JULY - What 1001 Book are You Reading?

No thread yet this month? Okay, let me begin . . .

I'm still reading The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, Night and Day by Virginia Woolf, and today I started listening to What a Carve Up! on audio book. All of them are good so far.

I'm about a third of the way through The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. I'm loving it despite the abundant negative reviews, perhaps because I'm reading it in very small sittings (on my phone whenever there's a spare moment) or perhaps because I simply like Wharton (I love the only other book of hers I've read, Ethan Frome). I'm also waiting on the library to get me The Stranger by Albert Camus.

I started Baltasar and Blimunda for the group read today.

Where are you seeing negative reviews for The House of Mirth? I thought I remembered seeing only good reviews on that one. Or maybe because I loved it I mentally erased any negative reviews I read.

I am leaving for Indonesia tomorrow for three weeks of travelling. I have tried to choose some books from the list, suitable for reading while travelling and came up with the following:
The Grapes of Wrath
Super Cannes
The Woman in White
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Howard's End
The Robber Bride
Platform
What I loved
The Sea of Fertility

Nothing worse than to bring too few or the wrong books with you on holidays. Any suggestions are more than welcome.

The Plague by Albert Camus. This is definitely not light reading, but it is suspenseful.

I read The Plague years ago but it still haunts me at night sometimes. Those rats....

I am about to finish Volume 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter and then I will be able to begin on Baltasar and Blimunda for the group read. Actually I already started B&B and then decided I'd better finish at least Volume 2 of KL before I continued. They are both long historical novels told in very distinctive voices so not the best things to read intertwined with each other. But after Chapter 1 of B&B I am very curious to keep reading!

For your travel, Simone, how about Max Havelaar by Multatuli? It's the great colonial Indonesian book and I assume it's on the 1001 list.

Normally I look at reviews on GoodReads, and I just went and checked and most of the reviews there are pretty positive, and it has a 3.96 rating... So I don't know! I do tend to seek out the negative reviews though when I'm researching a review, so maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

Not many 1001s planned this month, very very slowly reading Pier Paolo Pasolini's Ragazzi di Vita. It's in Roman dialect, it will take forever.

But I got closer to finishing some other listed works: I read this month's volume of "Dance to the Music of Time", The Valley of Bones. Not as great as the last two, but again very good (4 stars)!
And I am 25% through Trollope's The Small House at Allington and planning to get right to the (listed) Last Chronicle of Barset once this one is finished.
I also slow-started Rousseau's Confessions. Will also take a bit as I only found a free version for the PC, nothing for the Kindle.

Anything that keeps me from The German Lesson... No - I really need to read either that one or Berlin Alexanderplatz in July or August. I guess it will be the Doeblin...

I just started Regeneration by Pat Barker. It's the first in a trilogy that ends with The Ghost Road also on the 2010 list. The Eye in the Door is the second book in the trilogy -- it did not make the list. But, in a compulsive act, I intend to read it any way.

Is it more complusive to restrict my reading to the list? Or is it more compulsive to follow the trilogy? Or is hanging out with fellow readers the real compulsion?

I finished reading The Castle of Otranto the other day. It wasn't bad, though I think it made the list more for it's historical significance than for its enjoyability as a read.

Next I'm planning to read The Hound of the Baskervilles, looking forward to it as I've never read any Sherlock Holmes before.

I'm about 30 pages from the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman (finally!). I had planned to read Baltasar and Blimunda with the group, but a friend and I are going to start Infinite Jest together instead - picking it up from the library this evening. Wish me luck!

I finished two over the weekend, The Golden Bowl (snooze) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I wasn't sure what to expect from The Spy...it was more of an intellectual spy novel with a big slap in the face ending. I've started The Power and the Glory - so far so good.

Still working on Shroud and started An Artist of the Floating World. I love Ishiguro and this book is great. Shroud is a little harder to get into.

Just finished The Valley of Bones so have started Baltasar & Blimunda which is very intriguing in the first few pages!

Still plodding on with Don Quixote on the Kindle, which is hilarious.

Continuing with my alphabetical quest (speaking of compulsive, #11!), I am almost through The Absentee, which isn't really my style, though it's going by quickly enough. Next up is Absolute Beginners, by which I am intrigued after reading the synopsis and a few reviews.

