Friday 9 September 2016

Books on my Bedside Table (May Fall Down and Crush Me as I Sleep)

So it's been quiet here on the blog, and I'm sorry but it's likely to be sporadic for the next few months while I'm immersed in the launch of the Ninja Book Box (for more details see here) but I'm still reading (and how!) and although some of it is super secret book box reading that I can't share, lots of it isn't as you'll see. This is all the books in the pile on my bedside table that I am actually actively reading at the moment!


Some of these I'm dipping in and out of - The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (excellent so far, all about what's actually in our food and how we are connected to it) Letters of Note compiled by Shaun Usher (it's a book of a website and I cannot stress enough its brilliance. I'm reading a few a day. Yesterday, Virginia Woolf's suicide letter and an incredible letter from Louis Armstrong to a fan, written exactly the way he talked. Just read it as soon as you can) and Vitamin N by Richard Louv, which I'm pretty sure featured in my last one of these posts, I've been at it a while but just because I'm taking my time, not because it's not good! It's ironic that I'm reading it today when I've been inside alll day and it's all about how we need more nature in our lives, but never mind. We're going for a walk on the beach after tea. 

I'm miscellaneously stuck in the middle of Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. I have been for a while and it's weird because so many people love and adore this book that I expected to race through it but although I've been enjoying it I'm finding it strangely easy to read one essay and then put it down for weeks. It is really good, just not as mindblowing as I was expecting based on what everyone else said. Another very strange thing that I read half of ages ago and haven't read the rest of is The Sandman:Overture by Neil Gaiman. I bought this back on the London Bookshop Crawl in February and immediately started it but I got a little way into it and then just stopped. I'm not really sure why but I know I need to just sit down with it for an hour and get through it because The Sandman is my first graphic novel love and I can't believe I haven't finished this yet. Also I was reading and loving A Force to be Reckoned With by Jane Robinson which is a history of the WI and I really want to get back to it because it was way more interesting than the title probably implies. That's also been on the pile for a while so I do need to pick it up again!

Finally there are two on here for the Kid Lit book club I'm in with various family members. I think we're going to have a hiatus in October to catch up because Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce was last months book and I've only just started it and North Child by Edith Pattou, which is September's book, is beautiful so far but huuuuuge and Rhys can't read it til I'm done and he reads slower than me, so we're going to need some catch up time! (In case you're interested, so far we've read Flora & Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo which is fricking incredible and everybody should read it now, and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards which was really fun). 

I'm also flipping through a couple of allotment related books in between doing the work of actually clearing the allotment - The New Kitchen Garden by Mark Diacono and The Half Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz which are both really useful when trying to figure out what to grow. 

Looking back this could be titled 'books that are really good but inexplicably taking me ages to read'. Oh well, everything in this post is great, so that's something at least! What are you reading at the moment? 

2 comments:

  1. The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles! I love that book so very much, but nobody seems to know about it.

    I had a similar experience with Bad Feminist and other essay collections. I think so many essays are written in response to specific things, and they lose that sense of immediacy when they are compiled several years later.

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    1. Yes I completely agree! Lots of the essays in Bad Feminist feel like that.

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