BOOKISH FINDS: Online Orders & Other Things

I’m currently trying to minimise the amount of books I have in London, because I’m pretty conscious of completely swamping my aunt’s house in books. It will happen if I don’t watch myself. So I’ve turned my home into an almost library, where every time I go back I take the books I’ve read home and bring back the same amount that I haven’t read. It’s a system that’s lasted all of about three minutes, because I am terrible at not buying books.

A couple of books I’ve been given by colleagues who have passed them along after they’ve read them so I don’t count that as not sticking to the rule. Or deviating from the rule only slightly. You can’t really turn down books that have been offered to you. That would be sheer madness. So here are the books I’ve collected over the last few weeks.

REVIEW: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

A few days ago I read a quote from an author somewhere that there’s nothing wrong with writing to a formula, that it’s what you bring to the formula that makes a great story. I’m annoyed that I didn’t pay more attention to the source, the university student in me is appalled at my lack of referencing but what they said struck me as interesting. There’s often a sense that formulaic writing is somehow lazy or unimaginative, but all stories have a formula. Each has a beginning, a middle and an end. There is a point of conflict, sometimes a resolution. Some of my favourite novels have followed formulas. Life often follows the same pattern, so why shouldn’t novels? When a story surprises us it’s because it goes against the conventions of the genre and the novel. A writer can follow a formula and bring something new to it at the same time.

That’s not to say it always works out, and while I was reading Red Queen there were elements of the story that felt fresh and interesting, but I felt as if it was something I’d read before. 

DOWN THE TBR HOLE #16

Lia at Lost In A Story started this weekly post to trim down the Goodreads to-read list.

The rules are simple:

• Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
• Order on ascending date added.
• Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books. Of course, if you do this weekly, you start where you left off the last time.
• Read the synopses of the books
• Decide: keep it or should it go?

READING LISTS: International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day so I thought what better way to bookishly commemorate the day than by sharing some of my favourite women writers and their works. There are quite a few of them, and I could probably waffle on about Jane Austen for as long as anyone would listen, it could be days, so I’m going to limit myself to five authors that I love, and five authors that I’d like to read. Spoiler alert though: Jane Austen will feature and their will be some gushing involved. Sorry.

REVIEWS: For Esme with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

My relationship with J D Salinger hasn’t necessarily been an easy one. I tried to read The Catcher in the Rye when I was fourteen years old, after seeing it on a blog I was following and decided to buy it along with some other books that were in the same post. I fell in love with Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and was fascinated by the dark world of Chuck Palanuik’s Invisible Monsters, but The Catcher in the Rye for me fell short. Holden wasn’t a character I wanted to spend more than a few pages with and I couldn’t understand why it was a classic. I tried to read the book twice and stumble around the forty page mark. Eventually I donated my copy to a charity shop and decided J D Salinger wasn’t for me.