Four books last week; the last week before my next birthday! 4th to the 10th of August.
Two rereads, both audiobooks; The Bullet Catcher's Daugher and Poison. I listened to Poison on the OneClickDigital app, which let me borrow it from my local library. Unfortunately, it doesn't let me change the bloody speed, which was very irritating. Some people have found a way to listen to the files on other apps, but that would involve having a cable which let me link my phone to my PC, which I do not. My cables only charge.
There'll be a longer post to come on Wizard and Glass. I'm really into The Dark Tower series now, but it'll be a while until the next one, once I've finished rereading Little Sisters of Eluria.
Finally, What If...All the Boys Wanted You?. A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book aimed at teenage girls. Very silly. Tends to forget which bits you will and won't have already read on each path, so some elements are nonsensical and come out of nowhere. I read all of it, using my normal method of pencil marks and folding pages over.
I'll start my 28th year posts a week after my birthday...on Friday the 19th of August. See you then!
During my 27th year I read a total of 303 books, at an average of 5.83 per week or .83 per day, so a little faster, which surprises me considering that I was studying for most of it! Here's another graph.
27th Year
Another spike around Christmas/New years, but even that pattern is a bit of a push. My unread pile is down to 42 books, with 15 of those being physical books. I'm moving to Manchester on the 19th of September, so I'm going to focus on getting those down before I go so I don't have to carry them.
So far this calendar year, I've bought 15 new books, which is just over one per week and well on track to buying less than 60 new books this year. Considering I bought 124 in 2015 that's a huge difference!
My unread pile is down to 53; again, on track to getting it below 30 by the end of the year. Ideally, I'd like to get it below 10 or even 5.
The following 179 books were completely new to me;
...and I bought a total of 123 books this year.
In theory, that should mean my unread pile dropped by 56. That's not actually the case. Some of the new books were gifts, some were library books and so on. That said, I am going to try to limit the number of books I purchase in 2016. I'm thinking a total of sixty over the entire year.
Finally, here is my unread pile so far;
That leaves my unread pile at 65 for the end of 2015, down from 104. I'll try to get it to below 15 by the end of the year. I'll try to read at least one or two per week.
10 books this week - 3rd to the 9th of December. I didn't think I'd read that many!
I vaguely recalled having seen the move of Watership Down as a child, though perhaps I only saw the trailer, or the opening. I didn't recall anything about the plot though I did recall that it was fucking horrifying.
Reading the book as an adult was no less horrifying, though admittedly it was comforting to be able to tell myself that it was only a tractor and not, in fact, the end of the world.
I'm being facetious there; the events of Watership Down do include the end of some worlds, and clearly came from a time when British children were much hardier, not like soft modern folk.
Girls in Tears is the final book of Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series. Ellie and her friends are all a little older and now they're having boy trouble and pets are dying and so on. I cried a little too; not just because my hamster died a few weeks ago, but at the image of Ellie's dad, when she finally confronts him.
I'm sure that if you're interested you'd know this already, but there was a TV series made of the Girls series which you can view here. It takes several liberties, mostly with Ellie's height, weight and frizziness of hair, the features she dwelled on most. I didn't actually watch the series because it began around the time I stopped owning a TV, but I'm now watching it in a sidebar and completely failing to recognise the books in it.
Free Speeches was a pamphlet created by various comic writers and artists protesting against restrictions about what can be discussed in comics. They appear to have won. The essays made some great points.
I very much enjoyed The Vampire's Mail Order Bride. It's very silly; it's about a vampire, living semi-openly in a town his family owns, whose mother wants grandbabies so badly that she signs him up to 'Eternadate', a company which sets up month-long dates with wannabe-spouses.
Meanwhile, Delany, who dreams of opening her own sweetshop, accidentally witnesses a mob-hit. She runs straight into the offices of Eternadate where she steals a profile and decides to pretend to be Hugh's blind date so she can hang around in another state for a month or so.
While the book is clichéd in good ways it manages to avoid being clichéd in bad ways. Delany reveals herself fairly early on, and she and Hugh have an open discussion about it. At one point, when they're starting to fall for one another, Delany feels jealous, but openly admits to this while acknowledging that she has no claim on Hugh and they have an open and healthy discussion about that. It's still very silly and romantic, but it's also self aware and firmly tongue-in-cheek, and portrays a pretty healtyh (though very rapid romance). I read it in the bath with a glass of wine.
