Mid-October stuff
October simply hasn't left me much time for blogging, which is a shame because I've managed to find a lot of time to read and I have a lot of books I want to write about if I can carve out some time to do it. Purely to try and apply some pressure on myself to actually write about them, here are the books I've read over the last week:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- James, Percival Everett
- Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
- Held, Anne Michaels
- Playground, Richard Powers
- Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange (DNF)
- Parade, Rachel Cusk
- Choice, Neel Mukherjee
- In The Absence of Men, Philippe Besson
- Waiting For The Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
- Life & Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
- The Way, Cary Groner
The first few are from Booker long/short lists and given that I've been trying to blog my way through that reading I obviously feel I should write about them. After that I started to dig into the Goldsmiths Prize, which I only learned about this week but which is almost laser targeted at my interests. I may try to read the rest of that shortlist before year's end, so that might turn into a series of posts as well.
I had the stray thoughts earlier in the week that a fun long term goal would be to read every Booker winner. While I was looking through old winners and finalists I realised that I'd never read anything by J.M. Coetzee, and so I set out to fix that. Having read two books now I can't quite figure out whether I like his style or not, but at the same time I definitely want to read more. That's an interesting place to be in with an author.
That's all for this post. With any luck I'll get reviews of some or all of these books up over the next week or so, and then I can get this blog back on track.