willoyd

ONE of the best!! To give you an indication of what that means in terms of my taste, my other fiction reads over the past two or three years that I'd rate in the same sort of bracket: A Thousand Acres, Moby Dick, War and Peace, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hours, A Suitable Boy, Bleak House, This Thing of Darkness, A Month in the Country, Cryptonomicon, Rosetta, The Conjuror's Bird, The Tenderness of Wolves. That might help you decide whether that recommendation is worth taking any notice of from your point of view.

I can empathise with that, especially given the degree I want to travel around with my books. Trouble is, I like the print size in hardbacks nowadays. All too many paperbacks are impossibliy small to read with relaxed ease.

Over the past 2-3 years I've pretty consistently averaged 9 days per finished book, but there is quite large variation within that. During term time (I'm a primary teacher), I will drop to a book roughly every fortnight, but that will pick up if there are any holidays involved. 3 books a month is the norm outside the summer break. During the summer break, I was averaging a finished book round about every 4-5 days. I'll probably leave half a dozen or so books a year unfinished as well. My reading is fairly eclectic, but it does include some pretty chunky stuff - e.g. within the past 18 months or so: War and Peace, Moby Dick, a few other classics and some fairly big history tomes, partially counterbalanced by the occasional quick read Simenon, Leon etc. Favourite time for reading is early morning, or even better immediately after breakfast - not much good on a working day! Reading time has been a bit of a challenge the past few months, as I've been doing an OU course that has taken up a fair bit of time.

The grapevine is talking complete rubbish then!! I'm about a third of the way through, and it's brilliant - wonderfully readable, totally captivating, I resent having to put it down. So far, comfortably one of the best books I've read in the past few years. And whilst one could wait for the paperback (next May I gather), Amazon are currently selling for the price of a paperback.

I had The Girl who kicked the Hornets' Nest on pre-order. Published Oct 1st, arrived Oct 5th (bearing in mind that the 4th was a Sunday).

I've tried the Sony e-reader, and can't say I like it at all. Pages take forever to turn over (or so it feels), and flicking back through just isn't the same. There's also a horrible sameness in the books themselves - all grey and dull. However, the big no-no is that for the one thing it would be good for (travelling), all things electronic are awfully susceptible to breaking down, breaking or theft. So whilst I like some of the idea, I can't say I'm in a rush to buy one. But then I've gone back to paper diaries and binned the electronic versions.

I hadn't either until a week or so before I read it - it was a recommendation by a poster on another book forum that I belong to - one of the big pluses of sites like this!

