Tag Archives: non

New Books…

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The FoL summer book sale was held the other day, and although I tried to not go, I did end up spending some time there. (Well, to not go would have been so rude, don’t you think?)

And so this is what I ended up with in my shopping bag, all ready for a future summer’s day. Uncertain which summer it will be, but I’m ready!  đź™‚

Top to bottom:

  • Snow Angels – Stewart O’Nan (usually good fiction writer)
  • The Last Picture Show – Larry McMurtry (fiction set in Texas. I first read this in my first semester at American university and hadn’t been in Texas long enough to get the references. I think now that I’ve been here a while, I will appreciate it more.)
  • The Best American Short Stories (1999) – edited by Amy Tan (F) (current slight craze on short stories)
  • Tinkerbelle – Robert Manry (NF travel – guy has never sailed before, but buys a boat and sails across the Atlantic with many adventures…)
  • Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison (F and African-American classic which I haven’t read but with the new focus on reading more POC will do so soon)
  • Bailey’s Cafe – Gloria Naylor (F) (see above about the focus on reading more POC authors)
  • Advertising in America – (NF) big coffee book with some lovely color plates of old advertising from across the USA

And going against my usual grain of not-reading-things-I’ve-just-bought, I’ve just finished a good read of the Naylor fiction. Loved it so expect more to come about that.

So hmm…. What’s next?

Time to Play with the TBR…

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Strolling around the blogosphere seeing what’s going on, I read Thomas’ great blog at Hogglestock, and saw that he had a complete re-org of his library shelves (and he really does have a dedicated library room. #SeriousReader.)

Seeing the photos of him messing around with his book collection made me want to at least catalogue what titles are in my own TBR pile, thinking that if I had a better idea of what books I actually owned, it would actually lead to an increased likelihood of me reading them (in theory).

Plus – like a lot of book-y people, I love lists.

So, I opened up an Excel sheet and got to work. With the leg in plaster, I couldn’t pull all the books off the shelf (a la Thomas), so I ended taking photos with my camera of each shelf, and then moved to another room to type up the info, using the photos as reference for adding to the Excel sheet. It worked out really well, and although it’s not the same as physically taking books off the shelf and physically handling them, it came close enough for me.

(I’m still going to remove all the books from my bookshelves at some point, but that can happen only when this cast is removed. Not too long now… One more month to go.)

Reading about other people’s TBR piles, I became very curious about what exactly my own stash was holding, and I dug in. The end results were pretty interesting (to me, at least), and the numbers weren’t as bad as I had thought. (Everything is relative though.)

My total of TBR (both fiction and NF) is 399. (Let’s say 400 in case I missed a title here or there.)

This is divided up into two main categories:

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I am quite surprised about the number of fiction books that I have. I would have sworn that I had less than that, but you can’t fight numbers, can you?

With the NF, I seem to have a penchant for buying books concerned with history (mostly Victorian), but some other historical pieces slip through the net at times (e.g. social history, early American life etc.), social justice [esp. in the last year or so], travel, well-written biographies and autobiographies, and then the always-popular books-about-books.

That said, there are some rather random (but still interesting) one-off topics in there:

  • The true story of a guy who follows the journey of a swallow from northern Europe to Africa…
  • The true story of someone who retraces the journey of a person back in history who tried to track down the mythical city of Atlantis and never returned…
  • A historical look at the attitude towards sex in America and how it changes (or doesn’t, as the case may be)…
  • The suffragettes, the history of Roe v. Wade and abortion in America and other related issues…
  • A journalistic view of sorority life for students at university…
  • An AIDS memoir…

And the list just continues. I’m very glad that I took the time to do this project as it’s opened my eyes to the books I already own, all of which I’d like to read. (Except one or two odd titles that are going to the FoL Library Sale forthwith. I have no idea how they slipped through the defensive team, but there you go… Can’t win them all.)

 

April 2017 Reading Review

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So April fairly whipped by pretty speedily due to a general busy-ness of life and work. It was a pretty good reading month at the same time, but lower numbers than is traditional. (This would be due to a big mix of things, including my vision still having problems. Reading with one eye tends to slow things down, I’ve found.)

(To clarify: I still have my other eye, but the dodgy one doesn’t see very well a lot of the time. Thus the “one eye” comment. I didn’t mean that I was now Cyclops [although I might feel like that sometimes!]. I had no idea how much my reading would slow down due to this.  :-} )

The reads for April included:

So to the numbers:

Total number of books read in April: 5

Total number of pages read: 1,507 pages (av. 301).

Fiction/Non-Fiction: 4 fiction / 1 non-fiction; 0 play.

Diversity: 0 POC (that’s a bit yikes for me.) 2 books by women.

Library books vs. books I owned (and thus removed from the home abode): 1 library book, 4 owned books and 0 e-books. (Yeah. Good on working on the TBR pile.)

Plans for May is to read, read, read. How glorious is that?