Books of 2010 Winners Are…

I popped a post on the site letting you know what my books of 2010 were, if you missed them and want to have a gander you can pop here and here as I did them in two parts, I also offered to give two of you a change to win a copy of one of the titles of your choice each. All you had to do was tell me which book this opening line was from…

‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him’. 

Which was of course from Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’, the names have been picked out of a big kitchen bowl at random and the winners are… Alice and Anna.

Congrats to the winners, sorry everyone else but there are some corking comps coming up over the next few months, please email me your details and which title from my best of lists you would like me to pop into the post to you!

The Final Bits of 2010… What Where My Favourite Books?

I wasn’t really planning on doing a specific post on my favourite books of 2010 and yet I didn’t really feel like I could move onto a new year of reading unless I did. Maybe it’s something to do with having actually finalised the year or some such? Or maybe its simply my love of lists? Anyway its now done…

Well when I say ‘it’ is now done I mean ‘they’, as I couldn’t actually just do a single list of the top ten – I went for two. Now knowing some people don’t like these lists, though I have to say I love them, I thought I would hide them in the blog at the end of 2010, so you can find Part One here and Part Two here.

I have started my first book of 2011 (and almost finished it in fact) finally, and I thought I would have a little competition to get us off to a delightful start to 2011. So if you can tell me what my first read is from its first line pop your answer in today’s comments and two of you will be plucked at random and I will send you a copy of any paperback edition of a book on my best of 2010 lists, and its open world wide… how does that sound?

So the first line is this… ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him’.  So what’s the book? Good luck, you have until the review goes up at some point tomorrow!

Books of 2010… Your Thoughts

It’s getting to that time of year when you start seeing ‘The Books of The Year’ in all the broadsheets, which I always find quite interesting as invariably I have missed out on these choice reads!

Its also the time of year when I start to think which books will make it into my end of year lists and the question always arises ‘have I missed any?’ So I thought I would ask you for some of your favourites from 2010, be they published this year or ones of old (or the last few years/decade) that you have only discovered this year!

Which books might I have missed that you’ve loved this year and I should try and get reading before the end of December? (You might also save some books from getting culled… The cull is almost done, more on that later in the week!)