A Game for all the Family is a book I actually read (listened to) earlier, back in August. I'm on a Sophie Hannah kick at the moment, and since I've only listened to it once before the plot had faded from my memory enough for me to want to hear it again. I quite like Justine, the main character. She's very forthright.
The Age of Miracles is a book that's been on my kindle for quite a while, so I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. It's set in a universe where the spin of the earth begins to slow. In tone, it's very like the film Melancholia - the people are more important than the physics.
Speaking of getting around to reading, I had a clear-out recently and removed a lot of books from my unread pile, mostly those which were on last year's list and which I hadn't touched. My unread pile now stands at 54, which isn't quite my goal of 30 by the end of 2015 but it's pretty close.
Remember, the gold surroundings are books I bought since my birthday, the black crosses are books I've given away without reading them, and the blue crosses are books I've read.
Grinny is a library book. I read a little about it on TV Tropes - though I can't reveal what without spoilers - and that made me interested enough to reserve it. It's a children's book, 112 pages, and I read it on the bus. It was a fun interlude.
The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter is set in a steampunk world where the patent office outlaws any inventions they don't like. A 'bullet-catcher' is an illusionist or stage magician, and his daughter, in this case, is Elizabeth Barnabas. Due to the semi-Victorian mores of the society, Elizabeth also poses as her non-existent twin brother, which enables her to work as the equivalent of a private detective. It's the first in the Gas-Lit Empire series and I'm pretty tempted to pick up the sequels.
Finally, The Bees. I have been raving over this book. It's a fictionalisation of the life of a bee, but what's really interesting about it is that none of the actual events are inventions. Bees really do behave like that. They don't have an internal narrative about it, as far as we know, and the story's been filtered through a human understanding, but it's still very much just the normal life of a bee. I'd love to do a full annotation of it, once I've learned more about bees .
Since my birthday - in August - I've purchased 61 new books. According to my Goodread shelf, in 2015, I've purchased 122 books.
...I have a problem.
My unread pile currently stands at 98 books. I started the year with 104 and the goal of getting it under 15 books by the end of 2015. Which is in three and a half weeks.
Six books this week - 1st October to 7th October. Two I'd read before, a library book, and three books from my unread pile.
The Forbidden Game is an old favourite. Like Labyrinth meets Jumanji, and I know those are both movies, that's why they're not bolded. A girl buys a board game for her boyfriend's birthday party and ends up working her way through a house full of nightmares, fending off the advances of a kind of Hades-Loki figure. This was the audiobook version, which was pretty good!
Amanda's Wedding is another book I've loved since my teenage years. Again, the audiobook. I liked the reader. She did the accents quite well, and this is the first audiobook to make me start giggling like a lunatic while walking to work.
I liked The Secret History much better than The Little Friend.The Little Friend is written from the viewpoint of the most annoying character, while The Secret History is about the death of that character. Much better.
The Lie escalated quickly. It goes from being a little bit mysterious to dead bodies being basically everywhere. And I was never quite sure what the titular lie actually was.
Fairest was a great addition to Marissa Meyers series, and now I'm really looking forward to Winter. It took me an amazingly long time to realize it was a Snow White reference. Now that I know more about Queen Levana I want to go back and read Cinder again.
Finally, Tale of Murasaki. It's a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu author of The Tale of Genji.
And an update to my unread pile. 89 books left, after buying a collection of Gaiman's work on Humble Bundle, which bumped it up by 18. I quite want to complete an entire line, like in bingo. Maybe line 9, since there are only three left in there anyway. I'd also like to read one from each row.
Blue crosses are books I've read since my last birthday (mid August). The gold circles (which I'm going to change to squares in future) are books I've bought since my last birthday.
...I think I've found the problem.
In fairness, several of these are audiobooks. I bought myself 24 Audible credits for my birthday.
In summary; I've bought 11 new books since my birthday. I've read 5 of those as well as 2 I owned previously, which brings my total down to 83 unread, up from 79. I'm partway through two or three at the moment though, so I expect it to start coming back down. Although I just bought a new Kindle book. Fuck.
The final week! 5th to the 11th of August. Tomorrow, I complete my 26th trip around the sun (or spiral through the universe) and begin the next one.
Cold Comfort Farm I read because Tom likes it, and we watched the mini-series together. I felt like I was missing something, so I decided to read the book as well.
