy me...
Since September, I have been really busy in every single aspect of my life. Classes at university started again and it was quite weird to go back to work, studying, reading regularly. I did not go back to my soccer team but started rugby where I am surprisingly not too bad at, actually not bad at all and am maybe even going to be one of the regulars as the right hand prop. Yay!
Partying is irregular but heavy this semester, our housewarming party was a huge mess and also a huge success - we set the standards quite high for the others ;-) We decorated the flat around the theme of the seven deadly sins, each of our rooms representing one sin. I was dressed as the Bride in Kill Bill and my room full of dark and red paintings, a make-your-own-voodoo-doll-activity and nasty ideas on how to kill someone on the walls. Actually, because of my blonde wig that far too many guys started fantasizing about, I ended up as yet another symbol of luxury in my male flatmates' room. My other female flatmate was representing envy (as a sort of Blair Waldorf) and of course it was easy for her to turn it into luxury too, obviously the favourite sin for everyone. One of my best friends came with a huge tshirt full of bills and coins (greed) and therefore basically won the award for the best costume as she had put so much effort and thought into it and dared to take the one sin no one usually ever wants. Another great costume was my other friend: she came as glass of jam (gluttony)!
Reading has been quite a tough one lately, as I had to go through most of Bernard Lewis' books on Islam for a course and got less time left for "personal" reads. Nonetheless, I finished "The Thord Birds" successfully among others and am now watching the series. At the moment, I am reading "The Eyre Affair" by Fforde and really enjoy it despite some difficulties to get into it during the first pages.
So long, this was a quick update to revive this blog. Hope that I will find some time after monday (big presentation I still have to work on) to write about some challenges I want to do 2010 and about the books I absolutely have to read soonish!
Comments section fixed
It took some days for me even to figure out that it was impossible to comment on this new layout! But now it should be fixed and I even have the "posted by" back at the bottom I was looking for. When I will find some motivation again to look at the template code again, I will try to get the date header a bit down, there's too much space between it and the post title.
What to (not) do with a book
Today's news are filled with trial reports about people who get indemnities because they put their cat into the microwave or drink burning coffee and no proper instructions told them not to.
So just in case, take notes.
Reading in hard times
It has been a long while since I finished a book (last one was Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett maybe two weeks ago) and it is funny how I feel bad about that. I know that I read for the pleasure of reading and not only to make my TBR-list smaller, but apparently I need a regular "book ending" to happen, to give me a sort of structure.
Plus, I hate to be reading so many books at the time. Anna Karenina is too big to be carried around, so I only read it at home - and as I am either at work or visiting the city until I am fall-into-bed-tired, the chapters to be read are not getting fewer. My metro read is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and is maybe the only one I am progressing with. For the size of the book it is a relatively light paperback that I read while the train rushes through the labyrinth (depending on the distance, up to 30 pages), on the neverending escalators (up to 5 pages!) and one or two pages while I am walking out until I realise that no, readwalking is definitely not possible in Moscow.
At work I use the great DailyLit system to get familiar with Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Swann's Way. Moby Dick is far more easy to read than I expected, while Frankenstein had a surprisingly unengaging and almost boring start. It is getting better now that Dr Frankenstein himself is telling his story but duh! was this Walton annoying!
Ishmael is hilarious and I hope I'll stay with him for a long while. "Ignorance is the parent of fear" is in today's snippet. Well-said, Ishmael.
The Big List of Bookish Social Networks
I would quickly like to share this article by Deeplinking.net on bookish social networks. Written in 2007, it lists a number of different platforms I did not all know. What is even more interesting is the description following each mention. For example, Goodreads is a
I will check out some of these other bookish networks and would be pleased about an update of this list.
Long time no update!
Wow, it's been quite a while since my last post but I think that writing a new one immediately on the first evening I got wifi again qualifies me for being a willing blogger. I am now writing from the not-so-red-anymore city of Moscow, where I will be living until end of August. A change of scenery and of lifestyle that will undoubtedly affect my reading habits. The summer of doing nothing but reading and lazily staring at the screen is over, even though I successfully managed to open some other reading options inbetween work, sightseeing and sleeping.
First of all, I discovered and started using the very nice DailyLit website, where I started today with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, read far into the short story Hell-Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri and scheduled the first snippets of Moby Dick by Melville and Du Côté de Chez Swann (the French original of Swann's Way) by Proust for tomorrow.
As you see, I will really try not to fall back in terms of reading. Especially as I brought Anna Karenina by Tolstoi from Germany (for my nightstand) and bought Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (a light paperback for my metro journey every day) straight off the English shelves of the great Biblio Globus bookshop in central Moscow.
Fine. Now let's get back to business and leave the daily randomness.
Dangerous Berlin
Huge chain bookstores, small but surprisingly well furnished used-books stores and flea markets - Berlin is extremely dangerous for booklovers who are not completely broke. After almost one week in Berlin, I leave this overall amazing city with these treasures:
*from the Berliner Trödelmarkt (famous flea market on sat/sun)*
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men - Cannery Row
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
E.M. Foster, A Passage to India
*from Another Country (used books | link)*
Marie Phillips, Gods Behaving Badly
Susan Hill, Mrs de Winter
*from Fair Exchange (used books | link)*
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Kate Chopin, The Awakening and selected stories
*from Hugendubel (chain store | link*
Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade (ed.), The portable Dorothy Parker
Some new old books
I just came back from a weekend in Düsseldorf to visit family with several used and not so used books I found when strolling through the amazing bookshop Sternverlag there.
So that's what's in my suitcase:
- a 1962 Rowohlt edition of Hunger by Knut Hamsun
- Oblomow by Iwan A. Gontscharow
- Doctor Schiwago by Boris Pasternak
- Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton (the only new one)
and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf for my mum.
But as I fell behind with my reading of Mansfield Park, because I was too busy with my marvelous cousins (being the photographer of one kid's birthday party), all of these books will be put on my TBR-pile...
Reading updates and May/June plan
I'm really happy my copy of Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier) has arrived so quickly and I'm looking forward to read it, as soon as I have finished Slumdog Millionaire (Vikas Swarup).
So my reading plan for end of May->end of June should be the following:
- finish Slumdog Millionaire (Vikas Swarup)
- read Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier) for the Classics Challenge, Royal's Romance Reading Challenge and my Fill in the Gaps List.
- read The Voodoo Queen (Robert Tallant) for the Southern Reading Challenge
- read Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey or both (Jane Austen) for the Classics Challenge and the Royal's Romance Reading Challenge
I hope I am not overestimating myself and the power of my current vacation lazieness, but I will at least try to get that done before I start with my July reads: Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), another Russian classic and maybe Atonement (Ian McEwan)
Slow progress - no progress?
I think I've never been so slow reading a book as I am with The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I've bought The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini I am very eager to start but this damn Faulkner novel doesn't want to let me finish it and go over to the next book! Terrible. I cannot even think how I am going to write a review about it, as it is difficult to read and doesn't tie me to the story as every good book does, yet it is very fine literature.
So, this was my Thursday complaint on Father's Day, which I am spending with my Dad for the first time in many years: after lunch at a restaurant, I'm doing my own stuff and he's snoring on the couch :)
