Medieval Bookworm

First, this week I finished my dissertation!  It’s bound and all set to go tomorrow.  Tomorrow I am also moving and taking a trip to Birmingham to get all the legal stuff surrounding our wedding wrapped up, so it’s going to be a busy day.  Keith and I have been in a long distance relationship for so long – for our entire relationship barring a few fantastic summer months – that it’s hard to believe it’s over.  Admittedly, it’s not totally guaranteed over until I have a visa saying I’m allowed to stay, but we have everything we need and we meet all the requirements (either comfortably so or barely depending on how the law is interpreted, but they are met), so I’m feeling optimistic about it.  I won’t be completely relaxed until then, but we are getting there.

This week was also Book Blogger Appreciation Week.  I had a fantastic time and I think it was an amazing week.  I feel like everyone really came together and celebrated reading, books, and blogging, which is exactly the goal.  It felt like the controversy over the awards just disappeared and we instead strengthened our community, celebrating both the shortlisted blogs, the winning blogs, and everyone else.  I have discovered SO many new blogs, I can’t even tell you.  I haven’t commented on all of them yet, but I’m really going to try.  Amy deserves immense amounts of credit for all the time and love and creativity she’s put into this week.  Thank you, Amy!  And thanks to everyone else who dedicated even a little part of themselves to making this week awesome.  You all did an amazing job.

Now, the bandwagon.  Lately it seems that everyone has been announcing a TBR ban.  Well, now it’s my turn.  As of this posting, I have 369 unread books and six more on the way, my little gift to myself for having completed my MA.  As I am now entering that nebulous state of unemployment which could last longer than I’d like in this economy, and I have a boatload of student debt to start paying back in April so I can’t really spend the money that I have, I am officially banning myself from buying more books until I have a job.  Besides that, I don’t really need to have more than a year and a half of reading stowed away.  So I want to work on getting the pile down some.

What am I not banning?  I’m not banning review copies, library books, or gifts.  My birthday is just after Christmas and so December and January are my main book acquisition time, I’m not passing up on that!  I’m not going to stop myself from entering contests either.  And the truth is that I don’t mind having so many unread books.  Maybe that’s crazy because really, everywhere I go they’ve taken over, but I like having such a huge selection and knowing that I am totally spoiled for choice.  If I had the money, I’d keep on buying.  But I don’t, so I might as well try to make my fiance and my floor happier by reading the books I do have.  At least then I can give away the stinkers, which I’ve started doing with some frequency.  Anyway, my general rule is now that if the book is free, I can have it.  If the book costs money, I can’t.  I figure that if I still receive a few books, it will prevent me from pining over books I can’t have.

Do you mind having a huge TBR pile?  Is there such thing as too many books?

For those who have started a ban, any advice for me?

It’s looking like my reading totals for August are going to be down from the past three months.  I’ve finished 10 books so far and we’re halfway through, so that will leave me with 20, a fairly significant drop from 30 and 31 in June and July.  I’ll be back up there in September though.  My dissertation is due in completed form to my supervisor on September 3rd, and while I’ll probably have some edits to do after that, I won’t have time for the intense reworking I’m doing now.  I’ve actually done most of the work already (go me!)  so I have about 2 weeks just to form a conclusion from an essay I’ve already written and my own thoughts.

I’ve been feeling very nostalgic this month; it’s my last month in full-time school and I find myself missing my undergrad university and friends more than ever.  I don’t like stages of transition, I prefer to be one place or another, not in between.  I’m sure it’s because I haven’t been reading as much.  Do you find that not having time to read as much as you’re used to reflects in your mood as well?

Well, that brings us to what I have been reading this week.  I just finished Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen last night and found myself enjoying it far more than I’d expected by the end.  What got me was that even though she plays with the facts, none of it is needless or derogatory and I found it a refreshing new spin – for fiction – on a story I’ve read in various forms many, many times.  Not even the magic really bothered me, because I don’t believe that anyone is going to go around convinced that Jacquetta and Elizabeth were witches.  Historical accuracy only gets to me if I think people are going to believe that something wrong is true, and that’s not the case here, so I liked it.  I bet that’s a surprise to many who know me – it was a surprise for me too!

Right now I’m reading The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan so my mom can get a book off Amazon Vine on Thursday.  It’s billed as a love story with some tragedy tossed in, set around Niagara Falls in the early 20th century and loosely based on the life of a real man.  So far, it’s not earth shattering, but I like it.  This brings me to another point; both this and The White Queen are written in present tense.  It gives a certain feel, but I’m not sure I like it as much as past tense.  It can dissolve into the story if I read long enough, but it always bugs me a little in the beginning.  What do you think?  Do you prefer past or present tense?  What about 1st or 3rd person?  Or do you not care?

That’s enough from me for now.  I’ll leave you with two bits of news.  One, the wonderful Michelle Moran, whose Cleopatra’s Daughter I will be reading and giving away shortly, has asked that I mention her contests.  You can find details about them here.  They sound exciting, and I know if I was still in the US I’d go hunting in a few of those independent bookstores.  Two, you have until Wednesday to enter to win a copy of American Lion by Jon Meacham from me, and you can do that here.