Touched and Not That Kind of Girl were both library books. The former wasn't that great. A mystery about a haunted house and a kidnapping, neither particularly mysterious or compelling.
Not That Kind of Girl I read because of this article. I've never actually seen any of Lena Dunham's work though I have heard of some of the controversy - like the time she portrayed an all white New York and claimed not to see colour. Even her own book portrays her as a spoiled, clueless, narcissist. But none of those things make her a bad person. I like that she's body-positive.
I'm now watching her film, Tiny Furniture, since it's on Netflix. I'd never heard her speak out loud before. She's very whiny and nasal.
I'm glad I learned more about Lena Dunham, since she is such a large part of the current pop-culture landscape. Though my feelings are confused.
Finally, Cocktails is simply a beginner's guide to cocktails. I've been quite into them recently, so I gave it a quick read since it was free on Kindle.
...and that wraps up my 26th year! I read a total of 261 books over these 52 weeks, at an average of 5.05 per week or 0.72 per day. Here's a graph.
I'm going to carry on doing this next year. And I'm going to update my unread pile every month. Here it is currently.
In future months, a blank space will mean I donated it or otherwise got rid of it without reading it while a cross will mean I've read it. New books will be surrounded by a golden circle.
That's a total of 79 books. I've been saying since I was 23 that I was going to get the total down. Ideally to less than ten at a time. Maybe by actually tracking them, so they don't grow while I'm not looking, it'll go better!
I have succeeded in my stated goal of getting my unread pile down to 100 in 2014!
....I celebrated by buying three new books in January's Audible sale. And got a freebie from amazon because I bought a kindle book in January. So my unread pile currently stands as follows, with these 104 books;
My goal for 2015 is to get this pile down from 104 to below 15. I think 5-15 books is a reasonable amount to have hanging around unread at any one time.
It's a bit early to plan this, but what I'd like to do in future years is take a snapshot of my 5-15 unread books, and then if I spot the same ones hanging about on the list a year later, assume I have no interest in them and ditch them.
Six books last week! Two of them - The Second Sex and Piano & Keyboard I'd been reading for a while. Three of them - Monstrous Regiment, The Afterdark Princess, and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? - were audiobooks. Finally, The Flavours of Love had been hanging out on my unread pile for a while.
The Second Sex I read for my feminist bookclub, a meeting that never actually happened. Everyone except me cancelled. I'd only read half the book by the day, so I just carried on with it. It's a brick. An interesting read, but a long one. It really surprised me how much of it was still current and still relevant, despite the book being written sixty-five years ago. That's kind of sad.
Piano & Keyboard was a decent guide. I picked up a lot of good tips and I'm glad I read it. It really helped my musicianship.
The Afterdark Princess was a children's book I used to really like. It was just over £7 on Audible, but I picked up three credits for £18 and decided to get it. It's less than three hours long, so I played it through in my locker a couple of times when I was at work to try to get a few Audible badges. Worked pretty well.
Monstrous Regiment is one of my favourite Discworld books. Stephen Briggs is a great reader, but I really wish this book had been read by a woman. A woman who could do great male voices. I'd love to hear Monstrous Regiment read by a woman who could do great male voices.
I've only seen a bit of The Mindy Show and none of The Office, but I like Mindy Kaling. And I like hearing autobiographies read by the authors, especially since they tend to be comedians or other performers. So far, the best performance has been Michael McIntyre. He did the best voices, especially his impression of his Hungarian grandmother. Mindy definitely sounded like she was reading not performing, but she was reading so she can be forgiven for that. And the book was pretty interesting. I mostly read it while running, or while walking to work or round the supermarket. I will not be adopting Mindy's revenge-fantasy method of exercise motivation.
Finally, The Flavours of Love. I love Dorothy Koomson. Her books are like chick-lit thrillers, two genres I love, and I love that all her heroines are black. It's something that appears so seldom, which makes me sad.
I read Flavours of Love over a day; a few hours before bed, on the way to work, at lunch, while donating blood, and finished it before falling asleep the next night. I really enjoyed it.
My unread pile is now at 102. I'm going to try to have it under 100 on New Year's Eve. Then, next year, my goal will be to get it to under 15, where I'll try to keep it. That seems pretty amazing to me right now - I haven't had that few unread books in my possession since I was six or seven years old. But I think I'll be happier when I don't have all those books cluttering up the place and making me feel guilty.
