Now recruiting...recommendations

As one would expect from working in a bookshop, I have received many, many book recommendations over the years. Sometimes, I know immediately that the recommendation is not my 'cup of tea' so I smile politely and tell the customer I'll add the book to my To Read list. Sometimes though a customer's enthusiasm for a book is so contagious that I really do add it to the To Read list in my head. Despite having a mental To Read list of hundreds of books I have never actually got the list down onto paper...and every time I finish a book I whirl around confused trying to choose my next book. I know there are hundreds of titles I want to read but I just can never seem to recall a single one when I need it.

The other day I decided to take action. For once and for all, I was going to make a tangible To Read list, using ink and paper. I wanted to collate all the recommendations I'd received firstly...but thus far I have only been able to remember 5 books that have been recommended to me. They are:

1. Any Peter James title - a lovely customer with friendly eyes that lit up when she bought a book recommended Peter James. I served the lady a few times and her genuine pleasantness and easy chatter always brightened me somehow. She would invariably ask if I had managed to read any Peter James yet and I'd always shake my head, a little guilty. Crime has never really been my thing but I promised the customer that I would read one, and even though I promised the customer a couple of years ago, I intend to keep that promise.
2. Terry Goodkind - yesterday I served a gentleman who didn't look the conversational sort and I started to conduct the transaction in a polite and friendly but professional manner. Unexpectedly he started a conversation by asking  if I'd read any Terry Goodkind. I admitted I hadn't and he exclaimed with surprising vigour "oh, you should!". He told me he'd received a copy of the first in the series from a friend who'd waxed lyrical about the author for years and decided it'd make the perfect birthday present. The customer said the book had sat sadly, gathering dust in his home for years until he was packing a suitcase for a holiday in America. He said he'd forgotten to buy a book so threw the book in his luggage in case he got bored on the flight. He started the book at the beginning of the flight...and read solidly for 6 hours, when the plane landed and interrupted his reading. He took me to the section and told me the order of the series and also enthused about the front covers for the books, which are indeed beautiful.
3. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - I have been recommended this book more times than I care to count. I've heard nothing but unanimous good reviews.
4. Like Chocolate for Water by Laura Esquivel - a female customer once bought two copies of this. She said the book had changed her life and now she buys it for all her friends. Apparently she has never met somebody who has read the book and didn't love it.
5. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - a curious recommend from a friend has aroused by interest. (I have a weakness for Indian literature too).

So...I am looking for more recommendations to replace the ones I've lost and forgotten! I will try anything once and read all genres with just two exceptions-trashy chick lit and maths/science so you're welcome, even encouraged, to send any suggestions my way where they will be added to my To Read list. I can even promise to read them and give an honest opinion if you want!

Internet Kills Reading/My Year of 25 Books

Two years ago, I got my first laptop.
Two years ago, I read what I thought I should read, rather than what I wanted to read. I slogged my way through Crime and Punishment, whizzed dutifully through The Da Vinci Code and spent a joyless few months reading Love in the Time of Cholera.

Gradually, I started to spend my evenings on my bed, surfing the internet. Whole hours would pass in the blink of an eye and I'd head to bed and feel guilty that my current book had been neglected for another day, another week. I got bogged down with books I knew were not for me and ploughed slowly and painfully through them because I have one fault-I cannot give up  a book once I have started it. If I give up, I feel as if I have been defeated by the book. I live in hope that the book will improve or that there will be a hidden message which will result in me changing, my life changing. This seldom happens and I have read many 300+page books and resented. Every. Last. Word.

So, I sort of stop reading. Not completely, I read (and enjoyed) a small number of books last year and the year before but I stopped spending all my free time reading. Afterall, it's so much easier to spend an hour on Youtube or Facebook than to force yourself to read something you're getting no joy out of, isn't it?

A while ago I realised that I missed reading. A good book is a best friend. What do I gain from Facebook?  Certainly, it is an excellent communication tool without which I would not be in contact with half the people I am. Often though I am just confronted with other people's lives, which from my vantage point appear more interesting, more fulfilled, more beautiful. Over the New Year, I did the annual stocktake of my life and made a few decisions, planned a few adjustments. The first was to cut back on internet time and spend my newly salvaged time for reading and crafting.

