In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 27/52

Eight books last week!  That's 10th February to 17th February.

I finished the Matched series.  I've owned the first one for years - first read it in 2012 - so I borrowed the two sequels from the library.  It wasn't mind-blowing, but it was fun and nice to finally get some closure.  You can probably read something into the fact that I didn't read the sequels back when I first read the first book.



I also finished the Gas Lit Empire series this week, with The Custodian of Marvels.  My reaction is about the same as to the Matched series, though I did get through it a lot faster.  Part of that is because it's harder to find good audiobooks I can listen to on 3x speed so when I find a series with the right level of listenability I tend to go for it.

I also finished the Spilling CID series, although there's no indication that this book is the end of the series.  A very meta book, The Narrow Bed.   

Spoilers to follow! 

The killer has decided to murder everyone who gave an unwanted ereader to someone else and to kill the recipients who politely accepted the ereaders and shoved them in a drawer.  I'm kind of glad I listened to it as an audiobook and kept the fuck out of that mess.  There's also a straw feminist character, which is almost as bad as Hannah deciding Andrew Wakefield was being picked on.  No other character - not even Charlie who lives an exceptionally feminist life - says anything to the tune of "I'm a feminist but she's a tad overboard".  We just have one crazy feminist as our only example.  

Not one of her stronger efforts, in many ways.

End Spoilers.

The Broken was another audiobook.  It focused on two couples - with dreadful, ugly, London accents - one of whom breaks up.  It kind of fails at being mysterious and intriguing, though it does try.  The final twist was excellent, but there wasn't a lot of build up to it and it wasn't an exciting journey.

Finally, I listened to the first three Harry Potter books.  I originally read The Chamber of Secrets when I was ten or eleven, closely followed by Philosopher's Stone, Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire.

I kind of lost interest at that point.  It's hard to pinpoint why.  Some of it was to do with having a crush on Ron and then having very confused feelings about Hermione, whom I otherwise liked.  I was also put off by Rupert Grinch who looked nothing like I imagined the character.

I think there was an element of backlash as well.  With so many people raving about the series I didn't feel able to join in.  While I can't criticise the books themselves, my enjoyment of them kind of soured.

Now it's been fifteen years and I'm getting some of my affection for the series back.  It helps that I'm listening on Audible which makes it go by a lot faster; the entire series on 3x speed is less than 45 hours.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 26/52

It's my half birthday!

I read nine books last week - 4th - 10th February.  Four audiobooks, three books on my kindle, and two library books.

The library books were Shopaholic to the Rescue and The Waste Lands, which I wrote a longer post about here.  Shopaholic to the Rescue wasn't quite as bad as the other books in the Shopaholic series.  I really liked the first three; I read them as a teenager and they were amazing.  But then they kept coming.  On and on and on and on and....

I did like Step by Wicked Step.  It's one of Anne Fine's children novels, and after listening to Charm School and Flour Babies last week I thought I'd give this one a go.

The Imperfectionists and Little Star are both books I've had on my kobo for years.  I finally felt it was time to get around to them.  They were both pretty good when I got going, although Little Star was far, far too gory for my taste.

I actually read Little Star because I used a random number generator to pick which book to read from my unread pile next.  I did that again when I finished and it picked Middlesex so I'll start that tomorrow.

I reread Matched because it seemed time to finish the series.  I first read it a couple of years ago.  I've borrowed the second and third parts of the trilogy from the library, so I'll soon know how it turned out.

Witch World is a book I've listened to before.  I love Christopher Pike.  He's like Stephen King  for teenagers and with slightly more of a sci-fi bent.

The Telling Error was another book I'd read before.  It's the latest book in the Spilling CID series until The Narrow Bed comes out...tomorrow!  I just went to check.  Didn't realise how close it was, thought it was ages away.  Yay!

Finally, The Ice Twins.  A weird little psychological thriller.  Pretty good, though I forget what made me choose it.

In Which We Discuss The Wastelands

I am really getting into the Dark Tower series now.  The Wastelands was something rather like the DLR - a cross between a roller-coaster and a train ride.

This third novel in the series has Roland dealing with his newly contradictive memory and the Ka-Tet moving further along the beam towards the tower.  There's also a bright pink, crazy, train, a mechanical bear god and a killing spree set off by 80s music.  It all works, somehow.

Following this, there was a six-year-gap before the next installation was published.  This means I need to read the following before I find out what happens next;

Needful Things - 1991
Gerald's Game - 1992
Dolores Claiborne - 1992

Nightmares and Dreamscapes - 1993
Insomnia - 1994
Rose Madder - 1995
The Green Mile - 1996
Desperation - 1996

The Regulators - 1996
Six Stories - 1997
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass - 1997

In this case, the bolded books are the ones I've read previously.  Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne are part of a loose series, which is thematically similar to my favourite, Rose Madder.  Nightmares and Dreamscapes is another short-story collection.  I've read Insomnia once and Green Mile twice, I think.  The move was pretty good.

Hopefully, those ten books will take less than six years for me to read.  Eight more after that and I'll be out of the nineties!

This has been a very long-running project.  It's taken me almost three years to read thirty-two books, and that's out of a total of ninety-three.  In other words I'm 34% of the way through!

I can (and do) read faster than that, as you can tell from my weekly logs.  But I can't read just one author.

In the afterword, Stephen King seems to indicate that this is his favourite of his own series'.  His magnum opus.  James Smythe points out that this is where the series began to take shape, to find its form.  It's an excellent post.