My 2009 list of books: 1. Blood River by Tim Butcher (9 Jan) ***** 2. Lady Worsley's Whim by Hallie Rubenhold (16 Jan) **** 3. The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd (18 Jan) **** 4. Only in America by Matt Frei (5 Feb) ** 5. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (10 Feb) *** 6. Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin (17 Feb) ***** 7. Hunting Mister Heartbreak by Jonathan Raban (15 Mar) ***** 8. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R King (18 Mar) ***** 9. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (5 Apr) ** 10. Homecoming by Bernard Schlink (18 Apr) * 11. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (27 Apr) ****** 12. Have a Nice Day by Justin Webb (2 May) *** 13. The Dante Trap by Arnaud Delalande (8 May) ** 14. Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym (6 Jun) *** 15. A View From the Foothills by Chris Mullin (28 Jun) **** 16. Acqua Alta by Donna Leon (29 Jun) **** 17. The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman (12 Jul) *** 18. Bad Blood by Jeremy Whittle (21 Jul) ** 19. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (31 Jul) ****** 20. London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins (4 Aug) ****** 21. In Search of Robert Millar by Richard Moore ((10 Aug) ***** 22. The Secret Life of the French by Lucy Wadham (17 Aug) *** 23. Call for the Dead by John Le Carre (18 Aug) *** 24. Feet in the Clouds by Richard Askwith (23 Aug) *** 25. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (25 Aug) ***** 26. Restless by William Boyd (31 Aug) ***** 27. Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin (19 Sep) *** 28. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (16 Oct) ****** 29. The Water Road by Paul Gogarty (26 Oct) ***** 30. The Crow Road by Iain Banks (28 Oct) **** 31. One Man and a Narrowboat by Steve Haywood (31 Oct) ** 32. The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor (8 Nov) *** 33. Will and Me by Dominic Dromgoole (10 Nov) *** 34. The Death of Faith by Donna Leon (14 Nov) **** 35. The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric (26 Nov) ***** 36. More Than Love Letters by Rosy Thornton (19 Dec) **** 37. How Steeple Sinderby Won the FA Cup by JL Carr (20 Dec) ***** 38. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (21 Dec) * 39. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society Mary Shaffer & Annie Barrows (23 Dec) ***** 40. The Travelling Hornplayer by Barbara Trapido (24 Dec) *** 41. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (24 Dec) **** 42. War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (25 Dec) **** 43. The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri (26 Dec) **** 44. The Reader by Bernard Schlink (26 Dec) ** 45. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala (27 Dec) ** 46. A Murder of Quality by John Le Carre (27 Dec) *** 47. Birth Marks by Sarah Dunant (28 Dec) **** 48. The Paperchase by Marcel Theroux (29 Dec) *** 49. Water-Blue Eyes by Domingo Villar (30 Dec) *** 50. The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon (31 Dec) *** Abandoned books, not read enough to count in list above 1. Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson (21 Feb) * 2. Justine by Lawrence Durrell (2 Oct) * 3. And Now on Radio Four by Simon Elmes (17 Oct) * Ratings 1 = dreadful - almost certainly not finished, and often abandoned early 2 = disappointing - not necessarily finished - tends on mood 3 = OK - but can't get overly enthusiastic; good enough to finish 4 = good, only put book down reluctantly 5 = outstanding, book has to be forcibly removed from my grasp 6 = all-time great, total rave. I've also got a couple that I've got a long way through, but for one reason or another have suspended reading, but intend to finish as was enjoying them! 1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 2. Penguin History of the United States by Hugh Brogan

I bought it after seeing a fascinating exhibition in the Salzburg Museum. I partly only went there because it was a very hot day and the museum was pleasantly cool, but I spent a totally absorbing few hours there - it was oddly absurdly empty, which I couldn't understand given (a) Salzburg is chocker with tourists, ( the museum was superbly laid out, bang up to date and © it was well advertised. Anyway, part of the museum was devoted to a rolling exhibition focusing on famous Salzburgers, one of the current ones (this was July) being Leopold Kohr. I left feeling I had to find out more! Ironically perhaps he lived in the UK for the last part of his life. He was a great proponent of the small is beautiful ethos. (Another one of the current five was Franz Wallack, the driving force behind the Grossglocknerstrasse, and equally interesting - it was a great exhibition!). True! Perhaps I was just being a bit contrarian, given that some of the fiction, including some of the current top 20, didn't exactly strike particularly as 'ought to' reading. I've read the whole of Harry Potter and thoroughly enjoyed it (it dipped a bit in the middle mind), but am intrigued as to why it is something one ought to read. I must read this - you're not the first to tell me that! On the rest of your choices, I couldn't disagree with W&P, which was a stunning read both as a teenager and more recently in my fifties, or Catch-22, which I read as a teenager (I was blown away by the film at the same time) and must reread. I positively agree with Mockingbird - which I was introduced to two years ago by my teenage son who read it for GCSE and loved it. Your fifth I've never heard of - I must hunt it out!

Nor can I, but I'm not going to let that get between me and a good book, and some of their choices happen to be very good books (at least IMO!).

Fi - looking at your Librarything catalogue, there is a reasonable fistful of R&J choices which you've rated 4 or 5 stars, so I wouldn't worry too much about that - I've found several I really like, and a few I haven't particularly rated. Unless they're stickered in the shop, I'm rarely aware of whether they're R&J choices or not.

