Tuesday, June 13, 2006

That old TBR pile

As I have not quite finished reading Lloyd Alexander's "The Chronicles of Prydain" yet, and I've been writing a "guest column" for someone else's Blog (watch this space for more details), whilst waiting for the phone to ring, I thought I would "cheat" and give you a round up of what is lurking on my To Be Read (TBR) pile of books.

Once I've finished the Chronicles, I'll be reading Joseph Delaney's The Spook's Apprentice and The Spook's Curse. I've also got Michael Chabon's Summerland (which I've been looking at for ages on the library shelf); Peter Dickinson's The Gift Boat (which I read a preview of some time ago, but hadn't seen until now; since I enjoyed Dickinson's short stories in Elementals: Water, I thought I would try this one); I have heard that Eva Ibbotson's The Secret of Platform 13 is a sort of precursor to Harry Potter so I picked that up today with The Star of Kazan which has been discussed over in the Wicked Women comments on the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone; I've got three re-reads lined up to do spoiler-ish reviews for the Scholar's Blog Spoiler Zone: Kate diCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie (which I really want to own !), Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and Jonathan Stroud's The Leap; I've also got Stroud's Buried Fire which has been waiting for my attention for a little while. An SF and Fantasy discussion forum to which I belong has just started a Book Club, so I'm going to be reading H G Wells' War of the Worlds with them (I've never yet read it nor seen either of the movies), and in the same volume is included The Time Machine (another book I've neither read nor seen the movie of), and I had picked up Wells' The Sleeper Awakes before I found out about the Book Club. Someone somewhere recently mentioned John Crowley's Little, Big, another "classic" I'd not read, so I picked up that at the same time as the last mentioned Wells. Finally, there's the odd sounding The Boy Who Kicked Pigs by former Dr Who star, Tom Baker (I'm fairly dubious about this one !), and Eduard Morike's Mozart's Journey to Prague, which appears to be fiction ! It caught my eye because it's Mozart's 250th birthday anniversary this year. Since the book is relatively short, I thought I'd try it and see what it was like !

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, that's a lot of books! You must be a much faster reader than I am. Sounds like an interesting list. I'll look forward to reading your reviews.

Michele said...

I can usually read a 200 -300 page book a day (that's on a work day, when I'm working 8 hours in the office). I don't know if that's faster than you. Of course, if I'm re-reading then it's very easy to whizz through a book, but I often find I race through even the new-to-me books quite quickly. Of course, it all depends on what else I'm doing - around deadline time, I slow down somewhat !

Anonymous said...

I'll be looking forward to seeing your reviews of lots of these! I wasn't as taken with Summerland as a lot of people, though it was fun enough. (I'd probably have done better if I hadn't read the Narnia for North American claim.) Also have The Gift Boat (a review copy I was given ages ago) and Little, Big (cheap copy picked up after hearing people on the DWJ list say it was great, but needed lots of time and mental energy, iirc) gathering dust here somewhere. The Secret of Platform 13 isn't my favourite of Eva Ibbotson's children's fantasies, but I read it to one/other/both of the girls when younger and everyone enjoyed it. Star of Kazan was me, so no need to comment on that! And have read the two J. Strouds - will wait to see the spoilerish review of The Leap with interest.

Michele said...

Hopefully the spoilerish review of The Leap will go up at the weekend or early next week - depending on how long the Delaney books take me. The others will be reviewed as and when !