In Which We Discuss the BBC's List of the Nation's Hundred Best-Loved Novels

The Telegraph do not describe how they came to their list of 100 Novels Everyone Should Read (which I discussed here). The BBC, on the other hand, are a lot more transparent. They did a survey to find the nation's hundred favourite novels. I'm going to go through the list (and how many of them I've read) below, in handy groups of ten.

1. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [ ]
2. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [X]
3. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [X]
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [X]
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling [X]
6. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [X]
7. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [X]
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four  George Orwell [X]
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis [X]
10. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë [X]

 I like this list better already.  Though it seems ridiculous that the His Dark Materials series gets it's own entry while the Harry Potter books are all listed separately.

1. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller [ ]
2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë [ ]
3. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks [ ]
4. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier [X]
5. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [ ]
6. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame [ ]
7. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [ ]
8. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott [X]
9. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres [ ]
10. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [ ]

Wuthering Heights is another of those that I've been meaning to read for ages.  I think I'm afraid that it won't live up to the dreadfully romantic stereotype that it has, and I'll find it tawdry and flimsy.  That said, I had that exact fear about Lorna Doone, and Lorna Doone is wonderful.

1. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell [ ]
2. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling [X]
3. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets - JK Rowling [X]
4. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban - JK Rowling [X]
5. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien [ ]
6. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [X]
7. Middlemarch - George Eliot [ ]
8. A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving [ ]
9. The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck [ ]
10. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [X]

I'm not a big fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I've read at least one description about girls who read which talks about how we all love that, and Austen, and Little Women, and Lord of the Rings, and fuck off, no we don't.

I am becoming tired and grumpy.

1. The Story Of Tracy Beaker - Jacqueline Wilson [X]
2. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez [ ]
3. The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett [ ]
4. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [ ]
5. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [X]
6. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson [X]
7. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [ ]
8. Persuasion - Jane Austen [ ]
9. Dune - Frank Herbert [ ]
10. Emma - Jane Austen [ ]

Still can't abide Austen.

1. Anne Of Green Gables - LM Montgomery [X]
2. Watership Down - Richard Adams [ ]
3. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [ ]
4. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas [ ]
5. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [ ]
6. Animal Farm - George Orwell [X]
7. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [X]
8. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy [ ]
9. Goodnight Mister Tom - Michelle Magorian [X]
10. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher [ ]

That's the first fifty, and I've read 23 of them.  Much better.  I'll continue writing this post later, when I have stopped being so very grumpy.

Right.  It's later.

1. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett [X]
2. Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck [X]
3. The Stand - Stephen King [ ]
4. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [ ]
5. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth [ ]
6. The BFG - Roald Dahl [X]
7. Swallows And Amazons - Arthur Ransome [ ]
8. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell [ ]
9. Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer [X]
10. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [ ]

 I had a copy of Swallows and Amazons when I was nine or ten.  God knows what happened to it.  I remember starting it, but don't think I ever finished.

1. Noughts And Crosses - Malorie Blackman [X]
2. Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden [X]
3. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [ ]
4. The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCollough [ ]
5. Mort - Terry Pratchett [X]
6. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton [X]
7. The Magus - John Fowles [ ]
8. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman [X]
9. Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett [X]
10. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding [X]

I had a copy of A Tale of Two Cities as a child, too.  I think my sister and I used it for scrap paper before we learned how to read.

1. Perfume - Patrick Süskind [X]
2. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell [ ]
3. Night Watch - Terry Pratchett [X]
4. Matilda - Roald Dahl [X]
5. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding [X]
6. The Secret History - Donna Tartt [ ]
7. The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins [ ]
8. Ulysses - James Joyce [ ]
9. Bleak House - Charles Dickens [ ]
10. Double Act - Jacqueline Wilson [X]

I loved Double Act when I was eight or nine.  I remember reading that and The Suitcase Kid over and over.

1. The Twits - Roald Dahl [X]
2. I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith [X]
3. Holes - Louis Sachar [ ]
4. Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake [ ]
5. The God Of Small Things - Arundhati Roy [ ]
6. Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson [X]
7. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [ ]
8. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [ ]
9. Magician - Raymond E Feist [ ]
10. On The Road - Jack Kerouac [ ]

I Capture the Castle  is in my top ten.

1. The Godfather - Mario Puzo [X]
2. The Clan Of The Cave Bear - Jean M Auel [ ]
3. The Colour Of Magic - Terry Pratchett [X]
4. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho [ ]
5. Katherine - Anya Seton [ ]
6. Kane And Abel - Jeffrey Archer [ ]
7. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez [X]
8. Girls In Love - Jacqueline Wilson [X]
9. The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot [X]
10. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [ ]

I loved The Godfather, which surprised me, because I couldn't sit through the film.

