Wave goodbye

If you’re still following Bookphilia.com, bless you. This is, I believe, to be my final post here. On the fifth anniversary of this blog, I’m officially moving onwards and upwards to brighter and broader things; I hope you’ll join me over at Jam and Idleness starting right now!

I’ll still be talking about books there but I’ll also be discussing cooking and learning to garden and sew (not simultaneously) and riding my bicycle—generally, the growing wealth of things I’ve found to do and think about since I’ve realized, post-grad school, that there is more to life than sitting in a chair for 14 hours every day with my nose in a book. I will also be discussing, perhaps, the horror of overly long sentences; but that’s for another day.

My most, most favourite books of the past year:
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope (I’m almost but not quite finished this one…but it’s superlative. I hope Trollope will forgive me, wherever he is, for finding cause to doubt him when I was reading his Autobiography.)

Really good too:
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot (re-read)
The Gone Away World, Nick Harkaway
Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers
Busman’s Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (re-read)
Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Warden, Anthony Trollope

Least favourite:
The Dog of the South, Charles Portis (because parts of it were SO GOOD and the rest of it didn’t come remotely close to living up to its own high standard!!)
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Roddy Doyle
After Dark, Haruki Murakami (Dear Murakami: You believed the hype; haven’t you heard how dangerous that is?)
The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham
The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz
Birthday, Koji Suzuki
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg (If I were still an academic, I would be salivating all over Hogg’s double narrative…but as a “mere” reader, it just couldn’t hold me. Indeed, this book contains some of the sloggingest 250 pages I’ve ever read.)

Especially bad:
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

So, friends, take care. And please come see me in the land of sugary spreads and laziness. :) Thanks again for many good interwebby years!

-Colleen

Bookphilia.com turns 4 today!

It's been a tough one in some ways, but my fourth year of blogging has been filled with a number of truly stellar reads. I've abandoned a feature (the Sarazens Head), lost (hopefully only temporarily) interest in one (I Interview Dead People), and have periodically maintained the most popular (Curious/Creepy). Indeed, a friend of my hubby's recently rejoiced that because I'll soon be commuting to work every day, I must necessarily write more C/C posts. I will try, humbly (and creepily) to fulfill his expectations in this matter.

The best part of the end of the blogging year for me is always compiling my lists of most and least favourite books; here they are:

Favourites! in no particular order, except for the first four, which blew my mind the most:

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall - absolute most favourite!

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Anthony Trollope, The American Senator

T. Colin Campbell, The China Study

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Ellis Peters, The Rose Rent

China Mieville, The City & The City

Shusaku Endo, Deep River

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

Giuseppe de Lampedusa, The Leopard

Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Osamu Dazai, Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunleavy, The More Than Complete Action Philosophers!

Shaun Tan, The Arrival

William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale 

John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (I never reviewed this on Bookphilia; it was approx. the 15th time I'd read it; it's still an all-time favourite, in spite of the fact that it figured prominently in my doctoral thesis)

Sadly, year four wasn't a total love-fest. Least favourites:

Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle

Edogawa Rampo, Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination

J.M. Coetzee, Youth 

Miyuki Miyabe, Crossfire

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Andre Gide, The Immoralist 

Emma Donaghue, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits 

Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

David Almond, Heaven Eyes

Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education

Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

I don't usually make reading plans, and when I do, I often fail to execute. Nonetheless, I have an ambitious project for Bookphilia 5.0: an overview of Victorian lit, mostly fiction, but with some poetry thrown in for good measure. The list has 40+ books on it, beginning with Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841) and ending with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). This list was born out of my increasing frustration over the lack of structure in my reading, and the incredible pleasure I've been consistently taking in Victorian novels, even the ones I don't love. I think this will be a safer and more enjoyable bet than French literature en masse. But we'll see. I am notoriously unreliable when it comes to reading lists.

Right now, however, I'm making my way through an entirely non-Victorian fantasy slash soap opera - George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. It's pretty good. But it is a soap opera.

And, of course, I begin work on Monday at my new job. As I will be commuting (about 40 minutes each way), I will certainly be reading a lot. The question is, will I want to sit in front of the computer and blog after spending all day sitting in front of a computer working? I really don't know. I've certainly managed to be employed and blog frequently at the same time before, but I've not spent much of that employment time as a desk jockey. I'm hoping I'll figure it out, but if you don't hear from me for awhile, it's likely because I'm adjusting to a new schedule, etc.

Finally, cheers to all of you who have been reading along all this time! You're the best.

Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three

Today, Bookphilia.com turns three. I think this has been the most interesting year of blogging for it saw me become increasingly frustrated with the whole process – so frustrated that I deleted the whole damn thing. Of course, I didn’t allow the radio silence to last very long; or, more accurately, I wasn’t able to endure the radio silence and I came back with a vengeance and I think some of my best posts have been written since then. Or maybe the quality hasn’t changed, but my pleasure has certainly increased.

