My Thoughts: So Many Books, So LittleTime by Sara Nelson

I love hearing and reading about other peoples reading and their opinions on books so during my recent reading slump I picked this up hopig it would inspire me to read again - I am, although not sure if I can say it is down to the book.

This books sets out to be a reading journal of an avid read, Sara Nelson used to be a book reviewer so she knows her stuff. This book turned out to be more about why she read, why she picked the books she did and how those books related to periods in her life. I was pleased to see she loved A Million Little Pieces and The Crimson Petal and the White but she slatted a lot of other books and authors who I enjoy.

A very easy read, but as it was American it featured a great many books I'd never heard of - I guess they weren't such a big hit over here - or I was still in nappies when hey come out so missed the hype about them.

The Sunday Salon: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers bu Loung Ung

I haven't posted a book review on here in ages - I seem to be distracted lately when reading or I'm too busy to actually get to a book. This is the first nook I have finished in a while, but I have a poetry collection and another non-ficion half read so they should be coming up for review shortly.

I picked this book about Cambodia off of the shelves as I'm planning on travelling there next summer (5 weeks to explore Cambodia, Laos and south Vietnam - I've done the north already and loved it) and also my ex is there at the moment and he has been raving about it in his emails.
First The Killed My Father is a memoir, Loung Ung was just 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge stormed Phnom Penh causing thousands to escape from the city in search of safety. Coming from a rich family bacame both a danger but also a blessing as this family went on the run. Escaping first to families homes and then to distant villages they had to be careful at every moment to hide the father's past work with the old government. The Khmer Rouge a Communist Extremist group forced families to live in camps on meager rations, for children to work in rice fields and vegetable patches to help feed the armies. Her brother is forced to face bullying by the generals children as a means of keeping the family alive with a few extra scraps of food each night. As Loung gets older she witness the death of her sister and the disappearance of her father. She then is sent to a Children's Camp where the kids are taught how to attack the 'enemy' with the tools they use in their jobs.
The stories of what the families went through and the seperation of the families is harrowing, the political side of things is very sketchy so I'll be searching out a few non-fiction texts to find out more about the place before I go - the ex has already recommended one, which I'll borrow when he arrives back in the UK.

Challenges:
World Citizen Challenge
A-Z (Author)
In Their Shoes

Just got back from watching some live performance poetry, we arrived late as the restaurant we went to before was packed and way understaffed, but the first poets were fairly old. Then we saw some really quirky young English poets who I thought I'd share with you. Apparently this live poetry event is going to happen once a month in my town to looks like I've got a permanent outing to go to.
Hope you enjoy

Nathan Penlington

Ross Sutherland

Luke Kennard

The Twelve Step Poetry Program

Over at Bookgazing the TWELVE STEP POETRY PROGRAM is starting in a few days. Since leaving university the only poetry I seem to read is those poems which I teach, and while I love those poems (for the most part) I have to read the same poems that are on the curriculum for the last 3 years - they're still great but I'm not getting any variety. I saw this challenge posted and thought it'd help.
Below is (copied and pasted) the challenge description.

At it’s simplest level the challenge requires that anyone who feels like joining reads twelve books of poetry, each by a different author, in twelve months. Each book must be the work of one poet (that means no anthologies, like ‘The 101 Best Love Poems’, are allowed). Inject your lives with poetry from 1st Sept 2009 – 30th Aug 2010.

However I know what you serious challenge addicts want. You want something that allows you to make an uber-complicated list which includes categories. I want that too, what is the point of a challenge without at least a provisional list? How much better is it if the list includes separate classifications? So for my personal challenge I’ll be reading two books from each of the six categories below:

2 female poets: There are tons of wonderful female poets I want to recommend – Wendy Cope, Dorothy Parker, Adrianne Rich are just a few.

2 translated poets: This is an area I know very little about, yay for new discoveries. Anyone have recommendations?

2 dead white male poets: I have plenty of recommendations for this category – Philip Larkin, William Blake, Robert Frost.

2 poets who have held an official poetry post: I’m British so I’m thinking of reading Poet Laureates like Carol Ann Duffy and Andrew Motion. You may want to find out about poets in other countries who have held equivalent positions.

