1,001 Books - the next five

Embarrassingly, it appears that I haven’t had to choose the next five books in my 1,001 book challenge since this time last year, which just goes to show how easily I can get distracted.  Anyway, having finished four of the last five and having been unable to find an English translation of Platero and I (if anyone knows of one, please do let me know!), I’ve cranked up the Random Number Generator and it has tasked me with the following:

1.         Chess Story by Stefan Zweig.  Confession time.  I’m so backlogged on posts that I’ve already read and finished this one.  I loved it and so the post will be going up next week.  It’s a story of a monumental chess match played on a cruise ship bound for Argentina but it’s also so much more than that.

2.         A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Having not read him in my first 40-odd years of life, this is the second time in two batches that Ishiguro’s come up on my schedule.  Having thoroughly enjoyed An Artist of the Floating World, I am definitely looking forward to this one.  It’s apparently about a Japanese woman, living in England and mourning the death of her daughter, who spends her time reminiscing about one summer in post-war Nagasaki when she and her friends were trying to rebuild their lives.  If I’m honest, the synopsis doesn’t grab me but I do love Ishiguro’s writing so I am betting on it being a goodie.

3.         Claudine’s House by Colette.  I’m afraid Colette and I have history………and not the good sort.  Le Blé en Herbe (aka Green Wheat or Ripening Seed) was one of my set books for A-level and, having been mis-sold it by our teacher on the basis that it was a kind of semi-respectable dirty book of the early 20^th-Century, we were all completely disappointed with it when it turned out to be just a little bit dull.  In fact, pretty much all I can remember is that Vinca, the "heroine", is constantly described as smelling of periwinkles (i.e. fresh and innocent) whereas the older woman who ensnares Paul, the “hero”, is described using thicker, heavier scents.  Anyway, Claudine’s House is supposed to be a memoir of her childhood in Burgundy.  By the way, this is a different Claudine to the heroine of Enid Blyton’s school books.  I wouldn’t want you to confuse the two……not the same at all.

4.         The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë.  I suppose it had to happen at some point.  Having never read any Austen or anything by any of the various Brontë’s, I’ve managed to live my reading life in blissful ignorance of the authors whom many bloggers and commenters appear to love with a passion.  But the Doom is upon me and the damned Random Number Generator has presented me with a tale of spousal abuse and betrayal, a novel considered as the first sustained feminist novel (according to Professor Wikipedia). Oh, yippee.  Feel free to call me a philistine thickie or even a dead, white member of the phallocracy but I am so not looking forward to this.  The one consolation is that there is a free copy available for Kindle on Amazon so at least I won’t have to pay for it.

5.         Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia.  This is much more like it.  It’s the story of a gang of Argentine bank robbers who end up being besieged by the police.  I’m not sure whether it’s based on a true story or is purely fictional but I’m looking forward to it.

It’s a mixed bag this time but, hopefully, it won’t take me as long to get through them as last time.

1,001 Books - the next five

If any of you have been following the progress of my odyssey through the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, you may (but probably won’t) be wondering what has happened to Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which I was to have read as part of my last instalment of books.

I haven’t given up on it, I promise.  It is, however, turning out to be the most challenging novel I have ever started to read.  It is incredibly complex, dense and rich and, consequently, being a bear of little brain, I get brain ache every hundred pages or so.  I’ve decided that the best thing is for me to read it in stages, interspersed with other books for relief.  I am also almost certainly going to need to reflect on it for a while after I’ve finished it to get my thoughts into some kind of coherent order.

This means that I am moving forward to the next five in my 1,001 Books list.  I re-read my post listing the last five and I was amused by how different my presumptions on how I would find them were to the reality.  This doesn’t bode well for the next five as the trusty Random Number Generator has thrown up three books that I am really looking forward to.  My next five books in this journey will be:

1.         The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.  I have a confession here.  I’ve just realised that , for some bizarre reason, I’ve been confusing this with Out of Africa.  I’ve not seen the film adaptations of either and have never read either book so I really don’t know how I managed to do this.  Anyway, this is the story of four damaged individuals brought together in an Italian monastery in the dying days of the Second World War.

