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1lara_aine
I’m a bit late to the game this year but I’m way behind what I’d usually have read by now so I’m hoping documenting it here and all the interesting bookish chats might keep me motivated.
I’d been a bookseller for ten years when my shop closed quite suddenly a couple of months ago. We had less than a week’s notice and for a good month after that, weird as it sounds, it was actually physically painful to even look at a book. And when I could, I tended to start books and then throw them aside as I couldn’t focus.
So it’s only been in the past few weeks that I’ve started reading again. On the upside though, I now have oodles of time to deal with the piles and piles of unread books that I would stumble across in work and bring home but never get around to. This year my TBR shelves and I are in a battle to the death.
Books Read So Far:
1. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
2. Persuasion - Austen
3. Fermat's Last Theorem - Simon Singh
4. Phantoms on the Bookshelves - Jacques Bonnet
5. Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic - O'Toole
6. Liquidation - Imre Kertesz
7. A Room With a View - E.M. Forster
8. Howards End is on the Landing - Susan Hill
9. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - Eduardo Galeano
10. La Vita Nuova - Dante Alighieri
11. The Companion Guide to Florence - Eve Borsook
12. Florence, a Delicate Case - David Leavitt
13. The Adversary - Emmanuel Carrere
May
14. Mapping the Trail of a Serial Killer - Brenda Ralph Lewis
15. My Life Among Serial Killers - Helen Morrison
16. The Monster of Florence - Douglas Preston
17. Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit - John Douglas
18. Whoever Fights Monsters - Robert K. Ressler
19. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
20. Small Sacrifices - Ann Rule
21. Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace
22. On Literature - Umberto Eco
I’d been a bookseller for ten years when my shop closed quite suddenly a couple of months ago. We had less than a week’s notice and for a good month after that, weird as it sounds, it was actually physically painful to even look at a book. And when I could, I tended to start books and then throw them aside as I couldn’t focus.
So it’s only been in the past few weeks that I’ve started reading again. On the upside though, I now have oodles of time to deal with the piles and piles of unread books that I would stumble across in work and bring home but never get around to. This year my TBR shelves and I are in a battle to the death.
Books Read So Far:
1. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
2. Persuasion - Austen
3. Fermat's Last Theorem - Simon Singh
4. Phantoms on the Bookshelves - Jacques Bonnet
5. Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic - O'Toole
6. Liquidation - Imre Kertesz
7. A Room With a View - E.M. Forster
8. Howards End is on the Landing - Susan Hill
9. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - Eduardo Galeano
10. La Vita Nuova - Dante Alighieri
11. The Companion Guide to Florence - Eve Borsook
12. Florence, a Delicate Case - David Leavitt
13. The Adversary - Emmanuel Carrere
May
14. Mapping the Trail of a Serial Killer - Brenda Ralph Lewis
15. My Life Among Serial Killers - Helen Morrison
16. The Monster of Florence - Douglas Preston
17. Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit - John Douglas
18. Whoever Fights Monsters - Robert K. Ressler
19. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
20. Small Sacrifices - Ann Rule
21. Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace
22. On Literature - Umberto Eco
3mamzel
What a good news, bad news way of joinging the group. So sorry to hear about your book store but I am glad that you are once again able to enjoy reading. Welcome!
4alcottacre
Welcome to the group, Lara! Sorry to hear about your bookshop. I hope you enjoy your stay with the 75ers though.
5KiwiNyx
Welcome and real sorry to hear about your shop. That sounded hard. On the plus side, you have read some good books this year and this group is a lot of fun.
6lara_aine
Thanks for the really nice welcome guys. I'm only getting a chance to update now as my internet has been on the blink for the past week.
I have to admit I don't generally read this much true crime in one go (I'm doing a bit of research for something I'm writing at the moment), but it was interesting to read Mindhunter and Whoever Fights Monsters one after the other, as they both cover a lot of the same cases. Both authors seemed to have worked side by side for a while, but given how well they manage to write each other out of the cases they were working on, you get the impression there's not a whole lot of love lost between the two. Ressler seems particularly irked that Douglas claims he was the inspiration for the character of Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris's books. As for which I preferred, the Ressler book probably just edged it for me as it focused more on the psychopathology of the criminals and the information gleaned from their prison interviews. The Douglas book was written more in the form of an autobiography of his work.
