February – reading a lot of wonderful Indie books! :D #readindies

Well, that was a quick month, wasn’t it? February seems as short as January was long, and although it whizzed past I have had another really wonderfully bookish month, helped by the fact that there was a half term in the middle of it and so I got a lovely lot of time for resting and reading. Here is my pile of February reads and they were frankly all wonderful! I’ve not reviewed everything on the pile yet, so anything not covered will be carried over to March!

February was of course #ReadIndies month, and just about everthing on the pile is an indie – and there have been some wonderful treats which just goes to show the riches of books from independent publishers. Some of my favourite presses and authors have been featured, but I also discovered some new ones so that’s wonderful! However, on the subject of reading indies, we won’t be extending our #ReadIndies event this year as Lizzy has other project commitments in March! But I’ve barely scratched the surface of the pile of independently published books on the TBR; so although I will continue to follow my reading muse as the year continues, I’m going to try to fit in as many indie publishers as I can! 😀

If you’ve been reading along with us during February, don’t forget to leave details of your posts in the Mr Linky here, as Lizzy always puts together an index of all the reviews, which is a wonderful resource. Of course you may still be catching up with reviews as are we, and so if you’ve read an indie, you have until 6th March to post the review and be included in the index!

So what are my upcoming reading plans? Well, vague and amorphous as usual! I’m currently reading a fascinating review book from Columbia University Press called “The Narrow Cage” by Vasily Eroshenko; the author hailed from Ukraine and lived a peripatic live, and the book is translated from Japanese and Esperanto so this is something of a first for me!

Then there is the pile of journals and notebooks and essays I assembled at the end of February when I was reading Sartre – here they are again and there are just so many options into which I’d love to sink…

But of course there are many, many more unread books on the TBR and of course March has the #Dewithon as a reading event – I may try to join in, but it will depend what I can find in the stacks. In the meantime, I shall continue to read independent publishers, and here are some of those stacks, showing just how many choices I really have… ;D

One of the TBR shelves, although I *have* read some of these!

 

Another shelf, a mixture of read and unread…

 

A heap of intriguing books which currently lives on a table!

 

A rather precipitous pile…

Looking at those, you can no doubt see how it can be difficult for me to decide which book to read; I guess this is why I usually go with my reading moods and I’m sure they’ll continue to guide me throughout March! What do *you* plan to read??

A look at January’s reading…

Popping in with a second post today (good grief!) just to round up January’s reading – more chat about what’s planned for February will appear tomorrow!! So here’s what I read during this month:

 

I had such a brilliant bookish month and am *really* happy with that stack! My reading mojo has been on form during January and I have read some wonderful, wonderful books! No duds at all, and some real standabouts – the Calvino and the Niven, in particular, were epic reads and both of these are likely to feature on my year-end best of. However, all of the books were gems; I had great fun taking part in the Japanese Literature Challenge, choosing some lovely books from my shelves which had never been read; and I seem to have rediscovered my ability to take on chunksters (at least in non-fiction form!) There was fiction and non-fiction, classic crime, autobiography, small presses – really, a cornucopia of bookish delight!

So a marvellous reading month, and February looks to be a fascinating one too – see you back here tomorrow for more plans! 😀

“… a 688-page punishment beating.” @i_am_mill_i_am #yearofreadingdangerously

I’m carrying on catching up with my reviews here on the Ramblings; I *have* been reading some marvellous books, and with the current state of things they’ve become a welcome distraction. In recent months I’ve become, rather belatedly admittedly, a huge fan of the Backlisted Podcast; so much so that it moved me to read Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” (sadly a rather timely title just now) and invest in a very chunky copy of “The Anatomy of Melancholy“. So it’s a surprise, really, that I’ve never read podcaster Andy Miller’s “The Year of Reading Dangerously”, particularly as I love books about books! I was aware of the book when it came out, but somehow just never got round to it However, I ran across a copy of the book in the Oxfam recently, and the time seemed right. It was certainly a good choice to pick up after some of my more intense recent reading! 😀

I imagine many readers of the Ramblings have read this book as well, lovers of books about books as we are, so it probably doesn’t need a lot of description. Basically, I think it could have been subtitled “In which Andy Miller has a mid-life crisis and rediscovers his love of books”! His year of reading is kick-started by the realisation that he’s claimed to have read any number of book which he hasn’t, and by the chance stumbling-upon of a copy of “The Master and Margarita” whilst looking after his young son. Miller is hooked by the book (which I can understand – though I found myself quibbling with a couple of details in his description of the plot!) That’s by the by, though – what matters is that Andy’s reading mojo has been nudged back into life and he embarks upon his project of reading Great Works (plus one Dan Brown…) with gusto.

It took me a little over five days to finish The Master and Margarita, but its enchantment lasted far longer.… The Master and Margarita had made its journey down the century, from reader to reader, to a Broadstairs bookshop. Some part of that book, of Bulgakov himself, now lived on in me. The secret of The Master and Margarita, which seems to speak to countless people who know nothing about the bureaucratic machinations of the early Stalinist dictatorship or the agony of the novel’s gestation: words are our transport, our flight and our homecoming in one. Which you don’t get from Dan Brown.

