What's In A Name? 2 Challenge

Amy is holding a second round of the What's In a Name? Challenge. The premise is the same as before, read 6 books, each title has to fit into a different category.

1. A book with a "profession" in its title.

The Robber Bride - Atwood

The Zookeepers Wife

The Ice Queen, Hoffmann

2. A book with a "time of day" in its title.

Naked Lunch

Tender is the Night

3. A book with a "relative" in its title.

The Bonesetter's Daughter

Sister of my Heart - Divkrum

When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro

4. A book with a "body part" in its title.

Heart Songs - Proulx

Heart Shaped Box

The Wood Wife, Windling

The Bluest Eye, Morrison

5. A book with a "building" in its title.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Jamacia Inn, Du Mauriner

Perdido Street Station

The Castle, Kafka

House of Leaves

6. A book with a "medical condition" in its title.

Girlfriend in a Coma

My Thoughts: The Gathering by Anne Enright

Lots of reviews of this book say it is too depressing, too miserable. This is a book about a suicide, its hardly likely to be full of happiness and joy.

The book is narrated by a middle aged, middle class woman, with a seemingly perfect life - she's at home looking after the kids, whilst her husbands business is going so well she can buy anything she wants. But she isn't happy.

When her brother commits suicide she starts mulling over events in the past, her past and her families past, as well as the present, her lifeless, loveless marriage. Veronica is from a large family, one where the kids all drag up each other. The mother has too many kids to care about each child individually, and she also has some type of problem, so the family is constantly trying to protect her from the live going on around her. Veronica seems to hate, and yet love her mother, and also blames her father for having to grow up in this overly large family.

After her brother's suicide, Veronica explores a past she would have never known, the meeting of her grandparents, and how that meeting led to the event that she says it the root cause of her brother's death.

This novel is firmly based in the thoughts of the narrator, no great event happens, and you guess early on what childhood event will be revealed. I felt I never knew whether to trust this narrator, at some points she even told you that she couldn't clearly remember events. I also didn't really like her, or any of her family, they all seemed fairly self absorbed, no one really seemed to love anyone else, they all just existed side-by-side.

Saying that I thought it was well written, and a good read.

This was the last book I had to read for the 2008 Man Booker Challenge, this year I read:

1. The Gathering (winner)
2. The Famished Road (winner)
3. Sour Sweet (Short listed 1982)
4. Moon Tiger (winner 1986)
5. Mister Pip (Short listed 2007)
6. The Orchard on Fire (Short listed 1996)

By far my favorite was Mr Pip. In the next year I shall be reading all the of the 2008 shortlist, as well as some previous winners and runners up

Booking Through Thursday: Book Conditions

Are you a spine breaker? Or a dog-earer? Do you expect to keep your books in
pristine condition even after you have read them? Does watching other readers
bend the cover all the way round make you flinch or squeal in pain?

I used to bend the corners of pages to make my place, but I have gotten myself out of that habit, however I do leave them open face down. The spines do get broken, and occasionally pages have a gorgeous quote underlined or starred. I tend to only write notes around poetry.
I believe books are there to be enjoyed, they are not items in a museum. I used to know a guy who barely opened the book to read it as he wanted it to look pristine when he had finished with it, he always looked uncomfortable as he read.
As most of the books I read are second hand, or come from bookcrossing, they have already been read so its not a problem what condition they arrive in.
What makes me annoyed is when the kids at school bend the cover all the way around, its not their book and is just likely to make it break or pages fall out so other people can't enjoy it in the future. And when they write rude words or pictures in it - then they know they are in trouble!

P.S I have a challenge running till Dec 09 based on the BTT question from a couple of weeks ago, about books that have been sitting on your shelf for ages waiting to be read. Thr Rescue Challenge is to save those poor books from being ignored any longer, details can be found here

Book Give Away

There is a book giveaway over at BLOG.LITERARILY.COM for The Witches Trinity: A Novel. The giveaway is open till the 14th of November.
Plus over at the site is a great little essay about witches in history, go check it out.

RIP III: Wrap-up

I ended up going a little overboard on my reading. I needed to read 4, I managed....

The Gargoyle, Davidson *****

The Little Black Book of Stories, A.S Byatt ***

Fragile Things, Gaiman ****

The End of Mr Y, Thomas *****

Coraline, Gaiman ****

Creatures of the Night, Gaiman ****

Three Shadows, Perdosa ****

Varjax Paw, Said ***

I also started and abandoned one book, and started and put aside for a little while another, as I just wasn't in the mood for it.

Just pipping the post for fav over The End of Mr Y, is The Gargoyle. This was an excellent read. Look forward to taking part in this challenge again next year.

My Thoughts: The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson

Ultimately going to become my favorite book of the year!

I sat down this morning to read some of this book, and read for 7 hours, only stopping to nip to the supermarket and to eat tea. Its amazing, really powerful.

The book is about a burns victim, he is in a car crash, his own coke-induced fault, which leads to immense burning of his hole body - the descriptions of the burns on the first 10 pages is horrific, and nearly made me put the book down. He goes from being a pornographic cassonova, with his own company and party lifestyle, to a guy completely dependent on others for his every need.

Into the ward, and into his life walk Marianne Engel calmly announcing that she has been looking for him for the last 700 years, since they were last lovers.

Marianne is Schizophrenic/manic depressive/ genius/ fantastic story-teller. She recounts their life together, plus telling him tales of various other connected figures, and folk tales while helping him with his treatment and taking him into her own care. She is a compulsive sculptor, working into a frenzy when God talks to her and tells her what to create.

The book is full of knowledge, of burns, religion, myth, Dante's Inferno (which I so want to read now!), and schizophrenia but everything is delivered so you can understand. It felt like a cross between The Time Traveller's Wife (my fav book) and The End of Mr Y.

Read for the RIP III challenge (book 9/4)

Other Readers

Book-a-rama

The Literate Housewife

If you have read this please leave a link to your review in the comments and I'll add the link to the post

Sunday Salon: A week of reading planned

This last week has been really busy, the last week before half term is always jammed packed, so my reading has been limited. The only things I did seem to do, was create 2 new challenges; The Rescue Challenge and Exploration: Latin American Reading Challenge (see here for info), and join a new challenge for 2009, The Pub Challenge - a challenge to read books published in 2009.

As I have a week off I'm planning to attack my reading piles and especially my reading challenges. I have to finish The Gargoyle and Out, both of which are extras for Carl's RIP III challenge. Out is also my second read for the Japanese challenge, hopefully I'm going to find another Japanese book this week and get this challenge bagged. I'm also trying to read at least one short story a day from a collection of Nineteenth Century short stories, then I'll only need to read one more collection of stories before the end of the yet.

Anyone else tackling their challenges st the moment? How is it going?