Onwards to Needful Things which loosely follows the Sun Dog from Four Past Midnight.  I've read it before, about a decade ago, though I don't remember too many of the details.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 25/52

Six books last week!  That's the 28th January to the 3rd of February.

Three were audio books and relatively short.  Charm School and Flour Babies are both around three hours long and both are books I first read and loved around 11 or 12.  I do love Anne Fine's writing.

I finally finished Adventures in the Dream Trade.  That's a collection of introductions and other bits and pieces by Neil Gaiman, including his online diary of the bits between writing and publishing American Gods, which I'm now rereading.

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears is a collection of modern fairytales.  There are some particularly good ones in this collection, including my favourite one about a kitsune, which is a lovely word to say.  Kitsune.

About A Boy is a book I first read as a teenager.  This was the audiobook and I love Julian Rhind-Tutt's performance, actually more than that of Hugh Grant in the movie (and not least because I'm a bit of a Green Wing fan).

I've just heard that the book is being taught in secondary schools now, which I love.  I've reread it a few times over the years and I can see it would be an excellent point of discussion for teenagers.

It's weird to think of a book that I love being a 'school book'.  Though, of course, Shakespeare and Dickens et all were all very popular authors, and I do read Dickens novels for fun.

Better Than Before was a useful book.  It's about habits and motivation and so far I'm using two very useful tips.

The first one is the 'tendencies' the author sees people as being split into.

Upholders who are equally motivated by external and internal expectations.
Obligers, who are more motivated by external goals but more likely to let internal goals or expectations lapse.
Questioners, who will not accept a goal or expectation until they have question it and internalised it as acceptable.
Rebels, who defy expectations and find it hard to be motivated by a goal.

I'm definitely an obliger; if I decide to do something I find it very easy to talk myself out of it, whereas if someone else expects me to do something I find it harder to avoid. So the trick for me will be to externalise any habits I decide to do.  I've already done this; I've told my fb friends that if I don't stick to my study schedule for the week then I'm going to put the UKIP logo up as my facebook banner and my PC and phone background.   So far, that threat has been sufficient to get me up at 7am to study between 7:30am - 8:30am because I couldn't manage at any other time in the morning.

The other useful bit is realising that I'm very much a starter.  I LOVE starting new projects.  I love making new blogs, buying new notebooks and pens, making details plans...but I'm a bit meh on actually finishing things.  Knowing that is useful.  It's why my unread pile doesn't go down and why I end up buying books which I later just donate to charity.  Still working on ways to get around it, but at least I understand the issue better now.

In Which We Discuss Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight is a collection of short novellas, similar to Four Seasons though rather less famous and with a greater focus on horror and the supernatural.  It's Stephen King's 31st published work by my count, in 1990.

I had read it before, although I didn't remember much of it.  I remembered The Langoliers but not the details of Secret Window, Secret Garden which was the very story I picked the collection up for.

The Langoliers focuses on a few people who wake up on a plane with everyone else gone.  I like the Langoliers, the supernatural monsters that turn up halfway through.

Secret Window, Secret Garden was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp.  That on focuses on plagiarism.

The Library Policeman was also very good; however, I do find it interesting that Stephen King mentions that 'the library policeman' was a fear of his younger son, Owen.  The character who is pursued by it pictures it in that form because he was raped by a man calling himself a 'library policeman' at an early age.  I'm not sure I'd be able to separate the two characters once one had grown from the other.  That's one of the many reasons why Stephen King is a much better writer than I am.

Sun Dog is a weird little story about a camera.  Rather enjoyable in its own way.

James Smythe points out in his article that many people focus on The Langoliers, like I did.  He's also reminded me that Sun Dog is part of a series with Needful Things and, I think, either The Dark Half or The Tommyknockers.  It also features Pop Merril as a main character, Pop being the uncle of Ace from The Body and related to several characters in The Tommyknockers.  A character in the Sun Dog also refers to the divorce and suicide of The Dark Half's Thad Beaumont.

So now, on to The Wastelands, the third Dark Tower novel.  I'm also part of the way through Haunted Heart, a biography of Stephen King which I hope will give me some interesting background.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 24/52

I'm very late in writing this.  When I say 'late' I mean it's now Tuesday and I'm due to post the 25th week tomorrow.

I read five books between 20th - 26th January.  Three library books, an audio book and a Kindle book.

I'm not really any more impressed with the second Scott Pilgrim graphic novel.  I think Michael Cera's crappy acting and total lack of chemistry with Ramona's actor - as well as the lack of character development - has ruined it for me.

The Stone Angel was very enjoyable.  It's by a Canadian author - and the essay at the back points out how few of these we know of, apart from Margaret Atwood - and is something of a classic, I gather.  It's the life of Hagar, a Canadian woman born at the turn of the century.  It flips between her childhood and her time in her nineties, fighting over being asked to leave her own home and forced into a nursing home.

Big Brother is a book I read years ago.  I enjoy 90% of it, but the last 10% ruins it for me.

I had the same sort of issue with Woman's World.  Woman's World is told using cuttings from 60s women's magazines, like a ransom note.  It's a useful storytelling technique, considering the character.

What disappoints me about the ending is that the issues raised are not resolved.  They just...magically go away.  Which is a lot less interesting than actually dealing with it.

Unseemly Science is the second in the Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, focusing on Elizabeth Barnabas and her cross-dressing adventures as her imaginary brother, Edwin.  The Gas-Lit Empire has very Victorian values you see, and being a man can be incredibly useful.  I enjoyed it, enough to have pre-ordered the third book, which comes out on Thursday.