Bohemima's on the bandwagon for 75 in '09

Currently considering:
Categories. I'm not sure what the 999 means, but I do get categories. I'm anticipating including these:

Victorian Literature
Memoirs
Medieval nonfiction
Biographies
Sci Fi/Fantasy
Humor
Spy
Classical studies (in English)
Poetry

I'll consider myself a success if I get one from each category included, as I tend to cluster my reading.

And please, the more comments on books I read/try out, the happier I'll be.

Welcome to the group! Trust me, comments and conversation about books are not going to be a problem here :)

Welcome! Saw your comment about wanting to read Anna Karenina this year - also a goal for me, although to my shame I have never previously read it. 2009 has got to be the year.

Welcome Bo, you have a nice mix of categories - I will be interested in seeing the individual titles as you read them.

999 means 9 books in 9 categories in 2009, but as I have 160 books in 15 categories I am not exactly playing that game! I just want more choice and variety. I am sure I will read outside even this list of books! I've already got off to a bad start by picking up a book from the library that I never planned to read! Mind you, I might finish it before Thursday! :)

- TT

Well, I see I cleverly included memoirs twice. Der. Let's substitute s.f./fantasy for that second one.

TT, wait, what? You have 160 books on next year's list? Or on this year's list? I'm stunned at the thought of 160 books in a year. Haven't done that since, oh, since high school. I've not really thought much about books to put into each category yet. Well, maybe a couple of LeCarre for the "Spy" set and perhaps a Heinlin and a Bradbury or two and I think I'm finally going to break down and read the first Potter book in its entirety. So...I've given it a bit of thought, I guess. But clearly not enough. This is really quite an operation here on L.T....I may never get off the computer.

Floss, I've got that great Volkonsky or whatever translation of Anna Karenina and I'm hoping I'll have the stamina for it.

Tentative starting list for 2009:

Victorian Literature:
Middlemarch
Nicholas Nickleby
The Small House at Allington
Dr. Thorne

Memoirs/Letters:
Testament of Youth finished January, 2009
Education of Henry Adams
The Habit of Being

Medieval Nonfiction:
Medieval Reader
Life in a Medieval Castle
Mysteries of the Middle Ages finished February 11, 2009
Life in a Medieval Village

Biographies:
John Adams
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt
Queen Victoria

Sci Fi/Fantasy:
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone finished January 12, 2009,
The Hobbit
Ender's Game finished January 10, 2009
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Humor:
Lake Wobegone Days
Three Men in a Boat
Most of P.G. Wodehouse
The Complete Saki

Spy:
Secret Pilgrim finished, Jan. 7
Constant Gardener
Shibumi

Classical Studies:
Livy: Early History of Ancient Rome
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles
The Iliad (this will do double duty in the next category)

Poetry:
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats finished February 11, 2009

Others:
Anna Karenina
A Room with a View
Palace Walk

Seems ambitious but not impossible.

Wow! Some very ambitious reads there. Good luck!

Yay for Middlemarch! One of my all-time favourite books.

I'm also hoping to tackle Three Men in a Boat (just got a copy off Bookmooch) and Anna Karenina this year so I'll look out for your thoughts on these in particular.

Getting the year off to my typical start, I'm reading three books:
Queen Victoria for biography;

Secret Pilgrim for spies;

and Testament of Youth for memoirs.

I don't want to go straight to the 999 Challenge with all this because I usually read completely at random and self-discipline would not be my strongest suit. So, I'm trying to just dip my toes in the bath to see if the water's going to be too hot or what.

Flossie, when I get to Middlemarch I'll probably be asking some questions, looking for another point of view than my own.

Don't worry about your list, bohemima--some folks had laughs over mine as well! Some serious, some not--good mix, and have fun.

Oh, a note on The Secret Pilgrim: Do not, under any circumstances, read this as your first Le Carre book. On page 2 it reveals the bad guy from former works--a bad guy that was originally chased down in three consecutive books. What a spoiler that would be...and the back cover blurb says, "this would be a great place to start reading Le Carre.

Finished The Secret Pilgrim. I haven't read Le Carre in years, so I didn't have too much of a preconceived idea about what I was getting into.

Well. The good first? Ummm...the characters, particularly Ned the Narrator and Cyril the lonely, are very well-developed. Even the two or three who essentially fill stock parts are fully drawn. There's some humor here and there. The book is believable and not some farfetched nonsense like the Bond books. The structure of the book, which kind of involves a metafiction device using an after-dinner speech by George Smiley as the framework for Ned's reminiscences, is nicely done. There's some really good writing in the distinct voices given to each character.

