Classics Club Spin #2

I didn't take part in the Classics Club Spin last time as life was too crazy, but I'm excited to take part this time.  Basically, I'm going to choose 20 books from my Classics Club List and then a number will be selected and posted on Monday.  I'll then read whatever book on my list corresponds to that number.  Without further ado, here are my twenty books:

Five I can't wait to read:
1. Emma by Jane Austen
2. The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
3. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
5. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Five I am neutral about:
6. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
8. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
10. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

Five I am dreading:
11. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
12. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
13. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
14. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
15. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Five using random.org
16. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
17. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
18. Othello by William Shakespeare
19. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
20. Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

I really hope Moby Dick isn't selected, Les Mis would be OK but it's just so long!
Are you joining in the spin? If so, link me to your list in the comments as I'd love to see everyone's selections :)

Bout of Books: Monday's Update

I had grand plans for the first day of the read-a-thon; I was going to leave work at a decent time and then spend the whole evening reading and blogging.  Unfortunately, my car is due for it's MOT on Saturday and when I popped round my parents to ask my dad to fit some new windscreen wipers, we discovered a problem with the washer jets.  As I have an old, Japanese car, I spent most of the evening trying to track down the necessary parts.  I did meet my reading goal, but didn't get to spend any time blogging.

Day: Monday 13th May 2013
Time Spent Reading: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Books Read: I was in the mood for reading success, so I started and finished The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also made some more progress with Rules of Civility.
Books Completed: 1

 

How was the first day of the read-a-thon for you?

Sam Sunday #15: DIY

As we've been in the new house for over a month now, we've started properly thinking about decorating and modernising the 'retro' interiors.  An ongoing project has been eliminating the mahogany woodwork by painting it white, to brighten up the hallways and door/window frames.  In terms of rooms, we've decided to tackle the master bedroom first.  At the moment, it has bright red carpet, faded yellowy-beige wallpaper and artex swirls all over the ceiling.  There were fitted wardrobes, but they were gold with yellow-tinted mirrors for sliding doors.  It's certainly not to my taste!  Yesterday we tore out the fitted wardrobes and today, we had a delivery of a brand new set of bedroom furniture that is eventually going to be put in once we've got a new carpet installed and had the walls and ceiling re-plastered.

One thing that we could put up is the bedside tables, as they are easy to move between rooms when the plasterer arrives and give us a bit more storage space in the meantime.  We rolled up our sleeves, unpacked the parts and got going. Believe it or not, it took almost two hours to put together one teeny, tiny bedside table.  It had nineteen component parts and over fifty screws/bolts etc!  Who would have guessed it from looking at the innocent bedside table above?  It does look nice now it's up (my currently reading books have a home that isn't the floor again) but it was an effort!  When it's time to put together the rest of the furniture, I think it'll be a call-Dad-for-help moment!

Aside from house stuff, I'm really looking forward to the Bout of Books read-a-thon, which starts tomorrow.  Lots of my favourite bloggers are taking part so I'm sure it's going to be a great week.  In fact, my reading has already increased in anticipation of the event, and I managed to finish both of the books I had been plodding through last week.  I'm halfway through Rules of Civility by Amor Towles at the moment; I hope to finish that soon and then read some shorter books so I feel like I'm making great progress.  To everyone taking part, I hope you all manage to meet your reading goals.  I think I'm going to go with daily progress posts throughout the week.

This week, I've been reading:

  

Review posted:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

I didn't like Wuthering Heights the first time I read it.  I was a university student, it was my first Bronte and I thought it was heavy on the melodrama, to say the very least! Since then, I've read and loved books by both Charlotte and Anne Bronte, so I added Emily to my Classics Club list in the hope that my opinion would change with time.  Collectively, the Brontes are my favourite group of classic writers as their books are the ones that really speak to me.  I come across as very calm and collected but my life is really an emotional rollercoaster and I feel that whenever I read Villette or Jane Eyre.  I might admire the cool, sparkling wit of Jane Austen but the raw emotion of the Brontes is what gets to me every time.  And on this read, I just loved Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is all about Heathcliffe, a 'dark gypsy' boy rescued from poverty and bought up amongst the Earnshaw family in Yorkshire.  Although Heathcliffe quickly forms a bond with the daughter of the house, Catherine, he suffers from prejudice and discrimination from everyone else he meets.  When Catherine consents to marry Edgar Linton, a proper gentleman, Heathcliffe's bitterness and desire for revenge consume his life, with tragic consequences for those around him.

The first time I read Wuthering Heights, I was expecting a love story, and even though it sort of is, it's about the darker side of love, love that destroys and doesn't make any logical sense.  Heathcliffe is a prototype for the kind of man that lots of women want to rescue.  Isabella Linton thinks she can rescue him at one point, even though he makes it clear that he isn't about to change ("You'd hear of odd things if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face; the most ordinary would be painting on its white the colours of the rainbow and turning the blue eyes black.")  Of course, life isn't a fairy tale and Isabella ends up miserable.  I do like it when authors avoid the temptation of a cliched sub-plot, like Bronte did here.  

Despite all of the bad things that Heathcliffe does, I couldn't help but maintain a bit of sympathy for him and this is the genius of the story for me.  Bronte has created a layered, ambiguous character that does repellent things but never quite manages to fully repel the reader.  The unreliable narration of Nelly works to further this ambiguity and I closed the book with more questions than I had answers.  I don't know what was 'right' or 'wrong' in this novel.

