Bibliomama

126 books this year (although I've been having problems with Goodreads glitching and not adding books properly, so grain of salt), up from 111 last year. I set my reading challenge to read at least one more book than last year, and I confess that for a while I was reading with one eye on the numbers and feeling slightly anxious about meeting the challenge. Then I gave myself a smack because that is stupid, and stopped. I'm not sure if I'll set it as a challenge again this year - there's something kind of satisfying about that metre showing you what percentage of your challenge you've completed, but do I really need to give myself another thing to be neurotic about? I read a lot less straight fiction this year - I was noticing it throughout the year, and the stats confirm it. Most of the fiction I did read was for a Book Bingo Facebook group I joined, and it was cool - sort of arbitrary prompts that led me to books I wouldn't otherwise have read, some really go

Songbook by Nick Hornby:  “All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.” —Nick Hornby, from  Songbook.   Songs, songwriters, and why and how they get under our skin… Songbook  is Nick Hornby’s labor of love. A shrewd, funny, and completely unique collection of musings on pop music, why it’s good, what makes us listen and love it, and the ways in which it attaches itself to our lives—all with the beat of a perfectly mastered mix tape.  I thought that I had only started this years ago and left it unfinished, but according to Goodreads I had it marked as read. I had almost no memory of it, which is weird because on this read-through I was utterly captivated. I started reading it at physio and was cracking my face in half smiling, welling up with tears and laughing out loud within the first few pages (which caused the man on th

Genre: Fly By Night  by Frances Hardinge:  Twelve-year-old Mosca Mye hasn't got much. Her cruel uncle keeps her locked up in his mill, and her only friend is her pet goose, Saracen, who'll bite anything that crosses his path. But she does have one small, rare thing: the ability to read. She doesn't know it yet, but in a world where books are dangerous things, this gift will change her life. Enter Eponymous Clent, a smooth-talking con man who seems to love words nearly as much as Mosca herself. Soon Mosca and Clent are living a life of deceit and danger -- discovering secret societies, following shady characters onto floating coffeehouses, and entangling themselves with crazed dukes and double-crossing racketeers. It would be exactly the kind of tale Mosca has always longed to take part in, until she learns that her one true love -- words -- may be the death of her.   For the past two years it's been kind of a tradition for me to read a Frances Hardinge book on th