Tag: to read

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Have Been On My TBR List Longest

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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 The 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 Top Ten Books That Have Been On My TBR List Longest.  Here’s a topic all book bloggers can identify with, as most of us have massive TBR pile lists…and don’t even mention our wish-lists.   Five of the books on my list are part of my 2018 TBR Pile Challenge list so theoretically should get read this year.   The dates are based on when I added the title to my Waiting-T-Be-Read shelf on Goodreads and they are all books I actually possess, either in physical or digital form.

WhenChristandhisSaintsSleptWhen Christ and his Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman (waiting since May 2013)

AD 1135. As church bells tolled for the death of England’s King Henry I, his barons faced the unwelcome prospect of being ruled by a woman: Henry’s beautiful daughter Maude, Countess of Anjou. But before Maude could claim her throne, her cousin Stephen seized it. In their long and bitter struggle, all of England bled and burned.  Sharon Kay Penman’s magnificent fifth novel summons to life a spectacular medieval tragedy whose unfolding breaks the heart even as it prepares the way for splendours to come – the glorious age of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Plantagenets that would soon illumine the world.

TBR#6TheCleanerofChartresThe Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers (waiting since June 2013)

There is something special about the ancient cathedral of Chartres, with its mismatched spires, astonishing stained glass and strange labyrinth. And there is something special too about Agnès Morel, the mysterious woman who is to be found cleaning it each morning.  No one quite knows where she came from – not the diffident Abbé Paul, who discovered her one morning twenty years ago, sleeping in the north porch; nor lonely Professor Jones, whose chaotic existence she helps to organise; nor Philippe Nevers, whose neurotic sister and newborn child she cares for; nor even the irreverent young restorer, Alain Fleury, who works alongside her each day and whose attention she catches with her tawny eyes, her colourful clothes and elusive manner. And yet everyone she encounters would surely agree that she is subtly transforming their lives, even if they couldn’t quite say how.

But with a chance meeting in the cathedral one day, the spectre of Agnès’ past returns, provoking malicious rumours from the prejudiced Madame Beck and her gossipy companion Madame Picot. As the hearsay grows uglier, Agnès is forced to confront her history, and the mystery of her origins finally unfolds.

TBR#8 HHhHHHhH by Laurent Binet (waiting since August 2013)

Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services, ‘the hangman of Prague’, ‘the blond beast’, ‘the most dangerous man in the Third Reich’.

His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’, which in German spells HHhH.

The House of MirthThe House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (waiting since December 2013)

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by ‘old money’ and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect.

Whilst many have sought her, something – fastidiousness or integrity- prevents her from making a ‘suitable’ match.

The Rosie ProjectThe Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (waiting since March 2014)

Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful” husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical – most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don’s Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie – and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

Nor Will He SleepNor Will He Sleep (Inspector McLevy #4) by David Ashton (waiting since November 2015)

The streets of 1887 Edinburgh seethe with youthful anarchy as two rival gangs of students, Scarlet Runners and White Devils, try to outdo each other in wild exploits. After a pitched battle between them, an old woman is found savagely battered to death in Leith Harbour. Enter Inspector James McLevy, a little more grizzled, but unchanging in his fierce desire to mete out justice. As the inspector delves further he meets up with one Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in the city to bury his recently deceased father.

Any Human HeartAny Human Heart by William Boyd (waiting since January 2016)

Any Human Heart is an ambitious, all-encompassing novel. Through the intimate journals of Logan Mounstuart we travel from Uruguay to Oxford, on to Paris, the Bahamas, New York and West Africa, and meet his three wives, his family, his friends and colleagues, his rivals, enemies and lovers, including notables such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

 

adonisThe Flowers of Adonis by Rosemary Sutcliff (waiting since January 2016)

The 5th Century BC. The Greek city-states are engaged in perpetual war. But one man towers above the chaos. His name is Alkibiades. He is at once a pirate, statesman and seducer whose adventures rival those of Odysseus himself. Citizen of Athens, friend of Socrates, sailor, warrior and inveterate lover, Alkibiades flees persecution in his native city to join the Spartan cause. However, his brilliant naval and diplomatic victories on their behalf do not save him from the consequences of impregnating the Spartan queen, and once more he takes up the outcast’s mantle.

TheBoneClocksThe Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (waiting since March 2016)

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.  For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

The Man in the High CastleThe Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (waiting since April 2016)

It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war, and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

 

 

Next week’s Top Ten Tuesday: Love Freebie

Down the TBR Hole #10

whatcathyreadnext6 Comments

This meme was created by Lia at Lost in a Story as a way to tackle the gargantuan To-Read shelves a lot of us have on Goodreads.  Like other people, I’ve long ago forgotten what prompted me to add some of the books I have shelved.  This meme is the perfect excuse to start taking back control…

The rules are simple:

  1. Go to your Goodreads To-Read shelf.
  2. Order on ascending date added.
  3. Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
  4. Read the synopses of the books
  5. Decide: keep it or should it go?
  6. Repeat every week until the entire list has been filtered (hmm, quite a few weeks then!)

