State of the TBR – November 2013

Well, this month, I’m actually quite pleased. Because look how good my TBR is looking! As far as I can tell, I acquired a mere five books in September – two Debbie Macombers, one of which I’ve already read, and one of which is now on my Special Pile, because it’s second in a series and I don’t have the first one yet (we all have a Special Pile like that, right?!), a Fannie Flagg, a book on China that I ended up not finishing and a great book on the effect of people’s first language on their English, also on the Special Pile, as it’s a book I bought for work reading. You can see all of my recent Book Confessions by clicking the link. Anyway, this is doing better than last month, I think you’ll agree (what looks like a gap in last month’s is an optical illusion: the front shelf books end where the horizontal pile begins.

In current reading, I’m galloping through “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, which, admittedly, is Ali’s Hardy Challenge book for August/September, but I only read the June/July one in October, so I am catching up slowly! And ooh, it’s wonderful, isn’t it. As I’ve said many times before, the thing about Hardy is that he tells a blooming good story, and he’s certainly told one here. I still can’t work out why I’ve never read it before (yet I have a copy, covered in sticky-backed plastic, dating it to my pre-University Penguin Classics years). The other current read is Edith Sitwell’s “English Eccentrics”, in a lovely Folio Society edition picked up in Dartmouth. It’s … well … eccentric. It’s a bit random and odd, but interesting reading and quite poetic and individual, and I will persist with it (it’s not as long as I thought, either, because the high-quality pages are really quite thick!

Coming up – well, this is the front shelf of the TBR: the first two books there are slim volumes about Paignton bought on our holiday in March. It would be nice to have moved forward a few months in the TBR by the end of this month, perhaps (at least I know these are the oldest books on the TBR mountain, save for the Special Pile). As I put them in order, and these were NOT all bought at the same time, it seems a bit odd to me that I’ve got a white / pale spines theme going on! Does that happen to you ever? Anyway, one more celeb biography (but hopefully a decent one), then mainly biography and travel, with one novel (by an unknown author, picked up in The Works). I wonder if I’ll get to the end of these this month?

I also do want to mine the bottom of that Special Pile and read at least one of these really interesting books that I’ve bought for work. Of course I’m interested in these as books in their own right: that’s why I do the job I do, but perhaps I should have shelved them with the other books in acquisition order. I can only think that I wanted them to be accessible.

So, there we are. What are you planning to read in the coming month, as the nights draw right in (in this hemisphere) and there’s nothing better than curling up cosily with a good book?

Edited to add – in other booky news, I’ve been featured on Simon Thomas’ blog in his “A LIfe in Books” series – it came out really well and I enjoyed reading my partner’s assessment of my own life in books!

Full TBR here: haven’t done one of these for aaages …