Out of those hundred, I've read 47.  So I'm not well read by The Telegraph's standards, but I'm in tune with the general tastes of Britain, according to the BBC.  Good to know!

In Which We Discuss the Telegraph's List of a Hundred Novels Everyone Should Read

According to my GoodReads account, I read over 250 books in 2012 and I've 131 so far in 2013. In 2012, 184 of those were new to me, and so far in 2013, 84 of them were previously unread by me. 

Incidentally, in 2010 I started 189 books, but I didn't keep track of how many I was reading for the first time, and I didn't finish everything I started.  As for 2011...I only joined Goodreads in September of that year.  In that time, I read 75 books, 42 of them for the first time.

The point I'm trying to make with all these numbers is - well, you'd think I'd be well-read, wouldn't you?  I'm broadly read, and I don't want to say I'm not well-read because that seems disparaging to the books I choose to read, and I don't want to do that.  When you read more than ten times as many books as the average person, then you can be judgmental about what I throw in there.

Anyway.  Point I was making.  There are lots of books out there that I feel like I ought to have read, just for the sake of completeness.  For the ability to pick up references, for instance, or to understand another author's inspiration.  For instance, apparently Pratchett's Night Watch has a lot in common with Les Miserables.  I had no idea, never read it.

To this end, I spent a few minutes googling for one of those 'hundred books everyone should read' lists.  I did find a list of a thousand books everyone should read, but decided to leave that for now.   I found two I liked, from the Telegraph and the BBC.  When I started writing this, I only had the Telegraph's list in mind, but I had to google again to find that thousand linked, and the BBC popped up.

At this stage, I only intend to record how many I've read.  The Telegraph's list will go in this post, and the BBCs in another.  Maybe when I've gotten through my current goal, of getting my unread pile down from 204 to 150 throughout May, I'll have a go at completing the lists.  Maybe.

So;  The Telegraph, in handy groups of ten.

1. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien  [ ]
2. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [X]
3. The Home and the World - Rabindranath Tagore [ ]
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [X]
5. One Thousand and One Nights - Anon [ ]
6. The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [ ]
7. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [ ]
8.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré [ ]
9. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [ ]
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady MurasakiShikibu [ ]

I've started The Tale of Genji, but never actually finished it.  It was heavy going for a fifteen-year-old.  I've also read several adaptations of and stories from The Thousand and One Nights, but I don't think I've read the original.

1. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch [ ]
2. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing [X]
3. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin [ ]
4. On the Road - Jack Kerouac [ ]
5. Old Goriot - Honoré de Balzac [ ]
6. The Red and the Black - Stendhal [ ]
7. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [ ]
8. Germinal - Emile Zola [ ]
9. The Stranger - Albert Camus [ ]
10. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco [ ]

...hrm.

I'm not actually sure whether or not I've read The Three Musketeers.  It might have been an abridged version.

1. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey [ ]
2. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [ ]
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [X]
4. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller [ ]
5. The Trial - Franz Kafka [ ]
6. Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee [X]
7. Waiting for the Mahatma - RK Narayan [ ]
8. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque [ ]
9. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [ ]
10. The Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin [ ]

I read Cider with Rosie when I was sixteen, if I recall correctly.  I don't remember much about it.  Alice in Wonderland I read when I was seven, and in hospital with a broken arm.  I have Catch 22 in my unread pile; I'll get to it someday.  I tried reserving Wide Sargasso Sea at the library after my feminist bookclub read Jane Eyre, but they never got ahold of a copy.

1. The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa [ ]
2. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino [ ]
3. Crash - JG Ballard [ ]
4. A Bend in the River - VS Naipaul [ ]
5. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [ ]
6. Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [ ]
7. The Cairo Trilogy - Naguib Mahfouz [ ]
8. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson [ ]
9. Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift [X]
10. My Name Is Red - Orhan Pamuk [ ]

I might have read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide.  Or it might have been another abridged version.  I'm not totally sure.

I've read Orhan Pamuk's Snow.  An ex of mine leant it to me (while we were dating).  It was a bit of a slog but interesting enough.  I stuck with it because I assumed we were sharing reading matter out of common interest.  Apparently not.  When I gave it back, he smugly told me "that ought to get you back into reading literature".  Arse.  I am no one's Eliza Dolittle.