2 black/ hispanic/ asian poets: You can read books by any poets who are not white for this category. Personal favourites of mine are Srikanth Reddy and Patricia Smith.

2 GLBT poets: I put this category in because I wanted to include all kinds of diversity, but if you find it hard to pick poets (because you’ve already read all the poets where their sexuality is publically known) then you’re free to replace it with two books of poetry where the authors write a specific type of poetry (such as comic poetry, epic poetry like Beowulf etc). Personally I’d recommend picking up something by the ‘Great War’ poets Wilfred Owen, Rupert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon to fulfil this category if you haven't already read their stuff.

Here’s the especially challenging part, you can’t overlap categories and use one poet to fill many categories (for example Carol Ann Duffy is gay, female and England’s current poet Laureate but you can only use her in one of those categories - you can pick which category you use her book to fulfil but she can only count for one). You can also only read one book by each poet. That means you’ll read twelve books by twelve poets in twelve months.

But wait there’s a third level of challenge! You can join me in making poetry an even bigger part of life. In my house sits Poetry Daily’s 2003 anthology, which has a poem from each day of the year. I plan to read a poem from this anthology every day from 1st Sept 2009 until the end of the challenge on 30th Aug 2010. If you want to go the extra mile and let poetry flood into your everyday life you can either read that anthology with me or read a poem daily at heir website.

Reviews

Book bloggers don’t tend to review poetry, maybe because they don’t feel like they have the expertise to judge poetry, or because they’re not sure how to make their review format work for poetry. So, while you can fully review the books you read for this challenge if you like, you can also take the option of just sharing some of your favourite lines from the book (remember please don’t post full poems, there are copyright issues with that, instead link to full versions somewhere else). If you want to include anything else (poets biography, how particular poems made you feel etc) please do! I’d love to see all kinds of poetry related stuff popping up. I’ll sort out a way of organising the links to these posts later so people can find them.

Also there’s no need to post daily reviews of your daily poems, we’d all quickly be swamped!

So after the blather, the recap:

Challenge runs: 1st Sept 2009 – 30th Aug 2010

Challenge name: The Twelve Step Poetry Program

Option 1: 12 books of poetry, each by a different author
Option 2: 12 books of poetry, each by a different author, with two books chosen from each category mentioned above
Option 3: Option 2 + a poem a day from Poetry Daily until the end of the challenge

Sign up: In the comments below by leaving a link to a post you make about the challenge (including lists if you want). I hope loads to see a few challengers join me in September.

I'm going for the simple option, however I will try and read one collection from each of the categories above. I'm looking forward to discovering new poets to me, for an English graduate I have read surprisingly few, as well as rediscovering a few favorite poets.
I'll be grabbing my Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and T.S Eliot collections. Any other recommendations?

I'm also going to try and read a poem a day from my Penguin anthology - not sure if I'm going to read it in date order - that might put me off, or just by picking a random page a day.

P.S If you haven't read Carol Ann Duffy before, or you've just not read her for a while I highly recommend her collection 'The World's Wife', each poem is written from the view of the woman living in a famous man's shadow. Gems include poems by Elvis' sister, Shakespeare's wife and Midas' wife.

R.I.P IV

Carl is again hosting his RIP challenge, a chance to pick out some of the darker books lurking in my TBR pile. The challenge runs from September 1st till October 31st. As always different levels of participation are available, I will be completing Peril the First, to read 4 books of a gothic nature. I'll also participate in Short Story Sunday each week.
My Pool:
Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree (audiobook)
M.G Lewis, The Monk
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club
Anonymous, The Book with No Name
L.J Smith, Night World (Vol 1)
Edith Wharton, The Ghost Feeler
Scott Westerfeld, The Secret Hour

I'll search out some graphic novels and short story collections as well over next two months

