2015 Greatest Hits

Booking Through Thursday's New Year question (late again, I know) is:

What were your favorite books of 2015?
How many books did you read this year? Are you happy with the amount of reading you got done? Wish you’d had more time? (I know I always do!)

In 2015 I read 32 books, if you count those overlapping year boundaries. I do wish I'd read more, I always do.

In terms of favourites, I'll pick out some in chronological order:

A Corpse at St Andrew's Chapel by Mel Starr (read 12/02/2015-21/02/2015)
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen Donaldson (read 03/04/2015-10/05/2015)
Les Liaisons Dangerueses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (read 20/06/2015-15/08/2015)
Thank You, Jeeves by P G Wodehouse (read 10/10/2015-11/10/2015)
Nymphomation by Jeff Noon (read 12/10/2015-17/10/2015)

May 2016 bring some equally good reading!

Gifts

I realise I'm a little behind on this one, but this Christmas' Booking Through Thursday is:

What books are/were you hoping to get as gifts this holiday season?
Which books DID you get?
Are you happy, or did you rush right out to your local bookstore to pick up the book you’d hoped you’d be getting?

 
The books I got this Christmas are:

Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter (I had a copy of this previously when I lived in Canada but sadly had to leave it behind due to luggage weight limits)

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson - the latest in the Mistborn series

A Trail of Ink by Mel Starr - the third in his Hugh de Singleton medieval mystery series

They were all from family and I'd specifically asked for each of them, which is how we usually do presents, so we all end up with something we actually want!


How about you, readers? Did you have a good book haul this Christmas?

Audiobooks

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

I’m guessing most of you like reading (or why would you be here), how do you feel about audio books? 

For me, “reading” means using my eyes, not my ears. As much as I acknowledge their usefulness while doing chores or using your hands, I only ever use audiobooks for the rare long drive–listening, no matter how pleasant, is not READING, yet people persist in telling me they like to read and that audio books are their favorites. Am I the only one to feel that’s just not the same thing?


I feel the same. I've tried to listen to audiobooks, on journeys for instance or when given a free one by Amazon, but for me it just isn't the same relaxing experience as reading. You can't let your mind wander in the middle of a paragraph without having to try and desperately rewind and figure out where you left off, and the story moves either too slowly or too quickly, never at the right pace. It's a similarly soulless experience to Kindles, except with the added disadvantage of needing to pause or rewind every time you get interrupted or distracted.

I completely acknowledge that they're useful, for driving or while doing other things, but for me they lack that feeling of connecting and of shared understanding that makes a book worth reading.

Nostalgia

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What book (or books) from your childhood do you think about most often? That had the most effect on your life? 

I devoured books even as a child, but the ones that I really reread and took in most were Terry Pratchett's wonderful Discworld series. I read the lot (and the new ones as and when they came out) several times over, in chronological order, or sorted by character groups, and so on.

I also really loved Jane Austen's novels, particularly Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. George Eliot's Middlemarch was another one - it was my gran's favourite book, and she gave me her own copy before she died. The variety of characters and the depth and complexity of their feelings and situations kept me coming back to reread it.

Damage

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Have you ever damaged a book? Dropped it in the bathtub? Spilled a bottle of ink? Used it to mop up spilled wine? Or just broken its back (poor thing).

 Never on purpose! I have spilled water on books a few times, and felt terrible about it while it dried out all crinkly over a radiator. I've spilled food on them a couple of times too, leaving unfortunate food stains on the pages.

I hate seeing them damaged, even newer books, although it's really heartbreaking to see a wonderful old book that's survive 100 years intact get hurt. I have to avert my eyes when I pass shops that use pages from old books or sheet music.

Austen vs Pope

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What two authors (dead or alive) would you love to get in a room together, just so you could listen to the conversation?

And what made you put those two together? Are they going to be entertainingly contentious or bosom buddies at first sight?

For me it would have to be Alexander Pope and Jane Austen. Alexander Pope's serious, self-satisfied attitude and pretentiously over-educated poetry would be a fantastic subject for Austen's quick wit, and the fact that a woman had the gall to make fun of him would (I like to think) throw Pope into an extremely entertaining tantrum.

Who would you put together?

Travel books

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Do you like to read books about far-away places? Travel guides, memoirs, whatever? Places you’ve been? Or places you’ve never been?

That's a good question, but... no. I don't, I don't tend to read books based on real life in general, and I never read straight-up travelogues. I'll only read biographies if it's someone I'm really interested it.

I guess the easiest answer as to why is that I read for escapism, and that reading about real life doesn't feel like I'm escaping, even real life lived in a country I've never visited.

I do however, love to read books about places far off in history, whether long ago or potentially in the future, or about fantasy or science-fiction universes that will never exist. I know that reading for escapism should allow for reading non-fiction about places that exist right now, but somehow that just doesn't interest me as much as reading about places that I'll never see.

