State of the TBR – October 2016

I’m going to say Ta-Da! Look! One shelf! How long has that taken me to get to?? There is even a little gap that would fit one book at the right-hand end of the shelf. Yes, there’s a pile, but it’s only one pile, right? So I’m calling that a win. I read 13 books in September, pretty well all from the physical TBR, and gave up on one, so that big wodge of lovely Viragoes is gone, for a start.

Unfortunately / fortunately, I’m going to be in at least two places this month with unexplored charity shops, and you know what I’m like with those. As I’m in a few Not So Secret Santas, this is my last blow-out with the wish list before I have to keep it under control, so who knows what I’ll find? (actually, if I’m ‘allowed’ to buy lots of books, I don’t tend to find things I want to buy, whereas if I’ve got a huge shelf to read, I find millions more. Why IS that???).

So what have I got coming up? I neglected #Woolfalong in September, but now is the ideal opportunity to read “The Common Reader”, as I’ve been working on my Iris Murdoch research, which uses the concept of the ‘common reader’ (my participants prefer to be referred to as ‘ordinary readers’ but this is the background to it). I have read the books before but can’t find them (were they in the school library, maybe?) so I treated myself to these nice new editions, although they seem to have used an old print block. And the two Viragoes? Well, a new month means a new Dorothy Richardson volume (only short now, remember) and for Karen and Simon’s 1947 Club, I went all over-excited and bought a copy of E.H. Young’s “Chatterton Square”, which I’m really looking forward to reading.

Coming up on the TBR after that is a bit of a mixed bag. Two bits of social history in “Stranger in the House” and “War Notes from London”, a weird Icelandic novel (my last one on the TBR!), Simon Armitage’s poetic travels, a book about working with J.D. Salinger, “The Novel Cure” which looks like a lot of fun, and another book about reading (which appears to be part of a three-for-two purchase-fest from just after Christmas last year – I must have had a book token!).

Have you read any of these? How many challenges are you doing in October? How’s your TBR doing? Do share!