Bloggery

Friday 23rd Sep 2011

Libby Harris

Off to a good start...Libby's Reading Year

Hi, it’s Libby here. Although not the prolific blogger I intended to be at the beginning of the year, our new site has inspired me to be a lot more rigorous with my updates. The original premise of my reading year was to begin the Great Reading Digression. This consisted of me reading books that were related in some small way, whether it was a theme, setting or writing style – basically anything that caught my interest in the current book would influence my choice of the next. I was hoping this idea would lead me around the Mr B’s shop, entice me out of the fiction and teen fiction sections, where I often feel most comfortable browsing, and into the so far unexplored downstairs sections of the shop that house a lot of our non-fiction titles.
 
I thought I would ease myself in gently and went for a book at random from the beginning of the fiction section, and so “The Yacoubian Building” by Alaa al Aswany was where I began. And, in the following list, see if you can guess the connections I made while dotting around the store, and click on any title to read more thoughts in our online shop:
 
“The House by the Thames: and the People Who Lived There” by Gillian Tindall

“The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer

“The Girl with Glass Feet” by Ali Shaw

“My Goat Ate its Own Legs” by Alex Burrett

“There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya,

“When you are Engulfed in Flames” by David Sedaris

“Burnt out Town of Miracles” by Roy Jacobson

“After the Fire, a Still Small Voice” by Evie Wyld

“A Small Free Kiss in the Dark” by Glenda Millard

“The Howling Miller” by Arto Paasilina

“The Old Man and his Sons” by Hedin Bru

“We, the Drowned” by Carson Jensen

“The Cat’s Table” by Michael Ondaatje

“The Break” by Pietro Grossi

“Visitation” by Jenny Erpenbeck

“A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness

“The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean” by David Almond

“Revolution” by Jennifer Donnelly

“Pure” by Andrew Miller

“Jamrach’s Menagerie” by Carol Birch

That is where I have got to so far. Admittedly, some of the links between each book are more strenuous than others and sometimes I have been distracted by the new and shiny books on display in the shop but that is a bit of an occupational hazard.