Another fascinating thread - really enjoyed reading back through this - very comforting! Been reading more than you could have imagined? Or has your mojo deserted you? About the same as the past couple of years: have been reading at the rate of around 40 books per year, and have completed 27 so far this year. Actually very pleased with that, as started an OU course this year which has taken a lot of time up, so had expected the number to go down. Found any new favourites? Been disappointed by others? Perhaps the biggest new favourite of the year was Moby Dick, which went right up into my top ten, although my current read Wolf Hall looks as if it might rival that. In non-fiction my favourite so far is probably Richard Moore's In Search of Robert Millar. Overall it's been a good year, with more than usual 'five star' reads (I usually only hit 2 or 3 a year), both fiction and non-fiction. Aside from the two already mentioned, these have been: Hunting Mister Heartbreak by Jonathan Raban The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins Restless by William Boyd The one big disappointment was Bernard Schlink's The Homecoming, a complete waste of time. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher proved underwhelming too in spite of the good reviews. Been sticking to your reading challenges? Or pushed them to the side in the name of being spontaneous? Largely abandoned the one reading challenge I was doing, simply because I was missing the spontaneity in the way I normally select books, not least because I have an equal love of non-fiction as fiction, and the challenge was limiting me to specific fiction books. Bought more books than you've read? (Please tell me I'm not alone in this!) Oh yes, you are definitely not alone in this, much to my (book loving) wife's despair. Been spending too much time at BCF when you could otherwise be making inroads into your TBR pile? And if so, are you going to do anything about it? (Let me guess...'Yes' and 'No', right? ) Have been spending more time on BCF than I would expect to in the future, as am a newbie, so have been browsing back through loads of threads - lots of very interesting reading! So I do hope to be committing more time to reading in the future! And finally, where do you hope your reading will take you in the next 6 months? Wherever the whim takes me! But I definitely want to do more.

Have just come to this thread (two and a bit years after it started!) as a newbie reading through - fascinating!! I have a slightly different problem in reading 'The Classics'. In general terms, I love a lot of nineteenth century writing, both English (Austen, Brontes, Dickens, Trollope, some Eliot, Collins, Gaskell etc. etc.) and foreign (e.g. Zola, War and Peace etc.), but where I struggle are some of the more modern writers. For instance, I've recently tried both 1984 and The Alexandria Quartet, and failed to finish either (got about half way through Justine.). I've equally struggled with quite a few twentieth century classics writers, ranging from the very early, like Conrad, through (in no particular order) Kafka Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Mann, Joyce, Orwell, Hemingway, Golding, Camus and others. That's not say that I don't like twentieth century books - I definitely do! - but it seems that I struggle to relate to a higher proportion of what might be termed classics. There are exceptions - I'm starting to enjoy some of Virginia Woolf's work, and have always enjoyed lighter work like Nancy Mitford - but the label 'twentieth century classic' seems to be a bit of the kiss of death for me. But then maybe it's unfair to lump books together as 'classics'; it's down to how you enjoy the individual authors, even books. After all, even as an avid fan of Jane Austen, I would be prepared to concede that Mansfield Park isn't quite up in the same ranks as the others (S&S is my runaway favourite), and I didn't enjoy Great Expectations anywhere near as much as Bleak House, nor Silas Marner as Middlemarch.

No, but his other book, The Conjuror's Bird, was excellent - one of my best reads of 2007. For some reason, this slipped under the radar for me, and I'm buying straightaway. Thanks for the heads up!

I'm really surprised pretty much everybody has gone for fiction, even more so that books like Harry Potter 'ought' to be read. I've gone otherwise, so recognise that none will hit the top 20 list, but feel they are all highly readable books with important things to say. I still struggled to whittle it down to 5, but feel these are a fair representation of (just) some of things people 'ought' to understand. I've obviously been fairly heavily influenced by my career as a primary teacher! 1. The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr I'm reading this at the moment, so perhaps shouldn't include yet, but I was originally going to include Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and this came first! A seriously undersung great. 2. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre There's a lot of it about. Science seems to be grossly misunderstood, and the results are not pretty. The chapter on Brain Gym alone was worth the cover price!! It was a toss-up between this and The Tiger That Isn't (Blastland & Dilnot) which does the same thing with statistics. This was slightly broader ranging. 3. Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne Darwin's original is a great must-read, but this includes much more up to date supporting evidence. Perhaps the single most important piece of science for us to understand, helping us appreciate our real position on this planet. Appalling what little prominence this has in schools compared to other less substantiated topics, however much I respect people's belief in them. 4. Toxic Childhood by Sue Palmer Should be read by every parent in our over-protective, over-hysterical country! Real education, as opposed to training in literacy and numeracy, is in real danger of total paralysis, and this goes a long way to explaining why and what should be done. 5. The History of the World by J.M. Roberts I had to include one history book! This gives a superb overview - kept me engrossed. (BTW my fiction selection would have been To Kill A Mockingbird, Bleak House, Sense and Sensibility, A Month In the Country (JL Carr) and The Canterbury Tales. All books that I loved and had something worthwhile to say. Equally difficult to reduce down to just five). Some great ideas from this thread - I'll have to follow some of them,.