I started this blog for my project '25 Books'. I know it isn't a huge number of books (though bear in mind I am a full time worker and car commuter)-the idea is to choose and read 25 books I WANT to read this year. Halfway through the year and I have learnt to switch off my laptop and spend time with my old friends instead. In my head I have been to the mountains and fjords in Norway, run around Central Park with Murakami, sat in a church in wartorn Vietnam with a Graham Greene character and shivered courtesy of Susan Hill. It has been most fun I've had on Sunday evenings and after dinner for quite some time.

This blog was set up as a place to review the books. Near-permanent writer's block and lack of access to a working laptop have meant I am completely behind on updating my reviews here.  The reviews for the first 10 books are however on their way, along with some other thoughts and photographs...

Baggins Bookshop, Rochester

It is hardly surprising that with Rochester's much-advertised literary connections (Dickens hometown), one of the best secondhand bookshops in the land calls the town its home. Last time I was in Rochester I killed a happy hour in there, browsing everything from Welsh dictionaries to obscure poetry. The front room of the shop resembles a Ryanair check-in for books. The floor was almost obscured by a carpet of books, from which rose little 4 foot colums of teetering books. It all looked dangerously disorganised, although the post-it notes and strict instructions to not move books from piles implied otherwise. Possibly organised chaos incarnate.

Baggins touts itself as the largest second hand bookshop in England. It may well be true. The labyrinthine little corridors, side rooms and vestibules certainly house thousand upon thousands of books. The books themselves are not always as cheap as one might hope or expect. Although I was pleasantly surprised by my poetry purchase. (I got an old copy of Faber's Poems and Places for £2.40). In short, I suspect the pricing is done fairly arbitarily which makes for quite inconsistent pricing. Still, even if you do not buy anything, which would certainly require a significant amount of willpower, it's a great little place to wander around, poke about in and get lost in. I'm sure many potential out of print treasures and special gifts are lurking on its dusty shelves. The website claims they receive visitors from all over the world and as far away as USA. At 25 years old now, this bookshop has certainly achieved iconic status in the Medway.

http://www.bagginsbooks.co.uk/index.html

Now for a few more photos I surreptitiously stole with my camera.

A little dead end corridor in the maze

Shop facade in Rochester Highstreet

A book maze!

My Literary Shitlist

I'm currently in the process of compiling my top 20 favourite books for this blog. I have to say I'm finding it quite hard to nail it. Simultaneously I've been listing the books which I really, really didn't like. This list has been a little easier. So, I present, my Top 8 Most Hated, Despised, Time-thieving Books List.

8) Emma by Jane Austen. Holds the dubious honour of being the book it took me longest to complete. Two whole years it took me to plod through this novel with its irritating, smug heroine.

7) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To be fair to Marquez I've never been the biggest fan of Magic Realism so we started off on the wrong foot-and from there we walked in opposite directions. Marquez's work reminds me of a sticky fruitcake-far too rich and cloying for my taste. I found the novel incoherent. I spent a lot of time trying to absorb and memorise the family tree at the beginning of the book. My memory is trying to insist there is a scene in which one of the characters floats off into the atmosphere with some bedsheets. Surely I've imagined that. Haven't I? Three years later I read Love in the Time of Cholera. Clearly I'm a glutton for punishment.

6) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Maybe I should have read up on American history before I started this novel. Or maybe it's just a dull novel which no amount of American history/politics knowledge could have saved for me.

5) Twelve by Nick McDonnell. Someone died maybe? Lots of drugs in the book maybe? I don't really remember. The new Catcher in the Rye some declared at the time. We'll never know because it's already out of print. Thank God.

4) The Backpacker by John Harris. Hilariously this book is kept in the travel literature section, rather than the fiction section. I'm not sure how any editor could have been fooled into believing the 'facts embellished beyond truth' in this novel. Want to read the badly-written fantasy adventures of an oversexed, overdrunk, overdrugged lad with a mental age of about 16? I didn't.

3) Faithless by Karin Slaughter. As a young, inexperienced bookseller I was given the crime section to run. Gamely, I decided to try to acquaint myself with this alien genre by reading one of the new releases. It put me off crime for years. This must be one of the most badly written books I've had the misfortune to encounter. "She opened the cupboard door and reached for her cornflakes. She poured her cornflakes into the bowl and turned around to her friend and said "x". She poured milk on her cornflakes and went to sit down" and so forth. Parts of the book are written in 'real time' as above. Perhaps she even wrote when her characters blinked. I would not have been surprised. Perhaps we'll feel more empathy for the characters if we live through the mundane, day-to-day parts of their lives? Perhaps it's just badly edited and Slaughter is a poor writer?

