The Year so Far

Whoosh….. that’s the sound of October flying past. Where did the month go? Come to think of it, where did the last 10 months go? It feels like only an hour ago that I was bundling up against cold winds and lashing rain and here we are all over again. And it doesn’t seem like five minutes since I was deciding what my reading goals would be for 2013.

Speaking of goals, I was updating my review list on this site earlier in the week and realised I’ve already read more books this year than in the whole of 2012.  Forty three to be exact plus one that I really could not finish (Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life).  Now for some of you, that figure is a drop in the ocean but for me it’s a big deal. And there are still two months left.

I’m also slowly – ever so slowly – catching up with some reviews. I think I’m about seven behind right now. It seems I can read faster than I can write. I did manage to post my review of Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods this week and have almost finished my review of Petals of Blood by the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, both writers I chose as part of my world literature challenge. 

October reading

This was a mixture of some of the ManBooker prize longlisted novels and historical fiction

• Harvest by Jim Crace (highly recommended)
• TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (good in part)
• Life after Life by Kate Atkinson (could not finish)
• Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (readable but not particularly wonderful)
• The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe (dire novel. Finished it only because its a set text on the Plagues, Witches and War historical fiction course)

On the horizon

Currently reading two other historical novels – I’ve been following the  advice about reading books in parallel from various bloggers in response to a Sunday Salon post. Thank you everyone for really practical tips.

• Clotel OR The President’s Daughter, A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States by William Wells Brown. Published in 1853 this is a novel based on the claim that US president Thomas Jefferson fathered a daughter by a slave.
• Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. This is the book club choice for November. It’s set  during the period of the Risorgimento, the popular nineteenth century movement to unite the various states of Italy into a single country, and deals with death of a civilization, of an era

After that it’s more historical fiction with the remaining novels on the course and I hope to squeeze in at least another book from my classics challenge list.

A busy time ahead!