Sorry to take so long to reply, have been away the past couple of days. I was thinking of Instance of the Fingerpost when I mentioned Pears - a real great when it comes to crime.

It's good to read that I'm not the only one who hates the change of format part of the way through a series. It's just happened to the Brunetti series. They've all be mass market size, and have suddenly switched over to what I think is called B format. Totally unnecessary - even my poor eyesight can cope with the smaller font size (unlike some paperbacks where the print is virtually unreadable). Not just fiction either - the third volume in the Richard Evans trilogy on the history of the Third Reich has come out in a completely different style of cover to the first two (and not half as attractive either - positively boring and old fashioned in fact). Actually, the quality of the design work on paperbacks does often seem to detiorate with editions rather than improve. Can't understand why.

I don't think it comes down to American v British for me, but individual authors. I also like a fair bit of Euro-crime. Ones I'd class as favourites include Paretsky, Evanovich, Chandler, Laurie King, Pears, Gregory (Chaloner not Bartholomew I've never got into medieval crime except for the brilliant Name of the Rose), Conan Doyle, Collins, Childers, Kate Atkinson, Simenon, Mankell, Leon, Lauren Henderson, Larsson, Sjowall & Wahloo.

I love loads of crime novels, but that's a bit different from the individual character: e.g. I grew up with Sherlock Holmes, and adore the books, but I don't think characterisation was one of Doyle's strengths. My favourite characters are probably VI Warshawski (surprised there's only been one mention of her), Sam Jones (Lauren Henderson's books), Stephanie Plum, Guido Brunetti, and Jules Maigret. I've also recently read Laurie King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and I think Mary Russell might soon get added to that list (King also creates a much stronger character out of Holmes too).

Girl with a Dragon Tattoo was a superb read - finished it at 3am on the ferry coming home from holiday as simply couldn't put it down. Lisabeth is a brilliant character. I do hope the film comes to the UK soon - the trailers look almost as good as the book. Have held off starting the Girl Who Played with Fire until I can actually sit down and let rip - not during school term time - but have got the final book on pre-order with Amazon: due out in a few days' time.

I don't read much autobiography, since I prefer a biographer's viewpoint rather than the individual's own, but I have enjoyed Strange Places, Questionable People by John Simpson, and the recently published A View From the Foothills, Chris Mullins's diaries whilst a government minister, which is unusual for me as I'm not normally into political memoirs. Overall, I'm much keener on biography, particularly historical, as all too many modern biogs are either of complete nonentities, or are written far too early in the subject's life. There's not been much mention of historical biographies on this thread since Fiona's post back in 2007, so hopefully this list of some of my favourites will help redress the balance a bit. Pretty much anything by Jenny Uglow and Claire Tomalin (they're both brilliant!). The Last Englishman by Byron Rogers (JL Carr) Aristocrats by Stella Tilyard (The Lennox Sisters) Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser Wellington, Years of the Sword by Elizabeth Longford Shackleton by Roland Huntford In Search of Robert Millar by Richard Moore (perhaps the best sports biog I've read)

Hi. Just signed up last night. Am an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction (about 50-50), although don't clock up the sorts of numbers some do, about 40-50 per year, not least because I like reading other material too! In fiction terms, my favourite author is Jane Austen, followed in no particular order by Patrick O'Brian, Charles Dickens, JL Carr, Donna Leon, Peter Ackroyd and Jasper Fforde amongst others. My non-fiction reading is fairly varied, but I suppose is dominated mostly by history (especially the long 18th century), science and travel literature, favourite writers being Simon Schama, Claire Tomalin, Jenny Uglow, Lisa Jardine, Alistair Cooke, Jonathan Raban and Jan Morris (amongst others!)