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez [ ]
2. London Fields - Martin Amis [ ]
3. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño [ ]
4. The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse [ ]
5. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass [ ]
6. Austerlitz - WG Sebald [ ]
7. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [ ]
8. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [X]
9. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [ ]
10. Underworld - Don DeLillo [ ]

Okay.  This is embarassing.

Catcher in the Rye is also in my unread pile.  I've put that and Catch 22 on top, and I'll get to them this month.  I've also rescued Lolita from my 'donate' pile.  Pages are falling out of my copy; the glue's so old it's dried out and started to break.  I was intending to wait, and buy it as an eBook someday, because it was so hard to hold.  I guess I can read it first, though, and then buy an ecopy if I ever fancy reading it again.

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison [ ]
2. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [ ]
3. Go Tell It On the Mountain - James Baldwin [ ]
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera [ ]
5. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [ ]
6. The Voyeur - Alain Robbe-Grillet [ ]
7. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre [ ]
8. The Rabbit books - John Updike [ ]
9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [ ]
10. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle [X]

I may have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a child.  I'm not totally certain.  Beloved is in my unread pile, and I've put it over with Catch 22 et al.

The Telegraph has little descriptions under each of these in the original article.  I like the one for The Hound of the Baskervilles - "A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors".

1. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton [ ]
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe [ ]
3. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [ ]
4. The Warden - Anthony Trollope [ ]
5. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo [ ]
6. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis [ ]
7. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler [ ]
8. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson [ ]
9. A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell [ ]
10. Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky [ ]

 If I ever do work through this list, I'd like to do this batch of ten first.  Not just because this is the first group in which I've not read any of them, but because they all sound interesting.  And at least a few are out of copyright (until my new job starts, this is very important to me).

1. Atonement - Ian McEwan [ ]
2. Life: a User’s Manual - Georges Perec [ ]
3. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding [ ]
4. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley [X]
5. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell [ ]
6. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins [ ]
7. Ulysses - James Joyce [ ]
8. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [ ]
9. A Passage to India - EM Forster [ ]
10. 1984 - George Orwell [X]

Atonement is in my unread pile as well. I used to have a copy of Cranford; it was super old.  It didn't have an ISBN number or anything, and the author's signature was engraved into the cover.  I donated it to a charity shop (having owned it for fifteen years without ever opening the cover) and the lady in the shop was stroking it reverently and whatnot.  I wish her much joy of it (though, if she sold it on eBay for hundreds of pounds, I will be mildly ticked off with myself).  I'll get the eBook.  I have an eBook of The Moonstone, having given away my physical copy of that, too.  I've been meaning to get around to it for ages, especially after a friend highly recommended it.

1. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne [ ]
2. The War of the Worlds - HG Wells [X]
3. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh [ ]
4. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [X]
5. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene [ ]
6. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse [ ]
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë [ ]
8. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [ ]
9. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe [ ]
10. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [X]

I can't abide Austen. And I hated pretty much every character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.  That book made me so angry.  I guess that was kind of the point, to show up how sexist and awful Victorian times could be.  Though that said, in today's world, I'm sure you could find people who consider her equally to blame for the rape.

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes [ ]
2. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf [ ]
3. Disgrace - JM Coetzee [ ]
4. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë [X]
5. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust [ ]
6. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [ ]
7. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James [ ]
8. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [ ]
9. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville [ ]
10. Middlemarch - George Eliot [ ] 

As I said earlier, I finally got around to reading Jane Eyre because of a bookclub.  I didn't like any of the characters in that either.  Particularly not Rochester, who decides that locking his mentally ill wife in the attic while he preys on a young girl is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

So, I've read 14 books off that list.  That doesn't seem like a great deal, but I can get it up to twenty just by reading through my unread pile, and then reading one of the out-of-copyright books on my Kobo.  We'll see if I want to accept the challenge.

In Which We Discuss My Unread Pile Again

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!

In Which We Discuss $5000 Canadian

Kobo are currently running (yet another) competition. In this one, you read three short stories, which are released as free ebooks on the 25th April and the 2nd and 9th of May. You must use the clues in the text and images of each story to find a URL, and then use information on the three pages to locate the entry form. Full rules are here. Remember that you must have all three books in your Kobo library to qualify for entry, so don't go deleting them once you've read them.  You don't, however, actually need to own a Kobo; reading the books on the desktop or smartphone app works too.  Entries need to be in by the 14th of May, and prizes will go to the first five qualifying entries; winner gets $5000 Canadian and a Black Kobo Glo signed by Dan Brown; four runners up get the signed Black Kobo Glo and $100 credit to their Kobo accounts.  Oh, and before I forget; you need to live in the US, UK, or Canadia, and be an adult in your country of residence, ie, over eighteen.  Possibly sixteen in the UK, I'm not sure.  I'm 24, that sort of thing hasn't mattered to me in a while.