Intriguing

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What’s the most intriguing book you ever read? Something that made you think, explore new ideas, or just be really impressed and awed and amazed at the sheer wonder of the creativity of the thing?

Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy has always filled me with a sense of wonder and vast potential. The beautiful, vivid descriptions of such a wide range of worlds and the promise of even more unexplored over the horizon gave me a wonderful feeling.

In a completely different sense, Jeff Noon's debut novel Vurt and its sequel Pollen conjured up a much darker cyberpunk dystopia, in which humans, dogs, robots, aliens and spirits interbred to create marvellous and sinister cross-species beings with varied abilities and their own subcultures. The fast-moving plot leaves little time for explanation, so you have to pick up bits and pieces as you go along. That's another world I'd really like to explore at my leisure, look into the history of and figure out how things got the way they did.


I'm always on the lookout for new intriguing novels to explore - are there any that any of you would strongly recommend?

Book storage

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

How do you store your books? On bookcases? In piles? In piles on bookcases? Are they sorted? Do you know where everything is? What’s the most creative storage you’ve seen or used for your books?

 My books are most definitely sorted, or at least loosely. Read and unread books are kept separate by putting read books to the left of a shelf and unread ones on the right, except of course if it's a series - you can't separate a series, that's just wrong. I have an area on one bookshelf for foreign language books, another for poetry, another for non-fiction, and then the main bulk is made up of English language fiction.

For the most part my books live in (and on top of) traditional bookshelves (which I won't show you pictures of, you people know what bookshelves are) but I do have an overflow shelf made of a wire bathroom shelf I found in the street plus hardback books. Rest assured that no books were harmed in the making of that shelf.


How about yourselves, what's the most creative improvised bookshelf you've made or seen?

Beautiful

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever read?

I don't know about the absolute most beautiful thing I've ever read, but I've copied several passages I've really liked over the years into a notebook I have. Two passages I thought were particularly well-crafted and are on beauty itself:

"When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect." - The City and the Stars, Arthur C Clarke

"Our muddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous form of things:
We murder to dissect."
- The Tables Turned, William Wordsworth

Another phrase which I found particularly resonant is:

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- The Hollow Men, T S Eliot


Any favourite passages of your own?

Travelling

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

When you travel, do you bring one book with you? Or a pile of them?

And, is that pile still a load of paper to lug around? Or do you use an e-book reader like a Kindle or your iPad to help carry the load? (Because, even if you prefer paper, it can get heavy when you’re traveling!)


It depends on how long a journey I'm going on, but I always try to take one more book than I think I'll need, just in case. In spite of the inconvenience I still can't bring myself to buy a Kindle, so it's physical books for me. I do make sure that I choose relatively small, densely-typed paperbacks to cut down on weight and luggage space, though.

Much of the time I'll end up accidentally buying more books when I'm away, so I'll come back with twice the quantity I left with in any case!

Magazines

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What magazines do you subscribe to? Personal ones? Professional ones?
Or do you only/mostly pick up your periodicals at the newsstand?
How do you feel about digital editions versus print?
Do you save the old copies after you read them? Or promptly recycle them?

This is a very boring answer, but honestly I don't really subscribe to any magazines at all. It's true that I do get the occasional one through my door - I think the alumnus magazine from my university is the only one right now, thankfully RSPB stopped sending them about a year after I stopped my donations - but after a brief flick through I never really read them, they just go into the bin.

Those girly magazines with full-page spreads of celebrities' before-and-after diets/divorces/plastic surgery/etc are always lying around at work, and sometimes I'll have a glance at them if I'm bored, but I've never really been interested enough in any one publication to want to pay for it or order it regularly.

I find that I prefer to stay up-to-date by following blogs and clicking through links my friends post on Facebook, and things like that, so for me the internet has made paper magazines pretty redundant.

Graduation Presents

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

May and June … graduation season.
If you were to give a book as a graduation present to some eager person ready to launch themselves into the world … what would it be?


I know the most sensible answer would be 'some kind of inspirational self-help guide on how to achieve your dreams', but I think what I'd actually want to give someone would be Victor Hugo's The Count of Monte Cristo.

Not only is it a coming-of-age story, where the protagonist develops from a naive young man to a worldly, experienced millionaire, but it's absolutely full of adventures, subterfuge and colourful characters. Well worth reading as a novel, as well as thematically appropriate for someone stepping out into the real world for the first time.

Although hopefully very few of the things that happen in The Count of Monte Cristo will happen to this year's young graduates. Hopefully.

Books into Film

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What book would you love to see turned into a movie?

(Yes, with the understanding that it would be everything you hoped it could be, doing justice to the story, the characters, the writer’s vision, and so on. Not a hatchet-job horror.)


While there are many, many, MANY books that I love and think would make great films if adapted properly, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels always struck me as the easiest to convert into films. He actually said (when I was lucky enough to hear him speak at a literary festival) that he saw the action like a film in his head when he wrote them, and that really translates onto paper.