The difference? I’m not really certain, to be honest, although I think part of it was just my finally accepting that while you can take the girl out of the academy, you can’t entirely take the academy out of the girl. Not that the majority of my posts at all resemble the kind of academic writing I used to do, but that for all my terrible experiences in grad school, I nonetheless developed a real taste for writing about what I read while there. I can’t quite remember why I ever felt this was something to be resisted or agonized over, but I don’t feel that way now. When I spent hours and hours writing about Romola, for example, I simply enjoyed it; and in the face of anything as intellectually complex as the writing of George Eliot, I will happily do the same, as exhausting as it was.

So, yes, the third year of Bookphilia has been the most fascinating so far. I’ve killed one feature (The Reading Lamp), continued with another that is both a writer and reader favourite (Curious/Creepy), and begun another two – there are my occasional musings on being a book-seller (The Sarazens head without New-gate), and then there are my newly hatched dreams of talking with the dearly departed literati (I Interview Dead People – look out for a new interview very soon!). But writing about the books I’ve read is still my primary focus and will remain so.

I’ve also begun my very own personal quest to learn about French literature, and I have read twelve books in the area during the last year. One book a month is pretty good for me in terms of providing some structure while still allowing me to dip into the random things that appeal to me. Total randomness is not so prevalent this year as it has been in the past, however.

Having finished my PhD, I’m finally able to check out all those fat Victorian novels I’ve been yearning for and the weightedness of my choices in favour of British literature is much, much higher this year than it has been in the past. I would say I’ll work on that, but you all know how ridiculously unable I am to follow through with any reading promises I make.

Now, of course, an anniversary calls for lists, and I am happy to provide.

Books begun but impossible to finish

• The Complete Poems of Ben Jonson – I would say it’s still too soon post-PhD, but frankly, I just wasn’t enjoying this collection.
• The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne – Very sadly, ditto. Sigh. Maybe next year?
• Cryptonomicon – I will certainly try this again, because I’ve really enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s work in the past but the 50 or so pages I spent with this one had me tearing my hair and rending my cheeks the whole time.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Again, not the right time and irritation was my only critical response. Blog year 3 was only for “normal” Murakami, it seems.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Trying to improve upon perfection is, indeed, foolhardy.
• The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature – Sigh.

Favourite Books
I would say that these are in no particular order, but the first four are definitely my ultimate favourites of the past year:

• Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
• David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• The Immaculate Conception, Gaetan Soucy
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (a reread)
• Old Goriot, Honore de Balzac
• Romola, George Eliot
• Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
• The Virgin in the Ice, Ellis Peters
• Dangerous Liaisons, Choderlos de Laclos
• Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
• Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee
• Adolphe, Benjamin Constant
• Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
• Arthurian Romances, Chretien de Troyes
• The Snapper, Roddy Doyle
• Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado
• Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
• Silas Marner, George Eliot

Least Favourite Books
These are the ones that still make me want to punch someone in the neck, preferably their authors:

• La Bete Humaine, Emile Zola
• The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq
• Run, Ann Patchett
• The Scarecrow and His Servant, Philip Pullman
• Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay
• A Heart So White, Javier Marias
• The Eyre Affair, Jasper Ffacking Fforde
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver

I’m going to spare all of us and resist making any predictions or promises about where my reading will go in the next year. Suffice to say, I plan to enjoy myself, heartily.

Cheers,
Colleen

Year-end wrap-up, or, the ghost of Bookphilia.com future

I may not be counting my books anymore, but I sure am aware of the time – two years ago today, I started this blog. Happy anniversary to moi! Let's raise a glass of sparkling grape juice to celebrate.

Bookphilia.com has been very enjoyable to create and has only become more so as I’ve figured out more clearly what I want to do with it and how I want to do it.

That said, I’m still not doing everything I want to be doing with this site, either in terms of my writing or the brilliance and thoughtfulness of my...er...thoughts on what I read. It’s occurred to me recently that my dissatisfaction with what I write is in part related to the dissatisfaction with what I’ve been reading.

It turns out that reading entirely randomly isn’t as appealing or stimulating to me as it was when I was doing so only between reading for graduate school, where the reading, while I for the most part chose it myself, was still very narrowly focused in terms of both subject matter and context (i.e., original language, country of origin, time period).

I actually miss the order of reading in a university-like fashion. I miss the pleasure of delving into a single time period or author or even theme (e.g., about a hundred years ago, I took a great graduate course called Early Modern Privacy) – I miss feeling like I’m learning something.

Having finished school, I’ve been wondering how I can replicate some of its strictures for myself, in a way I’ll find engaging. Many ideas have come and been shelved and what’s stuck is an idea based on what I don’t know. Of the literatures of all the world’s so-called great nations, it’s French literature I know the least about (although German lit would be a very close second). I’ve read a few things – Madame Bovary, The Stranger, The Plague, Guy de Maupassant’s stories – but it’s definitely a gaping hole in my world literature knowledge.