The ten who need to demonstrate their worth this time are:

TBR10 Bellman & BlackBellman & Black by Diane Setterfield (added 31st August 2013)

Bellman & Black is a heart-thumpingly perfect ghost story, beautifully and irresistibly written, its ratcheting tension exquisitely calibrated line by line. Its hero is William Bellman, who, as a boy of 10, killed a shiny black rook with a catapult, and who grew up to be someone, his neighbours think, who “could go to the good or the bad.” And indeed, although William Bellman’s life at first seems blessed—he has a happy marriage to a beautiful woman, becomes father to a brood of bright, strong children, and thrives in business—one by one, people around him die. And at each funeral, he is startled to see a strange man in black, smiling at him. At first, the dead are distant relatives, but eventually his own children die, and then his wife, leaving behind only one child, his favourite, Dora. Unhinged by grief, William gets drunk and stumbles to his wife’s fresh grave—and who should be there waiting, but the smiling stranger in black. The stranger has a proposition for William—a mysterious business called “Bellman & Black” . . . (less)

Verdict: Remove – I already have The Thirteenth Tale by the same author on my To Read shelf and this one has less positive reviews.  

TBR10 AugustusAugustus: Son of Rome (Augustus #1) by Richard Foreman (added 31st August 2013)

Augustus: Son of Rome tells the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar and the rise of his heir, Gaius Octavius, as he journeys to Rome from Apollonia. We see a boy grow into a man as Octavius develops the moral courage, intelligence and ruthlessness that will finally see him become Augustus, Emperor of Rome.

The pen and sword will be employed to defeat his enemies and Octavius will earn the name of “Caesar”. Yet Rome will exact its price – and triumph will be accompanied by tragedy. Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Brutus and Marcus Agrippa all feature in this epic adventure, which will appeal to fans of Shakespeare, Plutarch and Conn Iggulden alike.

Verdict: Remove – I already have another book about Augustus on my To Read shelf and I don’t think I need another, particularly one with an average rating of only 3.5.

TBR10 King HereafterKing Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett (added 2nd September 2013)

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett’s stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland. Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue. He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.  Dunnett depicts Macbeth’s transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.

Verdict: Remove – I’m drawn to this because of the subject matter and I’m aware of the reputation of the author.  However it is over 700 pages long and I can’t see myself investing the time to read it any time soon.

TBR10 The Slaves of SolitudeThe Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (added 6th September 2013)

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter.

Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really begin.

Verdict: Keep – I’m intrigued by the description of this one and the wartime setting appeals so I’m going to give it a chance.

TBR10 The LuminariesThe Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (added 7th September 2013)

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner.

Verdict: Remove – This was garlanded with prizes and prize nominations but it’s over 800 pages long and has an average rating of only 3.7.  In addition, some reviews describe it as ‘slow’ or ‘dense’.  I think I can only retain books that really grab me and this one doesn’t.

TTBR10 The Killshe Kills by Richard House (added 7th September 2013)

This is The Kills: Sutler, The Massive, The Kill, The Hit. The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books. It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body. Moving across continents, characters and genres, there will be no more ambitious or exciting novel in 2013. In a ground-breaking collaboration between author and publisher, Richard House has also created multimedia content that takes you beyond the boundaries of the book and into the characters’ lives outside its pages.

Verdict: Remove – I was clearly in an adventurous frame of mind when I added this one but reading the description now it doesn’t appeal at all and once more its size – over 1,000 pages – puts me off.

TBR10 The MasterThe Master by Colm Toibin (added 7th September 2013)

Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

Verdict: Keep – I’m always drawn to fiction based around the lives of writers or artists and I really like the sound of this one.

 

TBR10 City of WomenCity of Women by David R. Gillham (added 8th September 2013)

It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War – and Berlin has essentially become a city of women.  Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.  But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets.

A high ranking SS officer and his family move down the hall and Sigrid finds herself pulled into their orbit. A young woman doing her duty-year is out of excuses before Sigrid can even ask her any questions. And then there’s the blind man selling pencils on the corner, whose eyes Sigrid can feel following her from behind the darkness of his goggles.   Soon Sigrid is embroiled in a world she knew nothing about, and as her eyes open to the reality around her, the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse. She must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two.

Verdict: Keep – Fiction based in World War II is another interest of mine and this sounds like an intriguing story.

TBR10 One Night in WinterOne Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore (added 9th September 2013)

If your children were forced to testify against you, what terrible secrets would they reveal?

Moscow 1945. As Stalin and his courtiers celebrate victory over Hitler, shots ring out. On a nearby bridge, a teenage boy and girl lie dead.  But this is no ordinary tragedy and these are no ordinary teenagers, but the children of Russia’s most important leaders who attend the most exclusive school in Moscow.  Is it murder? A suicide pact? Or a conspiracy against the state?  Directed by Stalin himself, an investigation begins as children are arrested and forced to testify against their friends – and their parents. This terrifying witch-hunt soon unveils illicit love affairs and family secrets in a hidden world where the smallest mistakes will be punished with death.

Verdict: Keep – Again, the period in which the book is set appeals and the story line sounds intriguing.

TBR10 SashenkaSashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore (added 9th September 2013)

Winter, 1916. In St Petersburg, snow is falling in a country on the brink of revolution. Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her role in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.  Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband and two children. Around her people are disappearing but her own family is safe. But she’s about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences. Sashenka’s story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin’s private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking story of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism – and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice…

Verdict: Remove – I was sorely tempted to keep this one but I think I’d like to experience the author’s writing (see above) before committing to another book by him.  However, I can see it getting added back to the shelf if I enjoy One Night in Winter.

The Result:  4 kept, 6 dumped.  Do you agree with my choices?  Have I dumped any books you would have kept or vice versa?