Tag: memes

#TopTenTuesday My Bookish Resolutions – An Update

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Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is a Freebie so we’re invited to choose any past topic or come up with one of our own. I decided to revisit my Bookish Resolutions from the Top Ten Tuesday topic on 12th January 2021 in order to see what progress I’ve made.

  1. Read the remaining 7 books on my Classics Club list – I have only three to go now – Business As Usual, Vanish In An Instant and Mrs Palfrey At the Claremont.
  2. Complete the What’s In A Name and When Are You Reading? challenges –  I’ve only managed to read 2 books that fit the six categories of the What’s In A Name challenge but I’m making much better progress with the When Are You Reading? challenge as I need only two more book to match all of the time periods.
  3. Take part in the 20 Books of Summer 2021 reading challenge – I posted my list of books I hope to read for the challenge which commences today.
  4. Read and review the 24 books on my NetGalley shelf with publication dates prior to 31st December 2020 – Unfortunately blog tour deadlines means I’ve had to concentrate on more recent arrivals so I still have 22 to go.
  5. Retain my 80% plus feedback ratio on NetGalley – I’m doing OK with this one as I’m at 88% currently and if I can make some progress with the previous resolution and resist requesting more titles, you never know I might be able to hit 90%!
  6. Read the 5 books on The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2021 shortlist before the winner is announced -This one’s looking unlikely as, so far, I’ve only read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville and I’m still working my way through the audiobook version of The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.
  7. Read and review the 7 books won from Readers First published prior to 31st December 2020 – I have 6 to go, all of which are on my 20 Books of Summer list
  8. Reduce the number of titles on my Want To Read shelf on Goodreads from 857 to 500 or fewer – Thanks to a radical approach I’ve adopted recently, deleting anything added prior to May 2018 that I don’t own a copy of, I’ve achieved this. OK, it still totals 497! I plan to work through the shelf using the same approach every month from now on.
  9. Read and review the remaining 6 books received from authors before I paused accepting new review requests – Unfortunately for the authors concerned, I still have five to go.
  10. Visit a literary festival in person – I’m hopeful the full relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in the months ahead will make a visit to Henley Literary Festival in October possible.

If you made any bookish resolutions for this year, how are you getting on?

#WWWWednesday – 26th May 2021

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

The Baby Is Mine by Oyinkan Braithwaite (advance review copy, courtesy of Midas PR and The Reading Agency)

When his girlfriend throws him out during the pandemic, Bambi has to go to his Uncle’s house in lock-down Lagos. He arrives during a blackout, and is surprised to find his Aunty Bidemi sitting in a candlelit room with another woman. They both claim to be the mother of the baby boy, fast asleep in his crib.

At night Bambi is kept awake by the baby’s cries, and during the days he is disturbed by a cockerel that stalks the garden. There is sand in the rice. A blood stain appears on the wall. Someone scores tribal markings into the baby’s cheeks. Who is lying and who is telling the truth?

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (paperback)

Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (audiobook)

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means “slave girl,” she begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.

As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my review.

Pathfinders by Cecil Lewis

This Other Island by Steffanie Edward

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville (audiobook)

Love and Miss Harris by Peter Maughan

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Sword of Bone CoverSword of Bone by Anthony Rhodes (eARC, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum and Random Things Tours)

It is September 1939. Shortly after World War II is declared, Anthony Rhodes is sent to France, serving with the British Army. His days are filled with the minutiae and mundanities of army life—friendships, billeting, administration—as the months of the “Phoney War” quickly pass and the conflict seems a distant prospect. 

It is only in the spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear. The men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk, where they face a desperate and terrifying wait for evacuation.