Remember that you can always see Kobo Competitions advertised on their website, near the top, underneath the bar with 'Top 50 eBooks' in it.  In my experience, they generally run at least one a month.  My favourites are the ones where you answer questions and win percentage off codes (generally anywhere between 10% and 75%) with anyone who correctly answers all ten entered into a prize draw.  You can't use the codes on every book, but there are quite a few good ones that you can use them on.

In Which We Discuss Kobo Achievements

This post originally appeared on my games blog, Deis' Discs.

The Kobo is an ereader, created by a Canadian company and affiliated with WHSmith.  I have a Kobo Mini which is adorably tiny and fits in my jeans pocket.  I bought my Kobo just before Christmas, since I was going to stay in London in order to work in a homeless shelter.  In 2011 I took a pile of books which were heavy, awkward, and finished before I came home.  The Kobo was a LOT easier.  I wasn't sure about eReaders before I got one, but I love it.  I'll write a full review at some point, but, for now, I just want to talk about the achievements.  I'm planning on getting a Kindle as well, so maybe I'll just write a comparison.  If you're thinking of getting an eReader, and you have a smartphone, I highly recommend starting with the various free apps.  They work in much the same way as the eReaders do, and should give you an idea.  I wish I'd done that.

Anyway.  Kobo has a 'reading life' section which lists various statistics, like how much of your library you've read, and how long it's taken you.  It also has various awards or achievements that you can earn for completing various tasks (like X-Box achievements).  As well as the eReader, I have the Kobo app on my phone, and there are some achievements unique to the iOS.  There's also at least one unique to the Kobo Vox, which I don't have, and have no intention of buying.  There are several which are only available with newspaper or magazine subscriptions, and I've not intention of moving out of the UK to take advantage of those, either.

The table below is not a comprehensive list, but it will be as complete as I can make it.  You can have a look at some of the awards here, although I'm fairly sure that's not a comprehensive list either.  I don't have an android, and I gather that there are a few different achievements on there, and a few are time specific and have since been discontinued, so I've not heard of most of them. Unfortunately, Kobo seems to have lost interest in the awards system, as they've not added any new ones in some time.

When you first open your kobo, you'll see many of these awards greyed out.  I think a few of them only appear once you've got them, but don't ask me which ones.