I think I've probably attempted to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveller at least three times. It's one of those unfortunate books, that every time I start reading it, things get in the way like exams and it's put down again unfinished. Not this time. I love this book. I loved the ending, and the long passage where the Reader is wandering around Ludmilla's house (particularly the description of the kitchen) and the marvellous bit describing the tables in the bookshop at the beginning. The edition I have has a quotation from a review by Salman Rushdie on the back and it pretty much sums up this book: "...you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before...I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends."
I think Ann Rule must be one of the most skillful crime writers around. I'm always amazed at how she manage to make a narrative actually thrilling when you know the ending right from the first page. I remember reading The Stranger Beside Me when I was twelve and on holiday in a labyrinthine hotel in Rhodes. It scared me out of my wits.
The last two books I've read were collections of essays by David Foster Wallace and Umberto Eco. They're probably not the best thing to take out fo the library because they're not really designed to be read cover to cover. Especially the Eco one, which as some pieces written on books I've never read. But I did enjoy them both and will probably return to them. I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace before so it seemed a slightly more relaxed introduction than the unopened copy of Infinite Jest that is glaring down at me from a shelf as we speak.
i have work due soon for college so I imagine the reading will have to slow down a bit in the next few weeks but i was at an event yesterday with Jean Claude Carriere as part of the Dublin Writer's Festival, so I think This Is Not the End of the Book might be next.
Again, thanks so much for all the nice welcomes.
I have to admit I don't generally read this much true crime in one go (I'm doing a bit of research for something I'm writing at the moment), but it was interesting to read Mindhunter and Whoever Fights Monsters one after the other, as they both cover a lot of the same cases. Both authors seemed to have worked side by side for a while, but given how well they manage to write each other out of the cases they were working on, you get the impression there's not a whole lot of love lost between the two. Ressler seems particularly irked that Douglas claims he was the inspiration for the character of Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris's books. As for which I preferred, the Ressler book probably just edged it for me as it focused more on the psychopathology of the criminals and the information gleaned from their prison interviews. The Douglas book was written more in the form of an autobiography of his work.
I think I've probably attempted to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveller at least three times. It's one of those unfortunate books, that every time I start reading it, things get in the way like exams and it's put down again unfinished. Not this time. I love this book. I loved the ending, and the long passage where the Reader is wandering around Ludmilla's house (particularly the description of the kitchen) and the marvellous bit describing the tables in the bookshop at the beginning. The edition I have has a quotation from a review by Salman Rushdie on the back and it pretty much sums up this book: "...you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before...I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends."
I think Ann Rule must be one of the most skillful crime writers around. I'm always amazed at how she manage to make a narrative actually thrilling when you know the ending right from the first page. I remember reading The Stranger Beside Me when I was twelve and on holiday in a labyrinthine hotel in Rhodes. It scared me out of my wits.
The last two books I've read were collections of essays by David Foster Wallace and Umberto Eco. They're probably not the best thing to take out fo the library because they're not really designed to be read cover to cover. Especially the Eco one, which as some pieces written on books I've never read. But I did enjoy them both and will probably return to them. I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace before so it seemed a slightly more relaxed introduction than the unopened copy of Infinite Jest that is glaring down at me from a shelf as we speak.
i have work due soon for college so I imagine the reading will have to slow down a bit in the next few weeks but i was at an event yesterday with Jean Claude Carriere as part of the Dublin Writer's Festival, so I think This Is Not the End of the Book might be next.
Again, thanks so much for all the nice welcomes.
7gennyt
A belated welcome from me too. Sorry to hear about the sudden closure of your bookshop. I'm not surprised it affected how you felt about reading or even looking at books for some time - must have been quite traumatic.
You seem to be doing some interesting reading now you've started again. I've not yet If on a winter's night - sounds as if I really must one of these days!
You seem to be doing some interesting reading now you've started again. I've not yet If on a winter's night - sounds as if I really must one of these days!
