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We’re in the slow, cold part of the winter now. Christmas and my birthday have both passed, so now I’m ready for spring, although I wouldn’t mind a bit of snow accumulation first (on a weekend, so I don’t have anywhere to go or anything to do but look at how pretty snow is). Unfortunately, months to go before spring and sunshine yet, but on the bright side, I can spend these months reading. I’ve started 2015 with three books I loved and one book I didn’t. My thoughts below.
The Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb
I’m lumping these all together because I can’t split them particularly well in my head. This trilogy is the beginning of the story of FitzChivalry Farseer, the bastard son of Prince-in-Waiting Chivalry Farseer of the Six Duchies and fated to be the Catalyst that changes the course of his country’s history. These books are set in a fantasy medieval world and mostly consist of Fitz growing to manhood in a very uncertain, dangerous situation, after his father’s abdication and death and his country’s coasts threatened by war with soulless raiders. He is trained as an assassin for his king, a dangerous and controversial role amongst people who would be all too happy to see him dead.
 I loved reading these books again. I read them first in high school and honestly am not quite sure when, as I mentioned last week. I am so pleased that I loved them again, even though I remembered virtually nothing about them. I got so attached to Fitz all over again, even though Robin Hobb is very, very hard on him – harder than I’d thought she would be, as part of the ending of the trilogy was different than I thought I’d remembered. That was a strange experience, but I think I might have actually mixed this up in my head with the Tawny Man trilogy that picks up Fitz’s story a few years later. I knew that the author wasn’t done with Fitz quite yet, so I wasn’t disappointed with the ending, which isn’t exactly a satisfying wrap-up in some ways. I’m instead pleased that there’s more to come.
I loved Fitz himself, but I also so loved the women surrounding him; Kettricken, Molly, and Patience, each of whom represents something completely different to him. Kettricken I think is my favorite in this trilogy (how did I manage to forget Kettricken?), with her inner strength and natural generosity but all too human failings of jealousy and gullibility. Hobb’s characterization has always set her books apart for me and I love how well she shows us so many types of people. I read reviews of these books after I’d finished – not something I normally do much, but I was curious – and I was surprised to see people complaining that the books were slow. I never got bored and I loved every page, just like I did when I was younger. The world that Hobb creates is so fascinating to me. I like different, unusual settings, but in all honesty I just love the traditional pseudo-medieval world she’s portraying, with the edge of mysterious magic that’s now very lost to history.
I was so pleased I chose to start 2015 off with this re-read and I know I’m going to be reading the rest of Hobb’s books set in this world this year for sure now. If there was any doubt, I’ve already started Ship of Magic, the first of the Liveship Traders series, which I actually recall as my favorite of all of her trilogies. I am so excited to reread these (Althea!), but I’m also looking forward to getting back to Fitz. I know I have plenty of books waiting for me, but these are all I want to read at the moment. Best of all, there are some at the end I haven’t read yet, not least my beautiful, signed edition of Fool’s Assassin.
 Arlington Park, Rachel Cusk
One of my generally ongoing goals is to read my older books. I have a lot of books from 2008 and 2009 in particular when I went a little crazy about charity shops and bought a lot of books I’d heard of or had recommended for very low prices. I don’t really frequent charity shops for books any more; I tend to instead donate my books to them and donate money to causes I care about, while spending my money in physical bookshops to do my little bit to keep them going. But in any case, Arlington Park is one of these books and I thought it would be a quick and easy one to tick off the list before I let myself read more Robin Hobb.
Unfortunately, I can’t really say I enjoyed it. The book takes place over a single day set in the upper middle class suburb of Arlington Park, told by a rotating group of women who are extremely dissatisfied with their lives. The women are generally well-off housewives with young children, who feel out of control. One, Juliet, feels that her life and potential has been sucked out of her by her husband and children; another keeps a meticulously tidy house to ward off death and views her children as obstacles; a third, Christine, has spent most of her life escaping her lower-class childhood and seems to insist she’s “solving the world’s problems” in the midst of shopping and casual disregard for her children.