I read a LOT this week. From Wednesday, I was off work with some sort of terrible lurgy. I pretty much just slept and read for three or four days in a row. Didn't eat which is probably why I fainted halfway through.
A Doll's House is a play I've read before. Again, it's on wikisource, so I read it on a quiet Tuesday at work. It's a classic, and considered to be one of the first if not the first feminist plays. I saw it performed at the Birmingham rep when I was sixteen, which is ten years ago now.
True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is another one I first read years ago. Just over fifteen years ago actually - it was a gift for my eleventh birthday. I think my friends just went round their local charity shops and came out with a handful of books, but I'm glad this is one of them. It just blew me away. It's about a proper young Victorian miss who ends up witnessing a mutiny on a ship. Newbury Medal winner.
According to wikipedia;
A film adaption of the book is in development. It is to be written and directed by Danny DeVito, starring Morgan Freeman as Zachariah and Pierce Brosnan as Jaggery. Dakota Fanning was originally cast as Charlotte Doyle, but had to drop out as production was continually halted and she eventually grew too old for the part. Saoirse Ronan was later cast, but she also grew too old. Locations are being scouted in Ireland and shooting is set for July 2014.
Exciting!
I read The Eternal Enemy because I loved Remember Me by the same author. Eternal Enemy is about a young girl who buys a VCR which can record the future. She records the news and tries to prevent terrible accidents, until the day she sees her own face on there. Unfortunately, she doesn't get all of the broadcast...something goes wrong.
That plot was described in Remember Me by Peter, one of the characters. When I found out that Pike had actually written it, I just had to read it. It's pretty interesting. Heads off into sci-fi rather than horror, much like Koji Suzuki's Ring Trilogy does.
Silver Birch, Blood Moon is the fifth in a series of modernised or reimagined fairy tale anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I wrote a slightly longer post about the series here.
Because this volume was the first I read, I have a special fondness for it. I love Precious obviously, but also the incredibly creepy retelling of Thumbelina, the romantic Rumpelstiltskin, and the terrible story of one of the princes who didn't make it through Sleeping Beauty's hedge. Less fond of the retelling of Snow White, who lives in an iron graveyard and dies of tetanus.
Music Theoryfor Dummies is a book I bought myself for my birthday, along with my keyboard. It's been pretty useful. Took me a while to get through it, and I didn't quite take in all the bits about permutations of chords, but that's also covered in Piano and Keyboard All-in-One for Dummies which I'm currently reading.
Unsouled is the third part of Neal Shusterman'sUnwind series. It's set in a universe where abortion is not allowed, but you can have troublesome teenagers 'unwound' - that is, taken apart for parts. Every cell is kept alive and donated to someone who needs it. It's an interesting and well-written series, which really goes into the ramifications of that idea.
Finally, Don't Tell the Groom is one that popped up on Kind of Book, a site which will notify you of heavily reduced Kindle books. I don't subscribe any more, because it was making my unread pile grow uncontrollably.
Speaking of which, my unread pile is now down to 107. My goal is still to get it down to 100 or less by the end of the year, so I'm well on track for that, as long as I don't buy any more.
Anyway, Don't Tell the Groom. It's about a woman who accidentally gambles away her wedding savings and then tries to organise a cheaper wedding on the sly so the groom won't find out. She tells him she wants it to be a surprise, and from a money-saving point of view, it's interesting. Some nice ideas, and even a shout out to Martin Lewis. The gambling support is fairly well done too, though I'm not totally convinced at how easily the main character gave up on her bingo addiction. I've never had an addiction, but it seems like it would take more than realising you have a problem, deciding to give up, and then only slipping up twice - once spending about £5 on scratchcards and once almost stealing a scratchcard from another bride's wedding favours. It all seems a bit too easy.
I mostly picked it up because it's very 'chick-lit', but touched on a serious issue which doesn't normally have a place in that genre. I feel like more could have been done with it, but it was still a decent read.
Last year, I read a total of 324 books, 244 of which were new to me.
Annoyingly, this has not resulted in a huge decrease in my unread pile. At the start of 2014, it had 177 books in it. That's now crept up to 186.
My goal is to reduce that pile to a more manageable size. I'll have less time to read this year; last year, I read thirty books in a week simply because I had nothing better to do than challenge myself. Now I have a job, which is pretty awesome, but means I can't read four books in one day any more.
I'll try to write regular updates, mostly to keep myself on track. Maybe go back to writing those weekly updates of what I've read. We'll see.
