Kylie

Ooh, maybe I'll be able to join in for once because I don't currently have work or plans for the weekend. I recently started rereading Arthur C Clarke's Collected Stories (950+ pages of small print), so maybe I could knock off a few stories. I'm entering every single story in the Contents tab of the Book Collector software as I go. I'm adding a synopsis for each story and a few words for a review, plus a rating and when I read it. This way I'll be able to look back in future and be reminded of what the stories are about and how much I liked them. I also have loads of books on the go because I keep starting books and not finishing them, so maybe I could make some progress in a few books.

I'm sure she'll be great in it! Is anyone else watching The Handmaid's Tale? It's utterly brilliant!

I don't keep my wishlist books on Goodreads—only books I actually own. My shelves are so out of date though. I'm sure there are books on there that I long since got rid of, and many hundreds more that I've never added. 😕

I'm looking forward to watching this! I haven't yet read the book, but I've seen the original movie several times. My dad loved that movie—particularly the pipe music.

Yay! I've been binge-watching The Big Bang Theory from the beginning. I'm up to season 7.

Oy! But thanks for the review. I guess I'll give it a miss, especially if it can't match (or at least come close to) Wells's style of writing.

I treated myself to a new book the other day: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I started reading it straight away (unusual for me!) and I'm about halfway through it. It's very readable and enjoyable—difficult to put down, which is just what I need in a book right now! Also recently finished How to Stop Time by Matt Haig—another excellent book.

Halfway through my 15th book, which is ahead of my measly target of 26.

American Horror Story - Coven

If you can tell me which episode it's from, I should be able to work it out.

And now Obama is visiting us! We love him too...mind you, we also love NZ's current PM. I'd happily swap ours for yours any day, Poppy!

Hi Raven! Does Stephen Baxter write in the same sort of style as HG Wells in The Massacre of Mankind?

*waves*

I went to the book fair a couple of weekends ago and came home with the following. Books with 'n.a.' next to them aren't added to my TBR pile for different reasons (basically they're all nicer editions to replace the ones I already have, except in a few instances, where I'll also be keeping my original edition). It wasn't the greatest book fair for me in terms of special finds, but it was still pretty great. Fiction (26) Margaret Atwood Hag-Seed Paul Beatty The Sellout Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (n.a.) (50th anniversary deluxe edition) Mikhail Bulgakov A Young Doctor's Notebook Agatha Christie The Sittaford Mystery Agatha Christie Three Act Tragedy (n.a.) Antoine de Saint-Exupery The Little Prince (n.a.) Hugh Edwards Islands of Angry Ghosts Joseph Heller Closing Time (n.a.) Joseph Heller Something Happened (n.a.) ETA Hoffman Tales of Hoffmann Andrey Kurkov The President's Last Love (n.a.) John le Carré The Russia House John le Carré The Spy Who Came in From the Cold Ann M Martin Stacey McGill, Super Sitter JD Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (n.a.) John Scalzi Lock in Natasha Solomons The Song Collector Emily St John Mandel Last Night in Montreal Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance David Walliams Gangsta Granny PG Wodehouse Doctor Sally PG Wodehouse The Little Nugget PG Wodehouse Love Among the Chickens PG Wodehouse The Man Upstairs and Other Stories PG Wodehouse Tales of St Austin's Non-Fiction (24) Richard Bradford Literary Rivals James Bradley The Penguin Book of the Ocean Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything (Illustrated) (n.a.) Rachel Carson Silent Spring Brian Cox Wonders of the Universe Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker (n.a.) Tim Flannery The Birth of Melbourne AC Grayling The Age of Genius J Mellentin Haswell Manual of Mosaic Henry Hitchings Browse David Hunt True Girt Naomi Klein This Changes Everything Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk Simon Sebag Montefiori The Romanovs Diana Mosley The Pursuit of Laughter Robert J Nemiroff The Universe: 365 Days Edward W Said Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient Carl Sagan Billions and Billions Carl Sagan The Varieties of Scientific Experience Dava Sobel The Glass Universe Don Watson Bendable Learnings Don Watson Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters John Wright The CSIRO Home Energy Saving Handbook

No worries. Fixed it for you.

