Books 2007.
Dec. 31st, 2007 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I resolved at the start of the year to read one book a month for the whole of 2007, which doesn't sound massively ambitious in any sense but I'm a painstakingly slow and resultantly reluctant reader and I find it slightly exhausting, for all that I in many ways very much love it. And I did so! I won a resolution. Well done me. Here are the books what I read:
January - Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
February - Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld
March - Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
April - The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry
May - Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
June - The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, Look Back in Anger by John Osbourne
July - The Crafty Art of Playmaking by Alan Ayckbourn, Harry Potter and the Extended Bank Holiday Weekend by J K Rowling
August - Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry, The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris, Jumpers by Tom Stoppard
September - Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
October - The Charioteer by Mary Renault
November - Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
December - The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
I think that's right. I always felt the playtexts were cheating a bit because they're kind of weeny, so I always added something else in those months. Like two more playtexts. December was a real triumph: I finished The Chrysalids in about ten days and I'm now fifty pages through Cranford. I'm quite surprised that John Wyndham won at the whole being read thing. Along with Stephen Fry. Triffids made me terribly cross with its masses of sexism, but The Chrysalids was significantly better, and both are undeniably real page-turners. But summing them up all, I'd say that my favourite was Riddley Walker, which was just astonishing, and my least favourite was The Ode Less Travelled, which was mostly a sheaf of shouty patronising opinion with which at times I fairly profoundly disagreed. Never mind.
I'm not doing the same for 2008, mostly because we're all falling into a sort of timewarp thing at midnight that's taking us back to 1998, but also because it tended to limit me to books around 200 pages in length and I'd quite like to read some longer ones. But I do want to always have a book properly on the go rather than festering for six months. That's the new plan.
Happy 1998.
January - Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
February - Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld
March - Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
April - The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry
May - Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
June - The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, Look Back in Anger by John Osbourne
July - The Crafty Art of Playmaking by Alan Ayckbourn, Harry Potter and the Extended Bank Holiday Weekend by J K Rowling
August - Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry, The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris, Jumpers by Tom Stoppard
September - Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
October - The Charioteer by Mary Renault
November - Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
December - The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
I think that's right. I always felt the playtexts were cheating a bit because they're kind of weeny, so I always added something else in those months. Like two more playtexts. December was a real triumph: I finished The Chrysalids in about ten days and I'm now fifty pages through Cranford. I'm quite surprised that John Wyndham won at the whole being read thing. Along with Stephen Fry. Triffids made me terribly cross with its masses of sexism, but The Chrysalids was significantly better, and both are undeniably real page-turners. But summing them up all, I'd say that my favourite was Riddley Walker, which was just astonishing, and my least favourite was The Ode Less Travelled, which was mostly a sheaf of shouty patronising opinion with which at times I fairly profoundly disagreed. Never mind.
I'm not doing the same for 2008, mostly because we're all falling into a sort of timewarp thing at midnight that's taking us back to 1998, but also because it tended to limit me to books around 200 pages in length and I'd quite like to read some longer ones. But I do want to always have a book properly on the go rather than festering for six months. That's the new plan.
Happy 1998.