2.         The Awakening by Kate Chopin.  Another confession.  I’d always thought this was “chick lit”.  I’m really starting to embarrass myself now.  Anyway, this is a classic story of a woman fighting against the constraints of marriage and motherhood in the late 19^th Century and finding sexual and spiritual freedom.  I can’t say I’m totally enthused about this but I can’t go on using my get out of jail free cards so casually.

3.         Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  An epic novel about violence and depravity on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, what’s not to like?  Seriously, though, I’ve never read anything by McCarthy so here’s a good nudge to do so.

4.         An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Another well-known writer whose work I haven’t read, I am looking forward to reading the story of a Japanese artist in immediate post-War Tokyo.  I am fascinated by this period and the way that Germany and Japan rebuilt themselves and so I should enjoy this book.

5.         Platero and I by Juan Ramon Jimenez.  I know very little about this other than it is a collection of Spanish stories for children.  I am struggling to find an English language translation so it remains to be seen whether I can actually read it.

So there we have it.  Overall, a pretty good random selection, I think.

Get out of jail free card 2

When I decided to read through the 1,001 Books list, I immediately realised that there were some books I simply couldn't face reading so I gave myself a little "cheat" - the get out of jail free cards.  I am allowing myself to choose not to read up to 50 of the 1,001 Books but, instead, to replace them with books that are in other editions of the book, but not the 2008 edition from which I have taken the list.

I used my first on Buddenbrooks a couple of months ago and really didn’t think I would be playing my second so soon afterwards.  The next book should have been Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro.  I’m sure it’s a very good book.  I really am.  But this is the product description on Amazon:

“The story of Del Jordan growing up in gossipy and insular Jubilee begins with a frog-catching expedition and ends with a shattered love affair. Between, lies the rich and unforgettable texture of female experience.”

And, I’m sorry but my heart sank into my shoes when I read it.  Call me closed-minded if you will but I’m pretty sure I would not enjoy this at all.  So, with apologies to Alice Munro, I’m going to skip it and, in its place, will be reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre, much more to my taste.

1,001 Books - the next five

Now that I've finished the Wasp Factory, I have come to the end of the first five books in the 1,001 Book Challenge that were chosen for me by the Random Number Generator.  I decided to choose the books in this way to avoid the all too likely scenario of me picking first all the books that appealed to me and then being faced with an endless stream of books that didn't.  Although it is a bit gimmicky, I thnk it works as a concept as none of the first five books it set me were ones that I would naturally have picked and I found that I enjoyed three, managed one and didn't even attempt the other!

So, I have gone back to the RNG for my next selection and {drumroll please}these will be:

1.  The Crime of Father Amado by Jose Maria Eca de Queiros - a nineteenth Century Portuguese classic about the power and venality of the Catholic Church in provincial Portugal.  I'm looking forward to this one, having read a few reviews of it.

2.  Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro - I'm contemplating using a Get Out Of Jail Free card on this one as it doesn't strike me as my kind of thing.

3.  Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow - looking forward to this story about the poet Humboldt and his friend Charlie Citrine by a Nobel prizewinner.
4.  Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - I suspect this will be challenging but I have a weakness for books set during WWII and its aftermath so will hopefully find it rewarding

5.  The Life and Times of Michael K. by J.M. Coetzee - another Nobel prizewinner, I am not particularly grabbed by the subject matter (a black man struggling to live a peaceful life in apartheid South Africa) but will try to approach it with an open mind.

I have a backlog of books to blog about, have a Classics Circuit Anthony Trollope Tour post to do on Monday and will be having a Christmas mini-theme later this month and suspect I will also have a very busy Christmas (Mini-Falaise is already getting warmed up by roaming the house bellowing random chunks of Jungle Bells and exclaiming excitedly at any pictures of snow, Christmas trees or Santa that she spots).  I will probably, therefore, not get to any of these until the New Year.  Hopefully, they will be a great kickstart to a new year's reading in 2011.

Get out of jail free card 1

When I decided to read through the 1,001 Books list, I immediately realised that there were some books I simply couldn't face reading so I gave myself a little "cheat" - the get out of jail free cards.  I am allowing myself to choose not to read up to 50 of the 1,001 Books but, instead, to replace them with books that are in other editions of the book not the 2006 edition from which I have taken the list.