I know a few Discworld films have already been made, but personally I found them all a bit... wrong. The Colour of Magic majorly miscast David Jason as Rincewind, and then recast him as Albert in Hogfather, which is a much better fit, but the problem for me is that in another novel Albert and Rincewind actually meet each other, so to cast them as the same actor is just so non-canon. They weren't terrible adaptations as such, and it was great to see some Discworld stories make it to the big screen, but personally I think they started with the wrong ones.

Mort would make a fantastic film - it's already written very much like a screenplay, and has plenty of visual jokes written into it that would translate well straight to the screen. I always felt as though The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were more of a warm-up for Sir Terry than fair examples of the Discworld series, and that the series improved very much from Equal Rites onwards.

Poetry

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

It seems like I’m always asking about actual books … but what about poetry? Do you read it? Write it? Like it? Not like it? Do you prefer song lyrics? (Because we can all agree there’s a relation between poems and lyrics, right?)

 I do like poetry, although I much prefer C16-C18 poetry in which rhyme and rhythmic structure were still considered important over modern poetry where poets often deliberately reject these things. It just doesn't feel like poetry to me without that kind of structure, just a weirdly formatted sentence.

I used to write a bit of it at university for my creative writing degree, and once I got used to it I found I really enjoyed it - it was a bit like a crossword puzzle in that you had to fit things into the prescribed structure and rhyme scheme, but it was also easier to condense and express emotion than with prose. I had one poem published in my university's yearly anthology, but I haven't written any since I finished the degree - I just haven't felt the need to sit down and do it, and I don't really feel like anyone would read it if it wasn't their job do to so.

As for song lyrics, I can see the link between lyrics and poetry, but the way many songs are produced means that they lack personal meaning for the final performer, and lose a lot that way - of course there are some wonderful singer-songwriters who perform their own work, but when a song is written by a team of 6 and sung by someone who hasn't written a single word of what they're performing, it doesn't have much soul.

Unread

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What proportion of the books you own are unread? 

 Good question. I think, looking around my bedroom, about 40%. I really need to stop buying new books before I've read (and ruthlessly purged) the ones I have, but I don't have the heart to give away a book unless I really didn't like it, and it's so hard to resist new ones.

Recommended

This week's Booking Through Thursday (response delayed by my trip to Derry for a family wedding) is:

Do you read books recommended by friends? Or do you prefer to find your own books to read.

I'm not very good at saying no to things, so if a friend is particularly insistent and actually provides the book in question, yes I will read it, all the way through, whether I like it or not. I do have some friends who share the same taste in books, though, and I'll happily accept their recommendations and look forward to reading them.

Normally I prefer to find my own novels, by browsing at random, searching for new novels by authors I like, or just idly clicking through Amazon recommendations, but I've found some really great authors from friends' recommendations and I hope to discover more in the future.

Constant companion

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Do you carry a book around with you? Inside the house? Whenever you go out? Always, everywhere, it’s practically glued to your fingers?
(And yes, digital books very much DO count as long as you’re spending time reading on your Kindle or iPad and not just loading them with books that you never actually read.)

Yes, I definitely carry a book with me almost everywhere I go. I only carry it around my own house when I'm going to be cooking, as then I can read it while stirring things - I don't feel the need to take it to the bathroom and I'm certainly not reading in the shower.

I always take a book when I'm going anywhere with a chance of waiting - for lunch breaks at work, queues in supermarkets, doctor's appointments - and definitely when travelling, I'll bring about 2 books more than I think I can get through in that time because the idea of maybe running out is just awful.

They're always physical books and not digital, I've never really got into reading on Kindle. It just doesn't feel like a book to me, it loses a lot of its character. I can see the logical convenience of it all, but it just doesn't count as a book in my head.

Bookcases

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

In an ideal world, what kind of book cases would you have? Built-ins? Barrister ones with glass doors? The cheapest you could find so you could have lots of them?
And … what kind of bookcases do you REALLY have?

In an ideal world I'd have a cosy wood-fitted library with wall-to-ceiling books (for instance this gorgeous one here:)

In real life, however,  I currently have a fairly random 5 bookcases that I've picked up along the way, including a repurposed bedside table, a children's bookcase I've had since I was about 8, and a wire bathroom shelf that I found on the street with cardboard acting as shelving base, as well as a couple of more traditional bookshelves. Also books balanced on top of said bookcases because 5 just isn't enough to hold all of them...

Covers

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Hardcovers or paperbacks?

Honestly, I prefer paperbacks. With modern books hardbacks are usually more expensive, bigger and heavier, which just has the effect of making them more difficult to read from a practical standpoint.

I do love the proper bound covers on antique books, however, especially if they're real embossed leather with the gold leaf intact - they're just beautiful.