Blog Archives

My reading goals for 2018

30/1/2018

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2018 Reading Challenge

Anne has read 8 books toward their goal of 100 books.

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8 of 100 (8%)

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I’ve registered for the Goodreads challenge for a fifth year and, although my totals have increased year-on-year, I’m sticking to a goal of 100 books. Even though it’s hardly a challenge to curl up with a novel most evenings, in a business that is mostly about failing, why not give myself a target I know I can beat? Besides, this isn’t a marathon. Reading is more about the experience than a numbers game. That’s why I’m setting myself some specific targets in relation to quality and diversity, building on my analysis of 150 books read in 2017.

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On the Edges

28/1/2018

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The Peak District National Park comprises the limestone territory of the White Peak bracketed to the north and west by the gritstone based Dark Peak. Towards the south of the Dark Peak area, moorland gives way to rocky escarpments known as The Edges. A haven for walkers and climbers, as well as a nesting place for the rare ring ouzels, they’ve been shaped by both the millstone industry and centuries of erosion.

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Men in love: Wabi-Sabi & The Only Story

25/1/2018

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I’m sharing my reflections on two novels in which sensitive men share their reflections on life and love. Both begin with the narrators at a loose end during the university summer vacation, the first in Barcelona, the second in London. Wabi-Sabi is the lighter of the two, in which a university lecturer travels to Japan where he is beguiled by a young woman. In The Only Story, a man’s entire life is shaped by a ten-year relationship with a vulnerable older woman he began as a nineteen-year-old student.

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Strange afflictions: Kintu & The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

21/1/2018

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An epic story of cultural change in Uganda and a novella set in an idyllic English community, these debuts have little in common apart from the strange affliction and that I’m happy to recommend them both. In the first, multiple branches of an extended family at the beginning of the twenty-first century are affected by a curse on their ancestor 250 years before. In the second, James probably feels cursed when he wakes up one morning to find he can’t move half his face.

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A thriller and a satire about women at work: The Night Visitor & The Beautiful Bureaucrat

16/1/2018

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I like fiction that shows the characters at work, but it can be difficult to pull off convincingly. While approaching it from very different angles – British writer Lucy Atkins in a thriller about a highflying TV presenter and historian; American Helen Phillips in a satire about a data entry clerk – both have produced extremely satisfying reads.

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My fast first draft three years on

15/1/2018

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Three years ago this week, I completed my first ever fast first draft of a novel. Four further drafts and a significant edit later, it’s ready for beta readers’ scrutiny. So it’s an ideal time to reflect on the overall process, and ask myself whether that’s a good way to go about creating a publishable book.

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A novel and novella with a Greek chorus

11/1/2018

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Scouring my shelves for a book to accompany The Athenian Women, I thought I was “making do” when I picked up Such Small Hands: two translated and disturbing reads. So it was a bonus that the latter included a strand narrated in the first person plural (very like a Greek chorus as Edmund White points out in an Afterword), while the latter, set in Athens 411 BC, takes its characters to the theatre where a genuine Greek chorus stands on stage. Add in the similarities of the authors’ names (I’m assuming Italian and Spanish versions of Barber) and I couldn’t have linked them better if it was planned.

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Perfect communities? from Celeste Ng & Thomas More

8/1/2018

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Given the chance, wouldn’t you live in a comfortable right-on community where none of your neighbours voted for Brexit or Trump? Where people read books, and supported libraries, and no-one hung plastic bags of dog poo from the trees? But you know what would happen if you packed up and moved there? You’d have the neighbours on your back for putting out the bins too early, or letting your dandelions run to seed. Because it’s in the nature of utopian societies to have a downside, often manifest in a denial of our baser human instincts and/or excessive control. It makes great fodder for fiction, however, as I hope to show in my review of Celeste Ng’s latest novel set in 1990s suburban America. Alongside that, I’ve gone back to basics with my first-time read of the original Utopia, published 500 years ago.

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Two Australian novels to kick off the new #amreading year

4/1/2018

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As 2018 started a few hours earlier in Australia than in the UK, it’s fitting that I should begin my reading year there. Or it could be the coincidence of kindly publicists sending me advance copies of two Australian novels published in the UK this month. The first namechecks various Sydney suburbs, while the second begins near Melbourne before circumnavigating the country. The first contemporary, the second set in the 1950s, they explore the socio-politics of Australian identities and their links to migration and colonialism.