Next weekend I will be in Cornwall, so expect pictures when I come back!  Have a great week everyone!

Or so it feels!  But first, a couple of quick notes.  If you haven’t seen the book drive Amy and Lenore are having for Nothing But Ghosts by Beth Kephart, go check it out.  This is a fantastic way to show our support for authors while having a chance to win some prizes.  The book is only $12.23 on Amazon!

Secondly, I wanted to show off my progress in my new quest to read my oldest books while also getting through my library books and review copies.  I started two weeks ago, and here’s how the pile looked then:

Today, this is how it looks:

I’m a little absurdly pleased with myself!  I’m still trying to read my older review copies as well.  I’m going home in 2 weeks and will have an avalanche of them to read very quickly, so I have to get these out of the way first.  Stone’s Fall has been on the top for a while now because I’m still trying to read 30 books in June.  So I’ve pretty much abandoned the pile this week because I actually fell behind and had to try to read 4 books in 2 days.  I managed it, but only because I got an order of mainly YA books that I could race through.  I have 2 1/2 books to go, but after that I’m going to go right for all of these chunksters.

Right now I’m reading Possession by A.S. Byatt.  Jennifer at The Literate Housewife and I are reading and reviewing this together, about which I’m very excited, so I’m attempting to go a little more slowly and actually think more about what I’m reading.  It’s not hard with this book, though, because I feel like it was written just for me.  Obviously, it wasn’t, as I was probably not even born when Byatt came up with the idea and I was four years old when it won the Booker Prize.  I’ve only read 100 pages but already it’s tapping deep into so many things I love.  I don’t talk about it much on this blog, but if I’d chosen literature rather than history I’d have gone straight for 19th century British authors.  There is something about this century in England that entrances me.  To make it even better, the book in the modern day is about two academics researching the lives of two (fictional) 19th century British poets and their possession of their biographical subjects.  I’m writing my own essentially biographical study and could completely see myself remaining in this vein in academics should I choose to continue.  It’s amazing how you form a bond with people long dead, becoming fond of them despite their faults and feeling that you know them, only to discover someone else probably feels exactly the same way as you with a slightly different opinion that makes you angry.  It’s so fascinating.  Of course the book is a romance as well, and although I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I can already see who the players are.  As I said, it’s like the book was written with me in mind!  I adore it already and I can’t wait to read more later on.

Have you ever felt like a book was written just for you?

As some of you are probably aware, I joined the Summer Reading Blitz challenge hosted by Shauna at Reading and Ruminations.  Our goal is to read 30 books in the 30 days of June.  I’m very pleased with my progress; I’ve already completed 15 books and it’s only the 14th.  Some of these were even slow, somewhat painful chunksters.  How am I doing this, you ask?  Well, my classes are over and I’m just writing and researching my dissertation.  I haven’t found a part-time job and since I’m getting married and moving away at the end of September/beginning of October, it’s getting to the point where it would be pointless to keep searching for 2-3 months of work just to search again when I get there.  I’ve already done most of my research, so at this point I am just writing 500-1000 words a day and then getting on with my reading!

I’m trying not to read short books just for the sake of the challenge.  Instead, I have been following through on last week’s mission of reading an ARC or review copy, a library book, and then the oldest TBR that I have.  I did have to cheat a little.  I knew I needed to get My Lord John by Georgette Heyer read for next week and Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea read for online book club today, plus I got a Harlequin survey that I needed to answer so I snuck in Married by Mistake by Abby Gaines.  That’s too many ARCs!  I’m going to stick with the plan this time, though.  I have found a great satisfaction in going way back through my LT catalogue and finding the oldest book that I have on my shelves and reading it.  I’ve had so much fun figuring out what I’m going to read next according to my new system that I arranged all the books for the next couple of weeks in a pile:

While putting together that pile and thinking about my new goal to read my oldest books, I have realized that the reason many of them are the oldest is because they are chunksters.  In the interests of speed and number counts, I have been passing over chunksters in favor of shorter, quicker books for the past couple of years.  I think it’s been mostly subconscious.  I will look at my shelves and think about what I really want to read, books like Possession and Crossed which you can see in the pile, but when it comes down to it I will pick up the smaller book.  I no longer want to do this.  My projected total for this year is almost 300 books.  I don’t need to read that many.  After June, I am going to read all those chunksters that I have been putting off.

Let’s take the two books I have read from the past this week, The Lieutenant’s Lover by Harry Bingham and Shadows and Strongholds by Elizabeth Chadwick.  The first is 500 pages, the second is 564.  I loved the first and I read half of the second last night instead of sleeping.  These books are fabulous and I shouldn’t shy away from the just because they are long.  Reading books I love should be more important than seeking the fastest read that will knock one off my TBR pile and add one on to my yearly total.

What about you?  Do you find yourself putting off longer books in favor of shorter ones?  Why?  Is it for your yearly count and TBR pile like me or do you have other reasons?