It's June 1st, and my unread pile has 154 books in it (including one that I finished today, but I'm counting anyway because it was still unread by the end of May). According to GoodReads, I read six books between the 20th and the 31st - Juliet, Naked I finished today. Don't ask me where the rest went. Some I gave to my grandmother, with the knowledge that they'll be there when/if I want to read them. I also bought one new book. I think my books breed and hide from me, because the numbers never quite seem to add up.
I've really enjoyed this project, even though I didn't succeed in my goal. Some of those books have been there for almost a decade, and I don't know why I never got to them before, because some of them were awesome. Annie Murray, who writes books set in Birmingham, will be giving a talk at my local library soon, so I expect I'll get a few of hers out of the pile over the next week or so. She'll be speaking about her new book, The Women of Lilac Street, and that'll be at South Yardley Library on the 17th of June, between 10:30am and 11:30am.
I like that Annie Murray's books are set in Birmingham. There was a weird moment, when I read My Daughter, My Mother when I was on the exact same bus that the character was travelling on. I like that. I like being able to picture the street the characters are on - it happens so rarely.
I really liked Soldier Girl, the middle entry of a trilogy of girls growing up in Birmingham in the early 20th century. I like Molly. I would like to be friends with her.
One of her books that I didn't like was Orphan of Angel Street. The main character seemed like a complete Mary Sue. She was so perfect, and terrible tragic things happened to her, because she was so perfect and lovely and everyone wanted her, but it all worked out okay. I just found it a bit melodramatic, and found it hard to like the character, near the end.
The librarian whom I asked about the event highly recommended Where Earth Meets Sky, which I have. I think I'll probably reread Soldier Girl and that before the 17th.
After 20 days, my unread pile is down from 204 to 167. I read these;
...and donated three more, getting rid of ten since the 15th. So I have another 11 days in which to read 17 books. It's not even 8am on the 20th yet, so I've actually got twelve days. I've been aiming for two a day, so I'll just keep doing that.
My unread pile consisted of 204 books on the 1st of May. I got it down to 194 on the 5th, and 179 on the 10th. It's now the 15th, so we're almost halfway through May, and I'm down to 177. That doesn't include books I've started, so I'm halfway through two or three of those. I might make a graph, at the end of the month.
I have read more than 2 books off the pile in the last five days. In fact, I've read these;
So why has my unread pile only shrunk by two? Pretty much purely because I decided to count the five books in the Pop Larkin Chronicles as five, when I'd previously been counting them as one volume. I think I must have picked up another book from somewhere, too, but god knows where. I swear they breed when they think I'm not looking.
I've still not finishing Thinking, Fast and Slow. I took it back to the library and bought the ebook instead. I'm focusing on books off the unread pile, so I'll probably only read a chapter or two at a time.
I recently read The Decisive Moment (alt title: How We Decide), which has been in my unread pile for quite a while. Right now, I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, which contains a lot of the original work that The Decisive Moment is based on. Both books are about how we think.
Lehrer (author of The Decisive Moment) labels the two systems 'instinct' and 'analysis'. Kahneman labels them 'system 1' and 'system 2'. Both use the following question to illustrate the two systems;
The price of a bat and a ball together is £110. The bat costs £100 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The part of you that said the ball costs £10 is instinct, system 1. The part that worked out that the correct answer is £5 is system 2, analysis.
I include that question not to illustrate that instinct is always wrong (it isn't; try catching a ball using analysis) but because you can feel the two systems working.
System 2/analysis normally takes more effort. Your pupils dilate, and your heart-rate speeds up very slightly. Kahneman mentions that, if asked to calculate something like 17 x 24 while walking, you will most likely stop walking. I've also noticed another of his observations myself; that it is very difficult to be in a state of physical exertion and to think complicated thoughts at the same time. That's what I like about running (during the relatively few moments when I do like running). It is a welcome respite from thinking.
Kahneman also talks about flow, which is when you're performing an activity that would normally use system 2/analysis, but you're in a state where it feels effortless. You know that feeling when you get really into something? Like when you're drawing, and the entire world disappears? I get it when I draw sometimes, during tests, and, sometimes, when reading.
It was only relatively recently that I realised that reading takes effort for most people. It was, really, when I read this article, on how to read fifty-two books in a year.