The wildness of the setting and the wildness of the characters was the thing I enjoyed the most about Wuthering Heights.  We all live our day to day lives suppressing our emotions and putting a brave face on things, so it was refreshing to see all of that put on the page with beautiful writing.   The hidden, wilder part of me simply loved this book, and I now count it as one of my favourites.

"For mercy's sake, let us hear no more of it now! Your cold blood can not be worked into a fever - your veins are full of ice-water - but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance."

Source: Personal Copy
First Published: 1847
Score: 5 out of 5

Classics Club: Book 9 of 72
My list can be found here.

Bout of Books - My Goals

The Bout of Books read-a-thon starts on Monday and I've started to think about what I want to achieve during it.  My reading has been slowing down considerably, due to a number of different factors, but mainly work.  May is exam season for me at school and getting the children ready during the final push of the last few weeks is both tiring and emotionally draining.  I've been coming home and slumping in front of the TV most nights.  And then on weekends, I've been doing yet more work and decorating our new house.  Reading has taken a back seat.

But I'm missing reading, and in particular I'm missing that wonderful feeling you get when you finish a book and get to choose a new one.  I've been reading Wuthering Heights and Salt, Sugar, Fat concurrently for almost a week now and I'm starting to get annoyed with not finishing either one, although I am loving both.  I need to re-prioritise and make some more time for reading, so the read-a-thon is a perfect opportunity for this.

I would like to:

1. Read for at least one hour every day.  This may not sound like a lot for some, but for me at the moment it's a big step up and will fit with my work schedule.  At the weekend, I want to read for two hours a day.

2. Also free up some time to spend visiting other blogs and finding some new blogs to follow.

That's it! I'm not going to set any goals apart from that as the act of getting back into reading is the main thing for me.  As for the books I hope to read, I'm going to read for pleasure and on a whim, as I'm focused on getting the enjoyment back :)

Blogging Business and Giveaway Winner

I've not had enough time for reading lately, so I've decided to sign up for the 7th Bout of Books Readathon.  The only other readathon I've ever participated in was the one day Classics Club one, so it'll be interesting to take part in a bigger and longer event.  The week beginning 13th May is a busy one for me at work, with the children in my class taking their exams, so it'll be good to have the distraction of plenty of reading whilst I'm at home.  I currently read for about 30 minutes a day during a working week, I'm hoping to at least double that, and meet some new bloggers :)

I've also decided to work towards reading the 100 books in the Penguin English Library, alongside my classics club goal.  It's a very low key reading target (not a challenge) without a time-scale but I'm excited by it.  I've read 19 out of 100 so far, so there's plenty still to discover!  I've created a tabbed page for it here, where you can see the complete list, my progress and any reviews I have written already.

Finally, in my blog tour review post of Alison McQueen's Under the Jewelled Sky, I was able to offer a fantastic prize of ten new women's fiction hardbacks.  With the help of random.org, the winner has been selected as....

Pearl Wilson

I'll be emailing Pearl and passing her details on to the publisher.

Sam Sunday #14: Recent Acquisitions

These past few weeks have been bumper ones in terms of acquiring new books for my already large collection!  Here's what I've added to my ever-growing TBR pile recently (links go to goodreads).

From a family member de-cluttering her bookshelves:

 

One of my family members recently decided to have a big clear out of books, so my Mum, sister and I all got to have a look through and pick out some titles to keep. I chose the following:

1. In the Woods by Tana French - I'm not a natural crime/thriller/mystery reader but I've heard so many good things about Tana French on blogs that I had to bring this one home.  It's about an Irish detective who has to solve a new mystery at a site familiar to him from his childhood.  I'm looking forward to trying this, it'll be something new for me.

2. The Book of Loss by Julith Jedamus - A diary is stolen in the imperial palace of Kyoto and it reveals a bitter rivalry between two ladies-in-waiting to the Empress.  I have a weakness for historical fiction of any kind, so bringing this one back was a no-brainer.

 

3. Digging to America by Anne Tyler - The story of two Korean babies adopted by two different families in Baltimore, who celebrate 'Arrival Day' each year.  I love a good immigration story, hopefully this will measure up.

4. Jubilee by Shelley Harris - Historical fiction set around the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.  Promises to cover multi-culturalism and identity.

Other Physical Copies:

  

5. The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan - This was on the long-list for the Women's Prize for Fiction and is about Harvard graduates.  When I mentioned that I wanted to read it, the lovely Kaz sent me her copy :)

6. The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown - For a blog tour. A house in Valencia, untouched since the Spanish civil war in 1936, is about to give up it's secrets.  I do like a good dual narrative story.

E-books:

  

7. Blood of the Lamb by Sam Cabot - The Historian meets the Da Vinci code? Yes please! This one is a supernatural thriller about a missing manuscript in Rome and I am so excited to read it! (Review copy from netgalley).

8. Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century by Sergi Kostin and Eric Raynaud - On offer for Kindle.  A true account of a KGB agent that became a spy for the West, under the nose of Brezhnev.

9. American Isis by Carl Rollyson - Review copy from Netgalley.  I love Sylvia Plath, and this biography includes new material from the recently opened Ted Hughes archive.

 

10. Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley - I was actually invited to read this one, how exciting!  I've seen a lot of positive reviews of it and polygamy is just interesting, so I'm hoping to read this very soon.

11. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi - A bit of a cult classic about life in 1990s Britain.  It's been on my wishlist for ages, so I snapped it up when I saw it reduced for the kindle.

Have you read any of these titles? If so, what did you think of them?