Eh. The bad? Boy, is this depressing. You'll be right down on the ground after you read it. Something I found particularly annoying was the repeated reference to the major bad guy in some earlier works. I'd read the books and so nothing was spoiled for me, but anyone who comes to this work first will have any sense of suspense in four or five of Le Carre's novels completely spoiled. The writing is uneven: parts read like a bad Hemingway imitation. The episodic nature of the book (it reads more like a set of short stories than a novel) is disconcerting.

Final verdict: 2.5 stars.

Finished Ender's Game. Really, really didn't like it at all, for a variety of reasons.

Hope that the first Potter book is better.

Sorry to hear you did not care for Ender's Game. Perhaps you will like Harry Potter better.

#11 Ok, where do you recomend beginning? I have Spy Who Came in From the Cold on my tbr list - is that the right one?

>6 Matke: Looking forward to seeing what you think of The Small House at Allington
and Dr. Thorne. I love the Barset series :)

#13--oh, Stasia, I was so disappointed in Enders Game. I had read/heard a great deal about how wonderful it is--but I found it not at all wonderful. I liked the Potter book much better. It's unfortunate that these folks (i.e., fantasy writers) have to compete with Tolkien and T.H. White. Or with Clarke and Heinlin and Bradbury in the sci. fi. side of things. Even so, at some point I'm sure that I'll go on with the Potter series, as contrasted to the Ender book...I wouldn't care if I never saw another O.S. Card book.

#15--I left you a note at your profile.

#16--Trollope is probably my favorite author of all time. Reading his Barset books is like having a lengthy visit with some very dear, sweet and funny, if a bit silly, relatives. It's just so comfortable there.

Question re: Trollope to anyone who can give some advice?

I've seen/heard Trollope's name mentioned a couple of times in the last couple of days and was interested. Have now mooched the 2nd(?) of the series, Barchester Towers but do I need to read them in the order? The 1st is only available from the USA on Bookmooch so I would have to wait for The Warden to become availabe in the UK.

Should I wait? Do I make sense? Help??

>18 lunacat: lunacat ~ you could probably start with Barchester Towers although The Warden is a good prequel, giving nice background detail to the personalities of Mr Harding, Eleanor, the Bolds, etc. It is available from free from sites such as LibriVox (as an audiobook) and Project Gutenberg (as an ebook). There is also a great Trollope group here on LT - http://www.librarything.com/groups/trollopeloversuniteo You will see that I asked the same question as you did about the Barset series in 2007 - http://www.librarything.com/topic/10661

Hello, lunacat! (Great name, by the way.) I read Barchester Towers in high school without reading The Warden. Each book may be read independently of the others; nothing of real importance will be lost. Barchester Towers is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

digifish_books: thanks for the tip on the trollope group. I'm off to it now.

>17 Matke:: Ooh, don't give up on Card just yet! My absolute favorite by him is not a Sci-Fi book (admittedly, I've never read Ender's Game) but fantasy/fairy tale with a modern/historical twist, called Enchantment. It's got to be one of my favorite books of all time, very intelligently written.

>17 Matke: and others. Card wrote one of my fav books, Pastwatch. As for the Ender's series, I actually like a few of the later ones much better. The guy's diversity is something. His other series are also different from the others mentioned and from each other.

and re: 999 -- I have no idea how you guys can plan out your reading. Kudos to you all, but it would drive me nuts! The 999 has actually forced me to a bit of planning -- not chafing yet, but no promises!

>21 dk_phoenix: All right. I'll give Card another chance in the future...but Iwas truly disappointed in Ender's Game.

>22 suslyn: I've always just hopped here and there in my reading (after all the assigned work from the old days), but I thought I'd give this 999 thing a go--I might like the structure! Part of my motivation is to reduce the huge, huge TBR piles. I even annoy myself now when I buy a new book. On the other hand, I just finished Book by Book, which wasn't on any of my lists or even on my radar last week. Sigh.

Family things have got in the way of both reading and posting. With those more or less cleared away, I see that I've read quite a few books so far and am about half through with several others.

Thought I was reducing Mount TBR (thanks to Alcottacre), but a quick visit to my brother led to a borrowing of several books. Uh-oh.

Will post tomorrow on just what I've finished in the 75 Book Doo-dah. I won't have any problem completing that at all. May not keep my 999 lists up to snuff though. But it's fun to try to give some sort of form to what has always been my formless, whatever-strikes-me-at-this-moment reading habit.

So far this year:

January
1. The Secret Pilgrim 999 Spies; Mount TBR
2. Ender's Game 999 Science Fiction/Fantasy library
3. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone 999 Science Fiction/Fantasy library
4. Book by Book: Thoughts on Reading and Life Books on Books; Mount TBR
5. The False Inspector Dew Suspense; Mount TBR
6. My Name Escapes Me 999 Memoirs library
7. Classics for Pleasure Books on Books new

February
8. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats 999 Poetry library

And currently in the middle of 4 or 5 more. Looks well on track for 75; not so much for 999, but there's lots and lots of days to go.