2) The Colour Purple by Alice Walker. I wanted to like this, I really did. No doubt the subject matter is important but I'm just not good at such heavy-handed feminism. Nor when it is so poorly written. The whole novel seemed so contrived. I liked it not.

1) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. This novel includes 2 things I simply cannot abide in novels-2d characters and American sentimentalism. Each of the 'women' plays a role in a cliched 'American Dream' family-the good one, the clever one, the naughty one etc.. They all learn their lesson and evolve to form perfectly happy families. I was almost shocked when they did away with one of the characters, but then Holloywood kills the odd hero off too to 'engage your emotions' and 'tug at the heartstrings'. Nauseating...cringing..I feel sick ...

Beannacht Lá Fhéile Pádraig

A bad back has rendered me partially immobile thus my St Patrick's Day celebrations are not what I had planned. I had, of course, arranged a wild night out involving fiddles, Guinness and Shamrocks. Instead, it will be quietly celebrated with a glass of Bailey's and some of the wonderful Irish myths in Peter Beresford Ellis's brilliant 'Celtic Myths and Legends' (which also includes Manx and Cornish myths and legends!). Note my green, woollen jumper, just to underline the tameness of my evening. Happy St Patrick's Day to all my other relations and friends of Irish heritage!!

p.s. a couple of indispensable Gaelic phrases for those of you celebrating in style tonight:

Pionta Guinness, le do thoil = a pint of Guinness, please

Tabhair 'om póg, is Éireannach mé = kiss me, I'm Irish

Lunch

I had a lovely lunch in Rochester of an egg mayonnaise sandwich, orange Tango-enjoyed with a group of poets headed by Carol Ann Duffy. Rochester is an excellent place to take a book and sit in one of the numerous little cafes

Secondhand Bookshop Acquisitions

Today I ventured into a local secondhand bookshop, dangerous territory for me. I have little willpower to resist beautiful or interesting books. I found three treasures today:

• a Latin dictionary. A Latin dictionary has been on my To Buy list for ages. This little dictionary cost just 69p. It is an old edition-but I doubt that Latin has changed that much in the last few years :D
• a Swedish grammar (99p). Old fashioned and solid. It contains lists of verb conjugations, endless pages of sentences and linguistics terminology. I like my grammar hardcore. I have little patience for the new 'soft' way of teaching grammar-I do not think it is particularly effective. Grammar can be hard and monotonous (as well as rewarding). Deal with it! I know a small handful of people who have this as their native language hence the reason for choosing this minority language over the other 20 there were on the shelf. If I'm feeling inspired, this will aid me in constructing a few clumsy sentences to litter my Swedish friends' Facebook walls.
• 501 German verbs (99p). German can be a real fiend and I will pass a few pleasant hours perusing this.

I have never understood how people can be emotionally detached enough from their books to be able to dump them at a charity shop. Still, I suppose their loss is my gain. I now have roughly a shelf of dictionaries and grammars. Joy! I won't insult geeks by accusing myself of being a geek. I'm just a complete and utter loser with an expanding dictionary collection.

A Favourite Book

From time to time, you receive a gift from someone which is so perfect, so wonderful that you wonder if the giver has somehow managed to infiltrate your mind and steal some of your very essence.

My parents had been somewhere in Kent, I can't remember where, and had obviously come across a second hand shop. My dad said he saw this old copy of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and thought I would like it, so bought it for me. There is no printing date in the book but some internet research leads me to believe that this edition was published in 1900.

I haven't yet read the book (I have a long 'to read' list) but regardless this is one of the books most frequently pulled off the shelf and looked at, simply because it is so beautiful. When I hold it, I wonder how many people have read it, and who those people were. Given the age of the book, the people who previously held it in their hands would have experienced the Blitz, had friends or relatives who were killed in the Trenches, walked though gaslamplit smog in London. They may have read this to the sound of The Beatles or The Kinks coming from vinyl record players. Perhaps some of them read this on a 'slam door', British Rail train, on their way to work, The Smiths playing on their Walkman.

I think it is time to share some photographs of this little piece of history...

The title page

                                                             The book is beautifully illustrated

                                                          This is my favourite illustration in the novel. I love looking at the detail in their clothes.