This book I felt had edges of something powerful, as there is certainly a case for discontent in the boundaries of a woman’s life when it’s ruled by other people, but it bothered me. It goes too far and it’s too easy to look at these women and think, first world problems. Things happen to them, rather than any of them taking control, and the women who did try to seize the agency in their lives were still universally unhappy. This is namely Maisie who chose to leave London and is now busily unhappily unmoored in Arlington Park. Everyone and everything is at a distance to these women. I think the author was trying to get across that material and surface wealth – having a good looking, working husband and children, a nice big house, lots of free time – doesn’t equal happiness, but I just wanted them to take control of their lives. Christine I felt was the one who epitomised the whole sentiment of the book; she is the one who says she’s solving the world’s problems, but all she’s doing is complaining about her own, feeling afraid of people “below” her because she doesn’t want to be one of those people, and virtually ignoring her children in the meantime. All of these women complain, but I wanted them to do what I would do (or at least what I feel I would do); get a babysitter and go to work, or volunteer, or do something different to stop the endless round of complaining about children and husbands. Maybe I missed the point. Have you read this? Did I?
Anyway, not particularly recommended. This is one that will be going back to a charity shop (albeit five years later).
How have you started off your reading year?
 I didn’t know who Wendy Cope was when I started reading this book; I picked it up due to the blurb, which reads:
Selected prose from Wendy Cope, one of the nation’s best-loved poets, from a lifetime of published and unpublished work as a reviewer, critic, and journalist. Readers can meet the Enid Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl, the ambivalent daughter, the amused teacher, and the sardonic television critic.
A book for anyone who’s ever fallen in love, tried to give up smoking, or consoled themselves that they’ll never be quite as old as Mick Jagger.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? I thought so; it was also on the table as recommended in my local Waterstones, so I thought I’d give it a try*. I was hoping for something of a biography, or at least a selection of essays about the author’s life experiences. I got some of that, but I suppose what I didn’t realize is that this is more of a collection of writings than anything else. The editors have gone through a number of archives and collected works to be published in this one volume. The book is split into sections based on Wendy’s girlhood, teaching years, time as a poet, and then a few other collections of various pieces of work.
For me, by far the most interesting parts were those about her life and her transition from a teacher into a poet and how that changed her. I was immediately drawn in by the very first piece, which is composed of snapshots of her memories as a girl, and stories of her time as a teacher. I would venture to guess that I was probably most taken with this because it is the most like a memoir and suits what I’d like to read. I can also say that I enjoy the way Cope writes and I’m actually intrigued to pick up her poems now, simply because this is clear and straightforward and there isn’t enough poetry in my life. She’s also a big believer in people getting paid for their work (rather than poetry getting shared for free online) and I respect her for that; she’s not after fame, she’s after making a living for herself doing something that she loves and is good at.
The rest of it didn’t really reflect any sort of universal experience and to be perfectly honest, I sometimes found it boring. I might have been more interested if I’d known who Wendy Cope was before, but the blurb above made it seem like I could enjoy it even though I didn’t, and in this I was disappointed. The interesting sections were interspersed with too much that I really didn’t particularly like. Perhaps personal taste, as I think I might be the wrong audience, but I didn’t really find it to be nearly as universal as the blurb seems to suggest.
Would I recommend this? I’m not sure. As I said above, I’m not sure I’m the target audience for this particular book, and I don’t think I really thought very much about what I was getting before I got it. But what I will do is go out, buy and read some of Wendy Cope’s poetry. I think it will be much more suited to what I’d like to read – and I will, of course, let you know what I think.
*I already had it for review but I bought five other books on that particular visit, so doing what I can to keep bookstores alive too. Obviously this means I received it for review consideration.
While I spent a huge portion of October not blogging, I for once allowed myself to indulge in a massive series re-read. The series I chose was the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire (very appropriate for October, I think you’ll agree), one of my favorites. The Winter Long is the eighth book in the series and I, of course, bought it on release, but didn’t want to read it without re-reading the series. After seven previous books, the first of which I read a good few years ago, I was losing track of who people were, what they meant to Toby, and where the wider plot was going. I knew that the seventh book hadn’t had the same impact on me as it should have simply because I forgot what happened. I had read that this eighth book was a game changer and I didn’t want to miss out any emotional impact.
I intended to re-read the series gradually, spacing in between them with other books, but what happened in actual fact was that I raced through the entire series. I genuinely had forgotten a lot of what happened. I only read one book while I was in the midst of my re-read and it was only because I went on holiday to Italy and couldn’t bring all those paperbacks in my luggage.