I got off to a good reading start in January and I'm several books ahead of my (very small) Goodreads goal, so I've taken the opportunity to pick up a couple of books I've had 'on the go' for a couple of years. I've read another chapter or two of The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, and I'm finally back to making some good progress with Stephen King's IT. Only a couple of hundred pages to go!

@chesilbeach, I find that a lot of poetry is not to my taste, but I saw Bilston's poems on social media a lot last year and ended up buying You Took the Last Bus Home late last year. I tore through it and plan to start re-reading it soon. I absolutely loved it! His humour and wordplay resonate with me very much. He's so damn clever! It immediately made my list of favourite ever books.

You both make me sad.

Pls let me win.

My reading year is off to a great start. I finished Matt Haig's Father Christmas and Me and read Richard P Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! and Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. All excellent books! Now I'm about three-quarters of the way through Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. It's utterly engrossing, so despite it's length and small print, I'm flying through it. So glad that I finally got around to reading it (with a nudge from @frankie!)

Thanks Gaia. I haven't managed to catch up with everyone's reading lists yet. I need to read your summary for 2017! Thanks Claire. I miss my books already! It's horrible not being able to display them nicely on our shelves, isn't it? I have to admit that one of the major things on my checklist when looking for a new home will be the amount of wall space for my bookcases. I'll be downsizing, so it's going to be difficult, but I'll make it work one way or another! Thanks Alexi. I hope to be around more often too!

It depends on who you ask, Noll. I've seen comments saying it's the best season yet. I think the episodes are all very subjective. One commenter might say 'x' episode is the best, and the very next commenter says the opposite. Personally, I thought it was another brilliant season and well worth the wait! Already can't wait for the next season.

I've finished setting up my blog for 2018. I had an abysmal reading year in 2017. I didn't post in my thread after February, and I didn't catalogue most of my new purchases throughout the year, so I had a lot of work to do to get everything up to scratch! I hope to be around the forum a bit more this year. Happy reading everyone!

My Library Most of my library has been dismantled and packed into boxes. Soon all of my books and bookcases will be put into storage while I sell my house and find another place to live. Hopefully by the end of 2018 I'll have a new house and my library set up again, in which case I'll post pics here. Check out what my library looked like in 2011!

My Favourite Books NEWISH are books I added in 2014–2016, NEW were added in 2017, NEWEST were added in 2018. Fiction Jane Austen Emma Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice John Banville The Book of Evidence Brian Bilston You Took the Last Bus Home NEW Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange Italo Calvino If on a Winter's Night a Traveller John Connolly The Book of Lost Things Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens Great Expectations Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities Daphne du Maurier Rebecca NEWISH Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Christo Mark Dunn Ella Minnow Pea Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex Michel Faber The Crimson Petal and White F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is Illuminated George Grossmith Diary of a Nobody Joseph Heller Catch-22 Susan Hill The Woman in Black Jack Kerouac On the Road Jack Kerouac The Town and the City Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird Erich Maria Marquez All Quiet on the Western Front Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind Vladimir Nabokov Lolita George Orwell Animal Farm Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged Mary Shelley Frankenstein John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men Bram Stoker Dracula Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray Tim Winton Cloudstreet Markus Zusak The Book Thief Young Adult Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden Stephen Chbosky The Perks of Being a Wallflower Suzanne Collins Hunger Games (trilogy) Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth John Marsden Tomorrow, When the War Began (series) A. A. Milne Winnie the Pooh Walter Moers The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear Lucy M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables J. K. Rowling Harry Potter (series) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Non-Fiction Bill Bryson Down Under Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods Byll Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything Vincent Bugliosi Helter Skelter NEWEST Truman Capote In Cold Blood AB Facey A Fortunate Life Tim Flannery The Explorers Tim Flannery The Birth of Sydney Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank Helene Hanff 84 Charing Cross Road Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction NEW Erik Larson Dead Wake NEWISH Erik Larson The Devil in the White City NEWISH Steven D. Levitt Freakonomics Sylvia Plath The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Andrew Solomon The Noonday Demon Martin Toseland A Steroid Hit the Earth