Saturday 9 June 2012

Book Club Books

Book Club time! Love the chance to borrow some great books. With the Bloomsday readalong starting next week I needed to get my hands on Ulysses (James Joyce) and luckily for me my friend had a copy.  My first reaction? Damn this thing's HUUGE. Seriously how do people read this brick in one day? Then I looked inside and there are parts of this that aren't even in English! Here's an example extract that freaked the crap out of me:
"....Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident, Hans Chuechli-Steuerli, Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivat-docentgeneralhistoryspecialprofesordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein....."
Oh yes, that just happened. It's okay, I enjoy the odd challenge, and who knows maybe I'll get to learn some Irish along the way as I'm sure that's going to be scattered around in there somewhere, so here we go. I have decided to give myself some leeway because otherwise I just know I may give up on this one. So I'm going to start this Bloomsday and I have to finish (no matter what!) by next Bloomsday. That way if things get too much I can put it down and pick it back up again without any feelings of failure. Right so lets do this!

Going from bottom to top in the pic next up I borrowed The Odyssey (Homer) as it's on my challenge lists and since there are references between Ulysses and The Odyssey I figured I should probably read them about the same time. I'll probably flick between these two books over the next few months.


Then I grabbed Always Looking Up (Michael J. Fox) as I read his first book Lucky Man and loved it, so I want to read his second since I really enjoy his writing style. Where the first is more about his career, early life and early diagnosis, this book is about his foundation and ongoing work with Parkinson research. 

Next up is Maus I (Art Spiegelman) a graphic novel set in World War II where the Nazis are represented as cats and the Jews are mice. This will be a good quick book to jump to when Ulysses's stream of consciousness text just gets a bit too much and I need a break and something a bit different.

Both After Dark (Haruki Murakami) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (Hisham Matar) were borrowed from last month's book club but I hadn't gotten to them yet so took them back to give others another chance to borrow them. But they're back in my pile again this month.

And finally grabbed The Happiness project (Gretchen Rubin), a non-fiction book about how to work towards a happier life by giving yourself little projects that mean something to you. A great book to pull me out of the depressing mood I'll be in when I realise I have been reading Ulysses for what feels like forever and I still have half the friggin' thing to go because it's so damn big! I'll need that.

Happy reading peops!