 As with many of us, I loved re-reading as a child and teenager, even as a younger adult. There was a time in my life when I’d read every adult book I owned at least twice and I think my record for an adult book was eight times. This ended when I got old enough to buy books for myself, but I still re-read sporadically then. Unfortunately, once I hit book blogging there wasn’t time any more. My logic went like this: There are so many books in the world. I own a solid chunk of them. I don’t have time to spend reading over again books I’ve already read. But that misses an essential fact; I loved re-reading these books. I enjoyed immersing myself back in Toby’s world so very much. It was fascinating to remind myself of the habits she acquired over the course of the series (coffee addiction – almost absent in the first book, rears up in the middle, vanishes) and the characters she befriends, admires, loves. And with so many books in the series, I could really feel how much things had changed for her, how she’d gone from a lonely woman who had lost everyone who meant something to her to a strong, confident one with friends and family.
Plus, TYBALT.
I knew I loved these books, but I think re-reading them cemented that for me. I was worried a little bit that they wouldn’t hold up. Seanan McGuire is an auto-buy for me and I’ve read a lot of her books, so I was actually worried that Toby would sound just like all the other characters McGuire has written. She doesn’t and neither do the other characters in this book. In addition, McGuire has obviously grown as a writer since she started writing these books and the last book was jaw-dropping. I picked exactly the right time to do my massive re-read as I genuinely don’t think I’d have gotten the connections as much without it. Yes, McGuire fills in the backstory, but filling in the backstory has never been the same for me as having it in my own memory. I’d rather flip through a paragraph of who Simon Torquill is remembering the emotional impact his actions had on Toby than forget who he is and need that paragraph. This book truly is a game changer, just like the back cover says. Toby is hit by revelation after revelation that change the way she views many parts of her life and which will have a significant impact on future events in her life. I was so glad I could make those connections.
I don’t think I’ll re-read all eight of these books when the ninth comes out, but I am so pleased I’ve reminded myself of how much joy there is in re-reading. This won’t be the last time I read these books.
And this re-read, although it was a few months ago, has sparked another one, which I’m in the midst of at the moment; all of Robin Hobb’s Farseer (and related) books. When I went to hear Robin Hobb give a talk and sign books in honor of Fool’s Assassin a few months ago, I was dismayed by how little I remembered the books. Not small things – big things, like who characters actually were besides Fitz. I shouldn’t have been particularly surprised since I read them in high school (I think – I can’t even remember how I discovered Robin Hobb, let alone when I read Assassin’s Apprentice for the first time, since she was already a favorite when I started recording books I read) and there have been a lot of books between then and now. Rediscovering books I think I’ll love just as much now as I did then seemed like a great way to start 2015 to me, and so here we are.
How do you feel about re-reading your favorite books?
2014 was the year I gave up on the reading spreadsheet and decided to just let Goodreads sort out my reading. As a result, I don’t have fancy statistics to show, and this post has been a bit more difficult to write (and included me getting halfway through creating a new spreadsheet before giving up) but I decided to just go with it and highlight what I thought was worth it.
I didn’t manage 150 books, but 144 is a number I’m very happy with. My reading was mostly speculative fiction, with fantasy in particular dominating the books I chose for personal enjoyment. This year, that was most of them. My system of reading a review book and then a personal book got dropped, so although the “immediate” TBR pile still has a few of them in there, they seem to make up more like one of each six or seven books I read rather than every other book. I love the freedom of choosing whatever I like. It may have kept me away from reviewing, because of the guilt thing, but I missed reading whatever I felt like whenever I wanted. As a result of this I had an amazing time re-reading the October Daye series in (not coincidentally) October, along with lots of other books I chose myself. Although I felt like I did away with all of my rules as the year went on, I kept reading more books by authors of colour – the figure isn’t high, but the consistency is there, and I can and do plan to work on that balance in 2015. Mostly female authors, mostly fantasy of various kinds, that seems to be where I’m happiest in my reading life right now, and I’m okay with that.
My own personal reading highlights, reviewed and not reviewed:
Books
 Edward III and the Triumph of England by Richard Barber – review – perfect for my target period and really interesting besides (or so I would think!)- Life after Life by Kate Atkinson – review – I just loved this book. I loved the time travel aspect and the way it looked at how tiny events can result in huge life changes. I’ve recommended this to so many people this year and I don’t see that ending. I’m so excited for the follow-up, I just hope it’s as brilliant.
- Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress by Marissa Meyer – these books completely captivated me. This was the first time in a long time that I stayed up too late reading, and I want more of that in my life. I was in London for work and read Cinder and Scarlet in one night (consuming a really amazing curry in the meantime). Never have I been so grateful for my ereader – and the meeting the next day still went well.
- A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan – this hit just the right notes for me at the right time. Very anticipated and very enjoyable.
- A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki – I so wish I’d written about this book after I read it. I absolutely adored it and, like Life after Life, have gone about recommending it to everyone I know who reads books regularly.
- The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater – The only reason I haven’t read Blue Lily, Lily Blue yet is because I can’t bear the idea of waiting for the fourth book, and also because I think I want to read these two. So brilliant. Wish I’d written thoughts down (again).
- We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler – review – I’ll let my words speak for themselves this time.
 The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez – review – you can’t go wrong with either of Henriquez’s books.- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – mini review – I loved so much about this book. I’m glad I at least wrote something to express that.
- Written in Red by Anne Bishop – this was a surprise to me. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. In some ways it reminded me of books I’d read when younger and I’m not sure I can articulate why I liked it so much. Maybe because I love closed-in communities and stories (boarding schools, spaceships, etc.) and this fit right in. I remember it really fondly and I’m looking forward to book 2.
- Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins – review – a book I liked so much it inspired me to write about it. More of these in my life and no books I feel required to review and I might just become a blogger again.
- My Notorious Life by Madame X by Kate Manning – review – One of only two historical fiction choices on this list, I was so unexpectedly pleased with this book that I had to include it. It is not only a good read, it feels important.
Authors
- I love everything that the writing team of Ilona and Gordon Andrews produces. No questions. This year, I only read Clean Sweep, but trust me when I tell you I have a re-read of the Kate Daniels series planned this year.
- Rainbow Rowell – Fangirl and Attachments this year. Love stories <3
- Rachel Bach – I read the Paradox trilogy this year and loved Devi and her quest to save the universe. I have really high hopes for future writing from her.
- Seanan McGuire – as I mentioned above, I read the entire October Daye series in a row before I read the latest installment and I loved doing it. I had forgotten so much about Toby’s earlier books and the way things changed. Plus, going back at this time was honestly perfect because the last book was a game changer and it became clear that McGuire laid the groundwork from day 1. Amazing.
2014 is also the year I blogged less than ever (since making a start), and I’ve not made my general malaise about writing much of a secret. I’m trying to remove requirements and write when I feel like it, about what I want. I am trying to remember this blog is for me – so often I only write about something if I have it for review or if it’s exceptional. I want to write a sentence about everything I read, even if it’s just I loved this and I think this is why, or why not. I want to make this into a hobby I enjoy again, because what I’ve learned with my haphazard year of blogging is that I don’t want it to end. I’m not a professional at this and I don’t need to be.
The same honestly goes for reading. I’d like to achieve more diversity, and I think the best way to do that is to continue making sure I’m reading diverse books every single month, like I did this year, but more of them. I’d like to read more non-fiction, but I think I can do that if I disregard my numerical targets. I have a lot of exciting non-fiction waiting for me, more than ever. I did put a numerical target in place – the same as last year, 150 books – more because I think that’s the amount I naturally read than a stretch. I just like having a number there.
I think I’ve stopped accepting review copies, too. I still get emails. I star them sometimes and think I’d like to read those books. But then I remember the pressure and I think, you know what, I’ll just buy it if I want to read it. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford to buy the books I really want to read, and in any case I have two bookcases full of books I haven’t read yet. No point adding to those.
In other aspects of my life, much of this year was great, and should go down as such in memory. We have made strides financially, professionally, and educationally. We saw the culmination of years of work and effort – our debt is gone and my husband completed the degree course he’s spent six years on with a first. I was promoted at the beginning of November and for once I’m not getting the two-year job change itch. I’d like to stay where I work. Personally, I rediscovered one of my favourite hobbies, which is crocheting, and although I may not have exercised enough this y ear, and really should do more in 2015, I am the same dress size as I was when I was 21 (albeit a bit tighter) but I will take that as a victory since it definitely hasn’t been the case for all of the years since then.
Nothing is ever perfect, and I don’t want to pretend it is; there are a few things going on which are not in the public eye and which I’d like to keep out of it. But this was, primarily, a good year for me and I’d like to remember it that way.
So, for 2015, let’s keep it simple. More of the good stuff, less of the pressure. No expectations or requirements, just goals. And we’ll see how we get on.
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