Achievement	System	How-To
Afternoon Rush Hour	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 4pm and 6pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
All You Can Eat	Kobo, iOS	Fill your eReader with books.  I think I had somewhere between 50-100 on mine when I got this (I've since cleaned off a lot of the free ebooks, on the grounds that the paperback versions of Austen, Dickens, et al sat on my bookcases for years and I never read those either.  Can't abide Austen).
Author-ized Reader	iOS	I believe this has to do with the 'author notes' feature mentioned here.  I'm planning on reading Me Before You anyway; will update when I can. I've just discovered that you can't get it from reading the preview, even if you look at 'all notes' and click on the threads started by the author.
Better in Bed	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 10pm and 12am.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
BookLover	Kobo, iOS	Link your Kobo account to your eReader.  Although this is theoretically available on the Kobo, a glitch means it doesn't work.  However, if you unlock it on the iOS (by downloading the free app and logging in), it will sync across systems.
Breakfast of Champions/Eat It	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 5am and 7am.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Classic Attack	iOS	Read the five classic novels that come with your Kobo.  If, like me, you deleted the stupid things, these are the editions in question; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Dracula Grimms' Fairy Tales Pride and Prejudice Since I've read all but the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I feel no guilt whatsoever about cheating.  Just spend ten minutes flicking through the books while watching TV. Note:  You can't get this by flicking to the start of each chapter, then through all the pages of the last one.  Do one book per day, and then do the Lost in Austen award in the same way, and you'll be most of the way through the Twain award by the end.
Deep Thinker	iOS	Make a note in any book.  Long press to highlight a word, then click 'add note' when the menu comes up.
Facebook	Kobo, iOS	Connect your Kobo account to Facebook.  This should be straightforward.  I did it fairly early on, in a 'gotta catch 'em all' spirit, so I can't quite recall how to.
Fanatic	iOS	Own more than five ebooks by one author.  Mine was Sheri Tepper.  You could probably get it with Dickens, since all of his are out of copyright now, if you don't fancy buying five books by any author.
Freeloader	iOS	Add ten free eBooks to your library.  If you're stuck for ideas, try here.
Fully Loaded	iOS	Add items from outside Kobo to your library.  I highly recommend Alicorn's Luminosity and the sequel, Radiance, but it's up to you. Go to the app screen in itunes, scroll right down, and click on the Kobo icon (incidentally, I had no idea you even could scroll down that far).  Add a document or two (PDF or ePub) then sync.
Graveyard Shift	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 1am and 5am.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Happy Hour	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 6pm and 8pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Highly Decorated	Kobo, iOS	Unlock twenty other achievements.
I ❤ My Library	Kobo, iOS	Add a book to your library.
I Eat Books for Lunch	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 12pm and 2pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Inverted Comma	Kobo, iOS	Highlight something.  Press and hold on a word to highlight, tap to make the dictionary definition go away, wiggle the little end markers if you like (this is a total pain to get right without lots of practice) then hit highlight down in the bottom left.
Juggernaut	Kobo, iOS	Turn 10,000 pages.  It took me about two months to get this.  Keep reading, you'll make it.  This is probably easier to get on the iOS due to the smaller screen.  You lightweight.
Just the Highlights	iOS	Highlight twenty different passages.  These can be single words.  Personally, I just picked random words in Grimms' Fairy Tales.  Made some very odd sentences.  It took a few minutes for my awards to catch up with my highlighting, so don't worry if it doesn't pop up immediately.
Kill the Commute	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 7am and 9am.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
LOLZ	iOS	Write a note with the word 'lol' in it.
Night Rider	Kobo, iOS	I have this award, but I'm not totally sure how I got it.  The description congratulations me on reading all night long, and I know I got it early on.  I typically read at night, but I'm not sure for how long, or which specific times.
Not an Open Book	Kobo, iOS	Finish a book.  This doesn't work if you open the mini-menu for a book (press and hold on book's name in library) and 'mark as finished'.  You need to go to the last page and close it by tapping right.
Off the Wall	iOS	This one drove me absolutely mental.  You need to share what you're reading in a very specific way, which took me a great deal of googling and experimentation to figure out. Step 1:  Press and hold on the cover of a book in your library.  You will be taken to the overview screen. Step 2:  Press the very rightmost button at the top of your screen in order to see a menu that includes 'share to facebook'.  Share this way, and it will count towards the award. Step 3:  Repeat for a total of five times.
Once Upon a Time	Kobo, iOS	Open a book for the first time.
Page Turner	Kobo, iOS	Read for two hours straight.  I did this during a very boring shift at the homeless shelter.  I was in clothing, which is where we have piles of donated clothes for people to sift through.  Even if no one wants to come down and shop, there still has to be someone sitting there.  That was my job.  Mine and Opal Kobo's (that's her name).
Papillon	Kobo, iOS	Share on facebook ten times.  I found the easiest way to do this was to share my highlighted passages.  My friends list got very sick of my Jinian Footseer quotes.  Tough, they should have fucking read it.  It's a good book.  My favourite.  And considering I've read over a hundred books so far this year alone, that's saying quite a lot.
Playing Hooky	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 2pm and 4pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Pressed for Details	Kobo, iOS	Press and hold on the title of a book in your library.
Primetime	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 8pm and 10pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Quoth the Maven	iOS	Highlight ten different things and post them to facebook by clicking and holding until the option comes up.  Easy peasy.
Reading Life	Kobo, iOS	Set up your ereader. Impossible not to get.
Scout Leader	Kobo, iOS	Unlock ten other achievements.
Sleeping In	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 9am and 12pm.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Total Recall	iOS	Reread any book.  I did this accidentally, with Francesca Lia Block's The Rose and the Beast.  There are plenty of short stories you could read through twice with ease.  If you get the PDF of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, then that'll help with the Freeloader, too.
Total Closer	iOS	Finish ten books.  If you can't do this, I feel bad for you, son.  I got ninety-nine problems, but not-reading ain't one.
The Twain Award	iOS	Open any book in the Kobo app once a day for two weeks.  Doesn't have to be the same book.
Lost in Austen	iOS	I believe you need to read five different Austen novels.  Bloody Austen.  Can't abide her.  There's something direful in the sound.
Witching Hour	Kobo, iOS	Read five times between 12am and 1am.  Open any book between those hours, on five different days.
Word Up!	Kobo, iOS	Use the Kobo dictionary to look up ten words.  Simply press and hold on a word in any book and it'll come up.
-	iOS	-

In Which We Discuss eBooks

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.

In Which We Discuss My Unread Pile

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!