The next book on my list from the 1,001 Books was supposed to have been Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.  This is a 19th Century family saga about the gradual fall from grace of a prosperous Hamburg family.  Now I am not a big fan of family sagas in general.  Netiher am I a big fan of German literature, as I have previously mentioned on one or two occasions.  So, when the RNG threw up Buddenbrooks, it pretty much ticked all of my least favorite boxes.  I could try and overcome my prejudices or I could take the easy route and use the get out of jail card.  Guess what I did.  Yes, that's right.  I played the card.  No more Buddenbrooks.

Instead I have chosen to replace it with the Third Man by Graham Greene.  One of my favorite authors but not one I have read.

The review will be coming up soon.

The Rules

So, here are the rules for the 1,001 Books element of this blog:

1. I will be using the list set out in the 2008 edition of the book (which is a shame as if I used the 2006  edition, I would have completed about 15 more of the books!).

2. I will choose the order of the books randomly (using the rather wonderful Random Number Generator).

3. I will intersperse books that are not part of my challenge as I see fit.

4. When books that I have already read come up, I can choose whether or not to re-read them.

5. I can substitute up to 50 books on the list with books from other editions of 1,001 Books as I know there are some books on the list that I simply won’t be able to abide.

That’s it.

Anyway, I have used the trusty RNG to decide my first five books and…{pause for imaginary drum roll}…:

1. Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon

2. Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz

3. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

4. Broken April by Ismail Kadare

5. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

In the interests of full disclosure, the RNG spat out Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson for me but, having not enjoyed it as a child, I don’t feel like giving it a second go. No special reason, I’m just being capricious.

Check back in a couple of days when Nowhere Man should be safely under my belt.

In the beginning

I love to read. I’m the sort of person who always has several books on the go, who can’t travel anywhere without just a few too many books in his bag, who squirrels books away in any unfilled cupboard, draw or bag he can find and who has now even started to measure out his life in books.

Appropriately enough, it started with a book. “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”, edited by Peter Boxall to be precise. 1,001 Books claims to do what it says on the tin – list the 1,001 books we should read before we die. I love lists. The top ten this, the greatest ever that, all are grist to my mill. So, a list of books? Perfect. I bought it. I then did what probably 99% of readers would do. I went through it and checked off all the books I’d read. There were surprisingly few – just over 80. As I’ve always thought of myself as reasonably well read, this came as a bit of a shock. Now, to be fair, the book is trying to cover the entire world and ranges across all time periods, so it can’t list every “classic”. So there are many great works that I have read which don’t make the cut.

It did, however, give me cause to think. It is fair to say that I’ve got into a bit of a rut on the old reading front. I’ve become less adventurous than in my younger days. I tend now to read books on history, food and politics, with the odd thriller and sports book thrown in. In particular, I have become a lapsed fiction reader and, on the odd occasion when I do pick up a non-genre novel, it tends to be by an author with whom I am familiar. So I have come to a decision. I am going to read my way through the books listed in 1,001 Books and blog about each one on this site. I have set myself a few rules and will write about these in my next post.

So where do the remaining 1,605 books come in? Simple. I came across a superb spreadsheet listing all the books in each of the 2006, 2008 and 2010 editions of 1,001 Books and enabling the user to keep track of their reading. If you are interested, here is the link - http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?page_id=1806. It also has a tool which allows you to calculate how many books you have left to read before you die, based on your life expectancy and estimated reading speed. As I have grown older, and even more so since the birth of my daughter, I have become morbidly prone to calculating things by reference to when I expect to keel over. How many more World Cups will I see? How old will my daughter (or, optimistically, granddaughter) be? How much will I be able to save and will it last? As you can imagine, I couldn’t resist this tool and it spat out the magic number of 2,606 books for me.

Now, obviously, this is a spuriously accurate number. For a start, my real life expectancy is probably greater than the average life expectancy as I have already attained a reasonable age. Also, as someone in full-time employment, my available reading time is likely to increase once I retire (assuming the Government ever lets me). Medical developments and better healthcare may also give me a little more time. So, hopefully, I will be around for book 3,000 and beyond.

Nevertheless, I am going to accept the number, am going to blog about the additional 1,605 books (which will be any books I damn well like) as well as my original 1,001 Books and will laugh in the face of Old Father Time when I get to book 2,607. I hope you can join me for the journey and that you may even find some books for you along the way.