So, it’s over – the chillingly spooky RIP Challenge, as brought to us by Carl V. at SSP, has heard its death knell and toppled into a wintery grave. (You can find Carl's round up post, complete with a list of *all* the titles read by challengers over the last two months, here.) May it rest peacefully till next year and what promises to be an all-improved second outing! You may or may not remember my own challenge list – I thought five books would be pretty easy, especially since two of them were chosen for their brevity. Alas though, I didn’t quite manage to reach my target…mayhap a pattern is emerging as regards these challenges?
I started off well enough, devouring and posting about the delightfully atmospheric The Woman in Black in record time (something to do with it’s merciful shortness?), before moving on to the first of my two ‘Classic’ horrors, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I tackled that in short order too, and admired it so much that I was inspired to read Muriel Spark’s book of biography and criticism as a ‘bonus’ to the challenge. I’m glad I did – Mary lead a doggedly tragic life – and I’m still meaning to write up my notes on the novel into a post (soon…soon…), but it did put me behind. After that I got almost-terminally bogged down in the late-Victorian etiquette of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel which, while heart-stopping at intervals, was largely dead to me (pun intended). I’m sure this had more to do with my reading mood at the time than with the novel itself and, retrospectively, the action and themes have provoked me more than I imagined they would. Again, a post in the future I hope.
By which point it was mid-October and my intention was to move swiftly on to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which I mooched in preparation), before closing on Affinity by Sarah Waters, a book I’ve been saving for a long time. But fate intervened by throwing Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale in my path and, since Carl, Danielle and a number of others were singing its praises, I opened it. Thirty-six hours later I emerged, satiated – it really is extroadinarily compelling – if a little cheated by the ending (which utilised my most hated sleight-of-plot).
And then I got distracted...again... by my Bible reading plan, and by my self-imposed ‘core’ reading for October: Walter Scott’s delicious but dense Waverley. Safe to say I will be reading I Am Legend and Affinity at some point before the New Year, but for now they’re in a holding pattern while my attention, ever-fickle, always-adventuring, turns to…erm…another reading challenge.
There were two on offer this month (everyone evidently loves making a list and having the focus as much as I do!), but I decided to attempt just one – no need to embarrass myself with my inability to complete either of them. Unfortunately, it was Kailana’s inspired War Reads November Challenge that fell by the wayside. Despite my having several topical books on the TBR pile – The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert and The Seige by Helen Dunmore immediately spring to mind – I decided that a) I had already gone some way to fulfilling the challenge quota in the last year or so (A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and a recent re-read of the peerless Regeneration by Pat Barker), and b) the other challenge was more of a balm to my inflamed book-buyer’s guilt.
Michelle at Overdue Books has proposed the ‘From the Stacks’ Winter Reading Challenge, in which “we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.” And this sounds Very Good To Me, since it's now coming to that time of the year when I should be buying books as gifts for others rather than for myself. (Also, ‘tis that time of year when my friends see fit to shower me with books-as-gifts. Three cheers for them.) Thus I set my unprejudiced assistant (i.e. Esther) the task of choosing me five books from the interminable pile, my only proviso being that they should be ones that I’ve been most vocal about wanting to get around to.
In her wisdom, she chose:
1. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Eco – Serendipitously, this also fits nicely into Kailana’s ‘War Reads’, as Esther tells me it focuses quite closely on the development of fascist rhetoric and propaganda in Italy during the 1930s. The synopsis sounds all things fascinating:
‘Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac.’
2. The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells - I’ve been meaning to read some Wells for ages, and most especially since the Slaves of Golconda’s interesting discussion of The Island of Doctor Moreau. I just happened to have this one lying around.
3. One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – I’m sure that this is quite a recent acquisition to the TBR stack; in fact, I think Nic bought it for my birthday this summer as part of our ongoing mission to proselytise good books to each other through gift-giving. The history of a single day in a Soviet labour camp in 1951, it promises to be a window on inhumanity and a short but rigorous read.
4. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood – As soon as Canongate announced their Myth Series I knew I would have to collect them all in hardback as they came out…and so I’m now the proud owner of the first six volumes. The frustrations of book buying have meant that I’ve only managed to read the first two though, and this Atwood has been highly anticipated.
And finally,
5. The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber – I cracked and bought it in hardback so I must, must, must read it before the paperback shows its face. The Crimson Petal and the White is, undoubtedly, amongst the best historical novels I have ever read, jostling up there with Dorothy Dunnett and Susanna Clarke for sheer class. If you haven’t read it, do, and soon.
...All I have to do now is get a head start on these (the challenge runs until the end of January) before Carl V. announces the Christmas Challenge he has hinted at. Because I know I won't be able to resist...
~~Victoria~~