...seriously? People need a guide on how to read a book a week? They think that's a big number? This was news to me. He also describes a lot of things that I'm in the habit of doing, like reading while commuting (I don't have a commute right now, but whenever I travel). What do people do if they don't read while travelling? Sure, I don't read sometimes. I listen to music or podcasts, or stare out of the window and switch off, every so often. But I read most of the time, while travelling. How do people not die of boredom otherwise? This honestly baffles me.
He also talks about using every minute to read. I typically read a lot in queues. It's a lot easier with an eReader, especially since my Kobo mini fits easily in my pocket. Whip it out, read a few pages, queues are no longer boring. I also read while I brush my teeth. My electric toothbrush only needs one hand, and the Kobo only needs the occasional tap. Paperbacks are trickier, but totally possible.
I don't force myself to do these things, and I don't have an end goal (most of the time). I just like reading, want to find out what happens next and/or it's the easiest way for me to deal with dead time, like travelling or waiting. I don't know what else to do with that time.
As I said, I am often in a state of flow while reading. It doesn't take me any effort. It was a bit of a realisation for me that it does take effort, for a lot of people.
That said, sometimes I'm not always in a state of flow. Then, I automatically do what he suggests, for instance, dividing a book into pages. I'll read until I hit fifty, or until I'm a quarter of the way through, or a third, or a half, or three quarters, and so on. It's kind of like counting sheep to fall asleep, making yourself read until you hit a state of flow. You know that state is there, ready for you to fall into; you just fake it till you make it.
I've been doing that more this month, since I have that goal of getting my unread pile down to one hundred and fifty. It's paying off. So many of these books I wouldn't have gotten round to, if I'd left it totally up to system 1, and the payoff has been worth it. The Decisive Moment, for instance, or Atonement. Atonement brought up lots of feelings, and I don't want to say that I enjoyed it, or liked it, because those feelings weren't all happy. But it was interesting. I'm glad I got round to reading The Catcher in the Rye, even though I didn't really connect with it. It's one of those books that's nice to have read, you know?
Anyway, Thinking, Fast and Slow is due back at the library today, so I should probably go finish it.
My unread pile now has 179 books in it, down from 194 on the 5th and 2014 on the 1st. Go me! I read eight;
...and donated a few more. Including India Knight's Comfort and Joy.
I used to love India Knight's books. I liked My Life on a Plate, and adored Don't You Want Me. Then I read her comments on Shannon Matthews, and couldn't pick up any of her books without remembering them.
...as India Knight put it about Maddie, she
had vanished from a holiday resort “which specialises in providing
family-friendly holidays to the middle classes.” The joy of these
resorts were that they “were populated by recognisable types” where you
could sigh in relief and think, “Everyone is like us”. They were not
places you would expect to meet “the kind of people who wallop their
weeping kids in Sainsbury’s.”
Journalists were often honest about why
there was less interest in Shannon’s disappearance. “It is ‘up North’,
it is a bleak mix of pebbledash council blocks and neglected wasteland,
and it is populated by some people capable of confirming the worst
stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass,” wrote one Times journalist.
Melanie Reid argued “we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we
are from events in Afghanistan. For life among the white working class
of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country.”
I'm the mixed race result of a teenage pregnancy, raised by a single mother on a council estate. India Knight's comments reveal her thoughts; that people whose families looked like mine, whose homes looked like mine were not "people like us". Instead, we are "the kind of people who wallop [their] weeping kids in Sainsbury's". Because, as everyone knows, it is impossible to be whatever makes up 'people like us' when you grow up on a council estate. It is impossible not to be the sort of person who 'wallops' weeping kids in Sainsbury's when you're poor.
I cannot read India Knight's books without being reminded of those comments and that mindset. So, no, Ms Knight. Just no. Fuck you.
Well, it's been five days since I vowed to get fifty books off my unread pile. I've read these;
...so that's 8 out of 204 gone. I'm halfway through another, and I've donated six or seven. But (confession time) I managed to pick up a few more. So I have 194 left all together. My goal was to get rid of 50, but I want to rephrase that as getting the pile down to 150. So I have 44 to donate or read in the next 26 days - wish me luck!
I've never really understood the romanticism of physical books. I've heard people go on about the pleasure of cracking a spine, or the smell and feel of the pages, and it just doesn't really do anything for me.