So, this is my plan: I’ve created a long-ish list of French literature, beginning in the Middle Ages with The Song of Roland and ending, quite arbitrarily, with J.M.G. LeClezio, who won the Nobel for literature last year. I’m sure there are gaps but I’ll fix things as I go along. More on my self-education in French literature (at best to be only a partial education, no matter how much I read, as I’m reading it all in English translation) soon.

Before I can begin this years-long project, however, I’m going to finally be turning my blog into a 3-column blog; my French book list will take up one whole column either to the left or right of the posts, and the other will likely have much of what I already have – blog links, etc. Since I’m changing up so much, I might change my title photo as well, even though I’m quite fond it. All of this will happen in the next couple of weeks when I have more time to sit down with Blogger.

But I should be saying something about the past year instead of harping so much on the ghost of Bookphilia.com future. Having abandoned the book counting, I have no statistics to offer. I will say that I really like the new feature I introduced last year, The Reading Lamp, and have one or two more on the way. I also introduced but then saw the premature death of Curious/Creepy, having moved to an apartment that’s so conveniently located that I never have the opportunity anymore to take transit and spy on people’s reading. Finally, I will soon be introducing an occasional feature about my life as a bookstore owner.

Most importantly, here are some lists of what I hated and what I loved, March 26, 2008-March 25, 2009:

The Best Books of Blog Year le Deuxieme (in no particular order)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
number9dream by David Mitchell
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough
Out by Natsuo Kirino
South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The White Darkness by Geraldine MCaughrean
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Skellig by David Almond

The Worst Books of Blog Year le Deuxieme (in no particular order)
Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
World War Z by Max Brooks
In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
The Light of Day by Graham Swift
Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan

The good news here is that my list of least favourite books is complete whereas my list of favourite books had to be trimmed considerably so that I wouldn’t make this insanely long post too much more unbearable. I read many more good than bad books this year! Here’s to another year of reading many more kick-ass than shiteous books!

Year-end wrap-up, or, Lay your head down on your desk and have a little nap now

Here we are: the last day of the first year of the blog that began as the awkwardly named whatiscolleenreadingnow.blogspot.com and ended as the more memorable but also somewhat more pretentious www.bookphilia.com.

I started this blog simply to find out how many books I read in a year (I was being asked this question a great deal and had no idea) but it's turned into something bigger than that for me. Honestly, writing this blog is one of my favourite things to do and I think has restored a great deal of my pre-PhD enthusiasm for books (and comfort with talking only about how awesome or shiteous a book is). Other revelations this year: I read more than I thought; I am becoming increasingly impatient with contemporary fiction (i.e., Serious Literature); I love books almost more than anything else in the world (okay, I might have known this one already).

So, here are some stats for you, summing up what I've read in the past year and how I've felt about it at the extreme ends of adoration and loathing - and of course, the final number of completed books.

Authors I've read this year:

Adams, Douglas; Adrian, Chris; Akutagawa, Ryunosuke; Alexie, Sherman; Allen, Woody; Ammaniti, Niccolo; Banks, Iain; Bauby, Jean-Dominique; Brooks, Terry; Burroughs, Augusten; Byatt, A.S; Carey, Peter; Chabon, Michael; Colfer, Eoin; Collins, Wilkie; Collodi, Carlo; Crane, Stephen; Dickens, Charles; Eco, Umberto; Erdrich, Louise; Frame, Janet; Gaiman, Neil; Highway, Thomson; Hynes, James; Jeffery, Lawrence; Johnson, Gordon; Kawabata, Yasunari; Keyes, Daniel; Kim, Young-Ha; Kishi, Yusuke; Krauss, Nicole; Kundera, Milan; Kushner, Tony; LeGuin, Ursula K.; L’Engle, Madeleine; Mahfouz, Naguib; McCarthy, Cormac; Millar, Martin; Mishima, Yukio; Mitchell, David; Miyamoto, Teru; Murakami, Haruki; Nix, Garth; O’Brien, Flann; Pamuk, Orhan; Pavese, Cesare; Priest, Christopher; Prince-Hughes, Dawn; Pu, Songling; Rahimi, Atiq; Rhodes, Dan; Scalzi, John; Sebold. Alice; Shaogong, Han; Singer, Isaac Bashevis; Spark, Muriel; Stewart, Mary; Suskind, Patrick; Takami, Koushun; Tanizaki, Junichiro; Toibin, Colm; Tong, Su; Tuttle, Will; van Niekerk, Marlene; Vonnegut, Kurt; Wodehouse, P.G.; Yoshimoto, Banana; Zusak, Markus.

Countries represented:

Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, USA.

Most over-represented author of the year:

It's a tie between Garth Nix and P.G. Wodehouse, with 5 apiece.

Most over-represented country:

The USA, with 25+ representations.

Worst books of the year (in no particular order):

The Road, Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, The Lovely Bones, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Flowers for Algernon, The King of the Fields.

Best books of the year (in no particular order):

Rashomon and 17 Other Stories, At Swim-Two-Birds, Ghostwritten, The Harafish, Leave it to Psmith, Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Quicksand.

Unfinished reads:

The Early History of Rome, The Cat and Shakespeare.

Total reads for blog-year 1:

86