I spotted this on MarinaSofia’s blog a few weeks ago and enjoyed her post so much I thought I’d have a go myself, it being that time of the year and all. I’ve linked to my own reviews where relevant and to other sources of information for books I haven’t reviewed.
A Book with More that 500 pages: John Dos Passo’s U.S.A – a fabulous book which I must reread some day.
A Forgotten Classic: This may well not be forgotten and I’m sure many will put up their hands and tell me so but when I was a bookseller I was surprised at how few copies of Tolstoy’s Resurrection we sold. I read it many years ago but still remember how much it impressed me.
A Book that Became a Movie: So few film adaptations live up to books but Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando actually surpassed the novel for me.
A Book Published This Year: Where to start with this? I’m plumping for Nickolas Butler’s American small town gem Shotgun Lovesongs.
A Book with a Number in the Title: David Mitchell’s Number9dream. I started this after enjoying Ghostwritten but failed to finish it.
A Book Written by Someone Under Thirty: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – not a very adventurous or original choice but it’s so damn good.
A Book with Non-Human Characters: Michel Faber’s Oasans in this year’s The Book of Strange New Things are very endearing aliens.
A Funny Book: Richard Russo’s Straight Man is a campus novel with some rib-ticklingly funny passages in it.
A Book by a Female Author: There are so many but Katharine Grant’s Sedition, a smart, salacious and very witty novel of female subversion, seems appropriate.
A Book with a Mystery: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind was a much-hyped title way back in 2004 when the English translation was published but it more than lived up to that hype – wonderfully atmospheric and suitably booky.
A Book with a One-Word Title: Amanda Hope’s Wake is a very fine debut from earlier this year, one of 2014’s many First World War novels but this one had an interesting spin.
A Book of Short Stories: Annie Proulx’s Wyoming collection Close Range which has some excellent very short and quite unsettling stories.
A Free Square: For this I’m going to choose the book I’d most like to see back in print: Linda Olsson’s lovely Astrid and Veronika, one of those slim novels written in the pared back prose that I so admire. It’s about the friendship between Veronika, a young New Zealand writer fleeing a tragedy who holes up in a remote Swedish village wanting only to be left alone to work, and the reclusive Astrid, elderly and shunned by the rest of the village, who falls ill. These two disparate women have more in common than they first thought. It’s written in gorgeous prose and was published in the UK with the sort of jacket that makes you want to pick it up immediately. I hope you’re reading this, Penguin
A Book Set on a Different Continent: Favel Parrett’s When the Night Comes – a lovely story of a thirteen-year-old girl, a sailor and his ship, the Nella Dan, set on Tasmania and in Antarctica.
A Book of Non-fiction: Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is a joy to read for anyone who’s worked in a bookshop or who loves to frequent them. So that would be most of us, I imagine
The First Book by a Favourite Author: Helen Dunmore’s atmospheric Zennor in Darkness set in Cornwall during the First World Wart is not my favourite book of hers but she is one of the finest authors I’ve read and I’ll take any excuse to mention her.
A Book I Heard About Online: One of many that have caught my eye at Jacquiwinesjournal – The First Wife by Jakob Wasserman which looks intriguing.
A Bestselling Book: Emma Donoghue’s Room which I wish I hadn’t read.
A Book Based on a True Story: Glen David Gold’s wonderful Carter Beats the Devil based on the life of the American stage magician, Charles Joseph Carter.
A Book at the Bottom of Your To-Be-Read Pile: Mark Haddon’s The Red House. Just can’t seem to get around to it.
A Book Your Friend Loves: Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her African childhood, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
A Book that Scares You: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl scared the pants off me. Written when she should have been studying for her A-Levels, and she still got into Cambridge.
A Book That is More than Ten Years Old: Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, probably my favourite contemporary novel and I’m amazed to find that it was published in 2003.
The Second Book in a Series: I was left wondering what on earth to choose for this then remembered Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie so it has to be One Good Turn.
A Book with a Blue Cover: A. L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book, which may seem a cop-out but it’s excellent.
Bingo!
I guess I asked for it: you have so many interesting and original choices here that out come my pen and TBR list…
Thank you for the compliment and the inspiration! This was such an enjoyable post to write.
Looks like you had a lot of fun here Susan – great idea – but I am a bit concerned that you wish you hadn’t read Room. Nightmares?
It didn’t work for me, Anne. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the narrator’s voice – an incredibly hard act to pull off and I’m well aware that I’m in the minority.
I enjoyed looking through your choices, Susan, and thanks for the link to My First Wife! I’m hoping to do my Reading Bingo next week.
I’ve yet to read David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, so I’ll be interested to see how that one goes for me. Was there something in particular that didn’t work for you? I’ve enjoyed his others, especially Cloud Atlas and Thousand Autumns.
Oh, I’ll look forward to your Reading Bingo, Jacqui, although my credit card won’t! My (attempted) reading of Number9dream is so long ago that I can’t remember precisely what it was but I think it didn’t hang together for me in the way that Ghostwritten does. However, I also failed to get on with Cloud Atlas so it may well be different for you.
Fab! I really enjoyed reading that!
Thank you – such fun to put together!
I had fun doing this too. Some great reads here!
Thank you! Such fun, isn’t it. Made me think about books I’d read ages ago.
Great idea and your choices were really interesting.
Thank you, Helen. It was a very pleasant way of whiling away a Friday afternoon!
Oh this is fun, and cute. And worth putting in the drawer for a day when I want to post and need inspiration. Love it! And I agree with so many of your choices (particularly Straight Man, which I adore and give regularly as a present).
It’s the bit where he’s in the roofspace which practically reduced me to tears. I’d love to see a post by you on this, Victoria.
Missed this in November… love it! And such fab choices. Hmm… Might have to have a game myself
Thank you, Poppy! I think it could do with a revival. Great fun to do and and to see what other bloggers came up with.