Challenge Update August

A-Z Challenge (Authors) 19/27
A-Z Challenge (Titles) 16/27
In Their Shoes 7/4 COMPLETE
The Dream King 2/12
1% Well Read Challenge 7/13
Orbis Terrarum 18/10 COMPLETE
The Genre Challenge 8/10 FINISHED - FAILED TO COMPLETE
The Decades Challenge 4/10
The Carribean Challenge 0/6
My Year of Reading Dangerously 2/12
The World Citizen Challenge 4/3 COMPLETE
Y.A Challenge 16/12 COMPLETE
Deweys Book Reading Challenge 0/6
The 2009 Pub Challenge 2/9
Themed Challenge 2/4 FINISHED - FAILED TO COMPLETE
999 Challenge 58/81
Book Awards 2 5/10 FINISHED - FAILED TO COMPLETE
2nd Canadian Challenge 1/13 ABANDONING - WILL NEVER COMPLETE
Latin American Challenge 4/4 COMPLETE
The Rescue Challenge 3/4
The Graphic Novel Challenge 11/12
Manga Challenge 1/4
War Through the Generations: WWII 3/5
Lost in Translation 8/6 COMPLETE
Notable Challenge 2/6
What's in a Name? 5/6
The Well Seasoned Reader 3/3 COMPLETED!
The Chunkster Challenge 8/6 COMPLETE
The Guardian 100 novels 3/10
Banned Book Challege 1/4
Once Upon a Time III Challenge 5/5 COMPLETE
Herding Cats 0/2
Its the End of the World 3/4
Japanese Literature Challenge 1/3
Book Awards 3 0/5
Non-Fiction 5 7/5 COMPLETE

Two Non-Fiction Books

I seem to be soaking up my Non-Fiction at the momnet, and I even read one which wasn't a memoir!

Normal by Amy Bloom
Eva of The Striped Armchair wrote a fantastic review of this a few weeks back, if it hadn't been for her review I wouldn't ever have thought to read a book like this.
Normal is a collection of essays written by Amy Bloom, I couldn't believe how readable they were, and how interesting.
The first chapter focuses on transexuals, particularly male to female transexuals. It discusses the details and forms of surgery and hormonal treatment available, and boy does it sound painful. Alongside this Amy Bloom speaks to many people who are either in the process of or have had some form of surgery to change their appearance to a person of the opposite gender. As well as the stories of these men Bloom is open with us about the way she is looking at people trying to figure out if they had had a sex change or not.
The second section is about crossdressing men and their wives. She describes the men's need to dress as woman as a compulsion, something they absolutely have to do and have no control of. As she talks to the men they all come across as really conservative, they have socially upstanding jobs like Ministers and Managers, they have families and strong moral values. Many of the wives, presented in the book, don't find out abaout their husbands until way down the line and when they do they feel they have to stay and be supportive.
The third chapter about Hermaphrodites was fair more descriptive of the surgery and didn't have the same level of personal stories in it, as a result I wasn't as interested in this chapter. I had studied hermaphrodites as part of my sociology course in uni so I knew about some of the stuff which was discussed.
Challenges:
World Citizen Challenge
Non-Fiction 5
999 Non-Fiction




Night by Elie Wiesel

I had this on audiobook to listen to, it is one of the 1001 books to read before you die so when I saw the audiobook was part of a bookring I snapped it up.
Night is a memoir about Elie Wiessel experienced in the concentration camps.
As a young boy he is an extremely devout Jew, he visits the synagoge every day and begs a neighbour to educate him about his religion as his father refuses to.
As the war looms the town are warned by a local man of the persecution of the Jewish, but they refuse to listen to him. Snatched away during the night they soon find that his unbelieveable story was all true. 15 year old Elie is seperated from his mother and sister and goes with his father into the male side of the camp. For a long time they are not called to work or moved to other camps because they claim they are unskilled labourers. When they finally get chosen to move to another camp they know that their time is running out.
Elie's father is hospitalised in the final days of the war, begging for hos sons help in his final moments, Elie finds he is unable o help his father, he has to help himself instead.
The book is very short and very powerful, however as I'd read Primo Levi's If This is a Man many years ago I wasn't as shocked by the memoir as I may have been, the story is very similar to that of Levi, and tells of less shocking details in the camps.
Challenges:
World Citizen Challenge
Non-Fiction 5
In Their Shoes
999 (Non Fiction)