I put off getting an ereader because...well, I don't know why. The cost, partly. The fact that I'd have to buy all new books for it, and couldn't just magically import my huge collection (in the thousands). I was a little squicked out by reading that you don't really own ebooks, and they can be edited at the publisher's discretion. I like owning things, and having them in my control. I also like sorting them. I like being able to put an author's books together on a shelf, and to make piles of unread books, and so on.
I bought my Kobo (her name is Opal) last December. I went away for Christmas, to work in a homeless shelter as I do every year. In 2011, I took a bunch of point horrors. I was able to finish one a day (actually, I can easily finish three point horrors in a day, but working in the shelter limited my time) so I had to take a lot. It was a nightmare carrying that giant bag down to London (on a train, obviously, I didn't walk), and I worried about running out of books. I think I also read Lorna Doone on my phone that week, but don't quote me on that.
Anyway, a week or so before I went, I was walking past a WHSmiths and saw that they had a sale on Kobos. I don't think I'd ever heard of a Kobo before, but I went in and played around, and saw that the mini-Kobos were only £50, which was the cheapest price I'd ever seen for an eReader. So I bought one, on a whim.
I love her. I love that she fits in my pocket. I like how she looks and feels. I love the menu screen, which lets me indulge my love of organising things. My brain doesn't work when things aren't organised, and a cluttered or badly designed menu screen would really put me off and ruin my enjoyment. I like the Kobo Awards (post about that coming soon) though it annoys me that they're not as supported as they should be. I like the Kobo website. I absolutely adore the way that I can see exactly how many pages are left in a chapter; it splits books into little popcorn sized pieces, something I do with physical books by working out which percentage I'm at, and how long to the next third/quarter etc. I like that I can put any kind of file on there (though it won't show the page count properly, so I prefer to read Kobo Epubs).
I'm planning to get a Kindle Paperwhite once I start work. On that note, new job are now saying June. This is my life right now.
...so I'll read a book, or maybe two or three, I'll add a few new paintings to my gallery, I'll play guitar and knit and cook and basically just wonder, when will my life begin?
The appeal of the Kindle Paperwhite is as follows; it has a bigger screen than Opal Kobo, and I think I'll like that, having a tiny eReader for ease of transport, and a bigger one so books seems like they have less pages. It lights up, so I can read in the dark. It works out how long it will take me to finish a chapter, and my brain likes the idea of this new data. It'll show the page numbers in Kindle books properly. And the menu seems less brain-irritating than in the normal Kindle (which I bought and returned; could not get on with that menu screen). At some point I do intend to write a full review of the Kobo, so I might wait till I have both and compare.
This then gave me the incentive to start getting rid of my books. That hurt at first. I used to hoard books. I'd read them once then keep them just in case I ever wanted to read them again. When I moved here, I had something like twenty-five boxes of books. It was a nightmare.
From now on, I only want one bookcase of physical books, and that's mostly books that look pretty as a set, like the sci-fi fantasy masterworks and Series of Unfortunate Events, and books which are simply not available as eBooks.
As I said, decluttering hurt at first, but once I'd got rid of a few, it got easier. I eventually reduced my books by two thirds. Of those I kept, as you saw in a previous post, a good two hundred were unread. I have my one bookcase, and the rest I intend to buy eBook versions of as soon as possible. I don't ever want to have to carry around piles of books again.
I also intend to keep my unread piles more manageable in future. I'm thinking something like only ten to fifteen unread books on any system (not combined, that's crazy talk).
On another note, I'd love to get a copy of Kim Newman's Life's Lottery. It's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, essentially, but with a few interesting twists. It's also aimed at adults, as opposed to the actual Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series for children, or the gamebooks, of which I have several (the latter, not the former). I've borrowed it from the library several times. Thinking about that book prompted this post; I was wondering if it would be possible for that sort of book to be on an eReader. It might be, but I think this is one of the few books that I really prefer as a physical object. I have a bad habit of folding pages over and marking choices with pencil just to make sure I don't miss anything.
This is my unread pile, in piles of twenty-five. Please note that this does not include unread books on my Kobo (nineteen) or Kindle (not sure how many; I don't even own a Kindle yet, just the app and some books for it).
Yep, that's two hundred and four books. And this is ridiculous. Some of them have been then for years. As much as a decade, in some cases.
So, my goal for May is to get rid of fifty of them; donate them to a charity shop, or read them and move them to another pile, it doesn't matter which.
So far, I've made a good start. I've picked out five to donate, and read three. I'm partway through another two. Wish me luck!