The book follows the trials and tribulations of his journey: the difficulties of reading a complex book on a noisy commute, what to do if you really *don’t* like a book and the euphoria that reading something really wonderful can bring. Interspersed with the reading are snapshots of his life with his admirable and entirely sensible-sounding wife and his young son. It makes for a wonderfully enjoyable read, and one with which I very much identified.

I had heard that other people dealt with this sort of problem by having ill-advised affairs with schoolgirls, or dying their hair a ‘fun’ colour, or plunging into a gruelling round of charity marathon running, ‘to put something back’. But I did not want to do any of that; I just wanted to be left alone. (On his ‘midlife crisis’)

Because *anyone* who’s brought up children will know the havoc it wreaks with your reading! In my madness, I produced three, and reading while dealing with small children is Not Easy! How can you sink into pages and pages of sublime prose while coping with crying, tantrums, fighting, demands for food and requirements to change nappies? (To list just a few of the horrors of children). It’s not easy at all, and like Miller I spent many years either not reading much or reading light stuff because it was impossible to read anything of substance.

Is it wrong to prefer books to people? Not at Christmas. The book is like a guest you have invited into your home, except you don’t have to play Pictionary with it or supply it with biscuits and stollen.

Luckily, Andy shares childcare and work arrangements with his wife, so there are times where he commutes or is away for work and so can fit in reading. And as the sensible advice says, if you read 50 pages a day, you *will* finish the books! He reads his way through some excellent works, providing entertaining insights as he goes; I didn’t always agree with his assessments, but I enjoyed reading them. And I loved his coda at the end where he revealed his various encounters with the late, great Douglas Adams (I really should re-read the Hitchhiker books…)

Many of my favourite books mimic the Pevsner guides in this respect, as though the narrator and their subject have become locked in an increasingly ill tempered tussle for control of the text: Pale Fire by Nabokov, Revolution in the Head by Ian McDonald, Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, most of BS Johnson’s novels, even Roger Lewis’s cantankerous The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.… Although it was not my intention at the outset, it seems to be how The Year of Reading Dangerously has turned out.

“Year… ” was first published in 2014, and there are some elements which were perhaps a little surprising; Andy seems to foresee the dramatic death of the printed book, a phenomenon which seems less likely to happen nowadays than it did then. And his views of bloggers and blogging (which I recall Annabel commenting on in her review) are provocative; our perspective (or at least mine) is very different from his because, at the end of the day, he is someone writing for a living. I write my blog for pleasure, because I want to share my love of books out there in cyberspace. I’m not wound up about views and comments and the like (although I *do* like to interact with people about books, so I’m happy when people want to comment and discuss). We’ll have to agree to differ there, Andy, because I think bloggers and blogging are valuable, and I mostly get my recommendations and bookish ideas from other bloggers I trust rather than ‘professional’ commentators.

I can understand The Master and Margarita inspiring anyone…. ;D

But I digress. I’m glad I finally read “The Year of Reading Dangerously” because it was a really entertaining and enjoyable book; Miller is an enthusastic and knowledgeable commentator on the works he reads, the autobiographical elements are often funny and touching, and I love his quirky sense of humour. It was a joy to watch him on his journey to rediscovering a deep love of reading, one of the best friends a human being can have. This is definitely an essential addition to any shelf of books about books, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with the Backlisted podcast when it makes its long-awaited return! 😀

Ushering in Autumn

That might be a slightly premature heading for a post, but I must confess that when I get to the start of September every year and am contemplating the return to work after the long summer break, autumn does seem just on the horizon – which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it *is* one of my favourite seasons. And let’s face it, the summer weather in the UK hasn’t exactly been brilliant…

I’m not sure that I actually got as much reading done over the summer as I usually do; partly because I was embroiled in “War and Peace” for so long, which did give me a bit of a book hangover. I seem to have found it difficult to focus of late, and as there are limited challenges I’ve set myself this year I’m not always sure what I want to read next. Hence, I suppose, the regular lapses into classic crime!

I had planned a summer re-read of these lovelies, but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, rethinking things I can see that autumn would perhaps be a nice time to hunker down under a blanket as the evenings become darker and chillier, and get lost in such a big saga. Apart from that, what else is lined up?

Well – poetry, I hope, as I really have let my poetry reading slip and I have so many lovely volumes that I MUST TRAIN MYSELF TO DIP INTO MORE rather than just trying to read them all the way through. Then there’s Pessoa, who again I need to dip into.

Some potential autumn reads..

I have a number of review books lurking for when the moment is right, and there will be the Virago monthly reads which I may join in with if the author appeals, as well as a group guided read of “Agnes Grey”. And on the subject of Virago authors, I really want to read more of the marvellous Margaret Atwood (and perhaps revisit some favourites).

Also coming up in October will be the next of the ‘Club’ reads, hosted by Simon at Stuck in a Book and myself. This time we’ll be looking at 1968 and I have a really surprising number of books lurking for that year, after worrying that there wouldn’t be much that took my fancy.

So lots of autumn treats to look forward to – there *will* be classic crime, there *will* be Russians, but what else – well, that remains to be seen! What plans have you got for autumn reading? And have you any thoughts about any of my possible reading pile or any recommendations??