I've begun sneaking in the five 'Song of Ice and Fire' novels between my list reads, which is definitely not helping my progress.

I just finished North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and loved it. I'll be picking up Une Vie by Guy de Maupassant at the library later this week, so that'll be the next up.

Hey jasmeyer

I just started reading Regeneration this morning.

Just finished Casino Royale the first of Ian Fleming's James Bond books.

Finishing up The Return of the Soldier and then next up is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

I finished Baltasar and Blimunda for the group read, and have Feast of the Goat lined up next.

I just started Justine by Lawrence Durrell, inspired because I just finished re-reading his younger brother's brilliant memoir My Family and Other Animals and I wanted to read some of Larry's self-described "deathless prose". :) So far, Gerry's the winner for me; I'm finding Justine pretty dull. Still, will stick with it and hopefully get into the swing of it soon.

I just finished Regeneration. I was engaged by the author and moved by her book. I am looking forward to reading the next two volumes in the trilogy. These are historical novels set in England during the first World War and the lead characters are historical figures.

I also started The Crow Road by Iain Banks which I am also enjoying.

Barker? Banks? Yes, I am going alphabetically by author selecting those with multiple books.

I've been working on The Golden Notebook for a while now (since just before the end of June, although I also moved in that time, so maybe it's not surprising). It's started getting interesting in the last 50 pages or so - I'm about halfway through.

I'm still keep reading Digital mind jail by Gojim Oavin. Book is mind blowing with it story and futuristic info.

Just finished with Baltasar and Blimunda for the group read. Next up will be Middlemarch, which I've long wanted to read.

The next two I'm taking on are Wuthering Heights and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I tried to pick two that are not at all alike :)

I liked A Room with a View so much that I've started Passage to india.

>27 amaryann21: I don't think you could've picked more different books!

I'm reading Daniel Deronda and unfortunately after this one I don't have any more Eliot's on the list to read.

Finished The Yellow Wallpaper and still working on Freedom.

I've finished The spy who came in from the cold, which was good - not quite what I expected though, I don't usually read spy novels (or detectives) so I don't know if this was a 'typical' spy novel or not. It was a quick and enjoyable read, but I won't start reading more books like this now.

Instead, I've started on a collection of short stories by Chekhov which is amazing - but not on the 1001 list - and yesterday I picked up The Leopard which I very much look forward to. I've seen the movie twice, it's so immense.

#29 - I recently started Adam Bede and feel lucky to have several more Eliot books left on the list as it's my first one - am enjoying it immensely!

I'm starting The Eye in the Door the second book in the trilogy by Pat Barker. All 3 volumes were on the 2007 list, but this one was dropped in 2010.

No progress at all with Ragazzi di Vita... really not an easy read, and written in those long stand-alone episodes, there's no continuous narrative that would keep me going.

But I finished Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles. The last and only listed one, The Last Chronicle of Barset with almost 1,000 pages, was not my favorite in the series, but a solid 4 star read.

As Rousseau's "Confessions" are also slow going, I squeezed in Brave New World which certainly is a must. And I started the short L'immoraliste by André Gide, an author with 4 listed works of which I have read none so far.

I'm reading Possession by A. S. Byatt and loving it so far.

Daniel Deronda was a let down. I've started Fathers and Sons, my first Turgenev. And I really must get back to The Power and the Glory. For such a short book it sure is taking a long time to read. I think because I know it will end badly I'm not that eager to see how.

I'm starting The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. All three books in the trilogy including Regeneration and The Eye in the Door address a challenging set of subjects associated with war. Set in England, in World War I, many of the characters are suffering what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress. Many of the characters are actual historical figures. The same lead characters are in all three books.

I highly recommend the tirlogy. Despite the topics, Barker's style is easy to read.

Finally finished Baltasar & Blimunda so am going to try and squeeze in Falling Man before the end of July.

Just finished The Accidental this morning, and after a short break to read a non-list book (A Clash of Kings), I'll be embarking on Ada by Nabokov - seems to be one of his lesser known works, or perhaps that is just my ignorance talking.

I just finished the trilogy. If you like Regeneration, you will reading the rest.

With my July reading:

The Plague, Regeneration, Ghost Road, and Crow Road

I bring my totals to: 119 authors and 161 books.

Reading Lucky Jim, and enjoying it quite a bit so far.