Congrats for moving things off the TBR -- good job! Some interesting 999 categories going there. :)

It would be wonderful if I could remove them before I added others. Such is not my way. If gluttony can be applied to lust for books, then I am a chief sinner.

If gluttony can be applied to lust for books, then I am a chief sinner.

Aren't we all?

For the rest of February (hmmm...looks a bit light here; must get moving):

9. Testament of Youth 999 Memoirs; Mount TBR
10. Mysteries of the Middle Ages 999 Medieval Nonfiction; Mt. TBR
11. The Lobster Chronicles; 999 Memoirs; library
12. The Bean Trees; Mt. TBR
13. Life in a Medieval Castle; 999 Medeival Nonficiton; Mt. TBR
14. The Hobbit; 999 Science Fiction/Fantasy Mt. TBR
15. The Book of Air and Shadows Mt. TBR
16. The Man with a Load of Mischief new
17. Three Men in a Boat 999 Humor; Mt. TBR

Well, maybe not so bad after all. At the very least, I'm finally getting some tiny movement off the glacier of Mt. TBR.

The Grimes mystery was entertaining, literate, and witty. The Gruber book was, I thought, exceptionally well done. He's a new author to me and a most intriguing one.

And here I am again immediately. To clarify, moving books off Mt. TBR doesn't necessarily mean that those books will be leaving my house. Just that I've done a bit more than simply buy, read, buy, put aside, buy, buy, buy this month. It's a sickness, I tell ya, a sickness!

#30: What's worse is that the sickness is so highly contagious! Especially here on LT - everyone run for your lives . . .

But isn't that why we're here? I mean, isn't this the support group for the biblio addicts---the support group that in fact encourages the addiction rather than helping to suppress it?

I love LT--always a new book or author to look into...hmmm.....

March was a hard reading month for me. Well, actually it was not a month in which I posted anything--not becuase I wasn't reading, thouhg. I guess things just sort of got away from me. Fortunatley I do keep a pen-and-ink journal about reading, so that I can more or less keep up with what's going on.

Reading for March:

18. Queen Victoria 999 Bigraphy, Mt. TBR
19. Death of a Cad new
20. Death of an Outsider new
21. Tarzan of the Apes 999 Science Fiction/Fantasy new
22. Matilda 999 Science Fiction/Fantasy new
23. Green for Danger Mt. TBR
24. Life in a Medieval Village 999 Medieval Nonfiction borrowed

The two Death books were okay time-passers, but not books I'd want to put on the all-time best mysteries. I wish I had left Tarzan to my memories, as I am much more aware as an adult of the weakness of this book. The Green for Danger (touchstones not working here) was a most superior mystery from the old school: limited suspects, seemingly impossible crime, old-fashioned police detective--with the added bonus of unusually well-developed characters. It was excellent. The Medieval book was very good, but not quite as enjoyable as #13, by the same authors.

Third of a year; third of the books--on target. Also I'm reading some l-o-o-o-ng books which will probably all be finished in the same month (May?), and thus boost my progress towards goal.

</i> actually it's only been a quarter of a year (3 out of 12 months) so that means you're doing even better than you thought! If you read 24 books every three months like you have in Jan-Feb-March you will have read 96 books by the end of the year! :)

Edit: to get rid of the italics

I'm adding both Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval Village to my TBR pile. They look very interesting. Thank you for your comments.

Loriephillips, hey! There is a whole series of books on medieval life by these two authors. The books are insightful and very well researched. They don't draw any wild conclusions, but do give a full picture of what it must have been like way, way, way back when.

Girlunderglass, well, math was never my strongest point. I think I'm really in good shape for the 75 Challenge, but not doing quite so hot on the 999 Challenge. I'm hanging in there, though, and not giving up on it at all. It'll be interesting to see how close I can come.

April additions:

25. Raven Black Mt. TBR
26. John Adams 999 biography Mt. TBR

Raven Black is a mystery set in the Hebrides. It's an interesting story about young girls and life in an isolated, unusual setting. The detective is a particularly engaging fellow. I liked it and would probably go on to read the next one by the same author.

John Adams seemed to take forever. It wasn't as well-written as I had hoped, and there's lots and lots and lots of information on the Adams family. However, it really picks up after the first half and we find that Adams was an engaging man of great integrity, if a little bit vain and short-tempered. Jefferson doesn't show up so well here, but I've found that to be so in other books as well, and Hamilton seems to have been a real beast. All in all, this one was well worth a read.