Patently I didn't start my Summer Reading Challenge on Saturday (or, indeed, Sunday or Monday). Jane Harris's playful Victoriana, The Observations, had me hooked in the first paragraph and, powerless to resist, I gave into its 400+ pages of revengeful ghosts, hysterical ladies and benevolent parsons... Still, better late than never right?
I had made a summer reading schedule with dates and everything...but now that I'm behind I'll just list the books I'm aiming at and plough on as quickly as I can. No doubt I'm being overambitious - the first book I chose could be used as concussive weapon and there are a couple of heavy non-fictions - but that's the challenge aspect. :-)
1. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (read) : I feel like Nic has been recommending this to me since the day we met and I've had a copy taking up inches on my TBR shelves for a couple of years now. It's just so dauntingly huge at 1474 pages...but if not now, when?
2. The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists - Gideon Defoe (read) : How to resist a book about "incredibly stupid pirates and ham" that might have been "written by Enid Blyton after a night in an opium den"? (Also, its only 144 pages long after what I anticipate to be the week spent on Seth's tome.)
3. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell : I'm years late to the hype-party again; I thought I better read it before Black Swan Green comes through on my library request.
4. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary - Marina Warner : This is entirely random...I came across it in one of my TBR boxes last week and it appealed. I hear that the scholarship is somewhat deficient but nevertheless my copy smelt strangely yummy and so here it is. (The cover pictured on Amazon is terrifyingly garish. Safe to say mine is more restrained...)
5. The Master and the Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov : Another frequently recommended book. My copy has a shadow-puppet dancing cat on the front. Can't beat that.
6. The Electric Michelangelo - Sarah Hall : I think it was Emma who recommended this to me, and I'm sure Hall is also a fellow St. Andrews Alumni. Huzzah!
7. A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louise Baldwin - Judith Flanders : My second non-fiction and a lonely unread left-over from my fascinations with Pre-raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement.
8. Arts and Wonders - Gregory Norminton : Incorrigible dwarf travels over Europe forging things in the Renaissance. Sounds good to me. :-)
9. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger : I've been meaning to read it for months and something always seems to intervene; I promise myself this for over my birthday in July since I'm sure I'm going to love it.
10. Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey : If you're not familiar with the realm of speculative fiction then this, the second book in Carey's sexy alternate history, might not be familiar. I read the first one years ago and was sure I'd devour the rest quickly...then I didn't.
11. Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700 - Diarmuid MacCulloch : I love everything about the look of this book: the fine grade paper that gives it that special heft, the deep red matt cover with the gold lettering, those imposing historical personages arrayed across the front. I'm sure it'll be heavy work for a pleasure read but I'm determined.
12. The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story - Stephen Donaldson : Again, chosen partly because its wonderfully short after Reformation and also because I'm a Space Opera virgin and 23 years old. Shameful. It's all because the idea of "space" freaks me out. I mean, there's no up or down...
13. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst : I've had this at least since it was shortlisted for the Booker and should finally get myself around to reading it.
14. The Briar King (Book 1 Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone) - Greg Keyes : I've been hankering after some good nostalgic, "traditional" Fantasy recently, and considered embarking on a reread of Tad William's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sequence but then stumbled across this instead.
15. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro : Never Let Me Go was my first outing with Ishiguro and at regular intervals Esther demands I read his "best" novel.
16. The Rise of the Greeks - Michael Grant : It's this simple: I don't know anything about Classical Greece. Nothing at all. It was never something we covered at school (probably not dramatic enough) and I feel its a huge gap in my general knowledge. I got this in a book club offer long ago and it seems a convenient enough place to start.
17. The Quincunx - Charles Palliser : Another ridiculously long novel...I didn't realise quite how many of those I'd chosen. Its just that they all look so juicy.
18. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury : I call myself a fan of speculative fiction and I still haven't read any Ray Bradbury. I need a good talking to.
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky : In my original plan I gave this a whole week to itself. I've read virtually no Russian literature, which is yet another lamentable gap in my reading history.
20. The Darkness That Comes Before - R. Scott Bakker : I'm ashamed to say that I've recommended this book to other people without having actually read it myself. Tis the first book in what I've heard called "the greatest finished Fantasy trilogy ever" and I'm very interested to see what Bakker has done differently with the mediaeval paradigm.
21. Small Island - Andrea Levy : I seem to think this won every prize under the sun one year and that it was later named the best Orange Prize winner in the award's first ten years. I'd forgotten I even had a copy...
22. The Master - Colm Toibin : I was inspired to put this in the challenge by David Lodge's severe case of sour grapes in the Guardian Review recently. He carped on over the course of two weeks about how Toibin's novel had overshadowed his own book, Author, Author, which had some of the same subject matter and was published a few months after it. In my opinion his grumbling was in poor taste and only served to remind me why I wanted to read The Master in the first place: it's about Henry James, with whom I had a literary love affair in my mid-teens.
23. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing : I felt like getting back to the brink of feminism...the reissue has a drab cover but you can't have everything.
24. Lempiere's Dictionary - Lawrence Norfolk : In my second year of university I stumbled on a novel called The Pope's Rhinoceros, also by Lawrence Norfolk, bought it and loved it in all its idiosyncratic storytelling glory. I've been meaning to follow up on his other work ever since.
25. Waldon and Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau: And last but not least some wise words from those United States of America...
What do you think? I tried to make it as varied as possible, with novels by men and women and covering the classic, contemporary and genre fiction. I have to admit it was a bit daunting typing it all out, especially with A Suitable Boy hulked up next to me in all its hugeness. And I have to remember to fit in library books as well. I went yesterday and picked up James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder, which had come in for me on recall, and also ended up with Hermione Lee's Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing. Tis going to be a busy few months. :-)
~~Victoria~~