What am I doing?
Have read books 53 to 57 (almost). They are, in order: The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux; Untold Stories – Alan Bennett; Dead Reckoning: the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach; England’s Lost Eden: adventures in a Victorian utopia – Philip Hoare; and My Roots – Monty Don. Haven’t quite finished that last one actually, I’ve only got as far as May (it’s a year’s worth of gardening columns). But I’m confident of being able to knock it off this weekend.
Now NaNoWriMo is over and I’ve cleared my backlog of library books I can update this blog with reviews of the above and plan what I’ll be reading for the rest of December when I’m hoping to take my reading total for the year over 60. Unusually, I’m having to return a couple of library books unread. They’re both hard-boiled detective fiction and I’m just not in the mood for it.
So, what now? I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of the first volume in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes. It’s really difficult. Currently I have it on order from Amazon but it’s one of those four to six week jobs that often end in an email explaining how they can’t sell it to you at all despite the extreme optimism of their earlier communications. If this occurs, it’ll be off to eBay. In the meantime I have managed to get hold of volume two, The Doll’s House, and I have heard that volume one is arguably not the best place to start with this series, so maybe I shall just go ahead and read that.
Possibilities for December/Jan:
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll; Tennyson’s Gift – Lynne Truss (both inspired by Philip Hoare’s book on Victorian spiritualism in Hampshire)
- The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman and The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender
- Fire Sale – Sara Paretsky (the last outstanding volume of a recent three for two)
- The Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell
- Writing Home – Alan Bennett (also currently on order)
- American Gods – Neil Gaiman