I haven’t done a ‘Do I Want To Read’ post for sometime but seeing as I know I will be moving when this goes up, there really are occasional bonuses to being able to schedule a post if it all goes right, and as it will also be his 200th Birthday (I could go on about what would happen if we celebrated everyone’s 200th but I won’t, oh I did) I thought maybe it would be appropriate to ask you all about Mr Dickens and what you would recommend this reader do with the ‘Dickens difficulty’ he has.
Happy 200th Birthday Charlie-Boy!
My mother, no less, has said on many occasional that I shouldn’t really call myself a reader if I haven’t read Dickens, or maybe it was Hardy… or maybe Austen (I have failed at all three in the main). I tried to argue this one out and failed, she is an English teacher after all. We have also come to snarky sneery banter about Shakespeare; I hated him at school and have been unable to shift this phobia. Anyway let’s discuss my ‘Dickens dilemma’ further, for it is his birthday and should be all about him.
I have tried and failed with Dickens on four occasions now. ‘Oliver Twist’ was first, I thought being a tale for children it might be the easiest way in, along with the fact it was one of the shortest. The 22 year old me just didn’t like it, remember he wasn’t the best reader though – or certainly not a patient reader shall we say, I have no idea why now but I simply didn’t enjoy it and so probably promptly moved onto an Agatha Christie.
The following year came Andrew Davies adaptation of ‘Bleak House’ which being made by the BBC and starring Gillian Anderson (I am of the X Files generation, what can I say) enticed me to watching the whole 15 episodes which I really enjoyed and thought ‘ooh I must read the book’. I started it and thought it was ok, then I got lost with all the characters and plot (which seemed so much more graspable in the adaptation, enough said) and these dreaded words ‘well the TV show was much better’ were actually muttered out of my mouth. I think dear reader I might just have heard you muter ‘heathen’ under your breath. Rude.
Moving in with a very well read family member in December of 2010 who was also, very important for this post, is a huge Dickens fan I found my interest peaked again. ‘Great Expectations’ was the recommendation, apparently his most accessible work. If I remember rightly I think Polly of Novel Insights and I were considering reading it that Christmas, in fact knowing our Christmas Classics pact she probably did, I picked it up, got on with it ok but wasn’t held enough to read it right through. My bookish magpie eyes kept seeing other newer shiny reading gems. We parted ways about page 80-90, we haven’t faced each other since.
This Christmas we had another adaptation of Dickens ‘Great Expectations’ on the BBC, and again with Gillian Anderson once more I was drawn into the show. But I decided to hold off watching and try to read the book instead. Until I saw someone on twitter give away the fiery ending and so I thought ‘what’s the point now?’ I soon settled down with some of his ghostly stories instead but Scrabble, Spite & Malice or (the most likely) a Snowball cocktail lead me away from them.
Yet I do still want to try him, so oh wise readers of this blog… where should I start?
(And will anyone else please own up to not having ever finished a Dickens so I don’t feel such a literary loner? I have also noticed I didn’t mention the Queen yesterday, but frankly 60 years ruling a country vs. me moving house, which is bigger news? Ha!)
I am pretty sure I have pushed you in the direction of Australia’s ‘First Tuesday Book Club’ before. It’s the perfect book show and one I am shocked we haven’t the likes of in the UK as I think it would be a great success (and I know someone who would love to host it, cough). Each month they read two books in a panel of five (three of whom, Jennifer Byrne, Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger, are always on it) and discuss them. Invariably the books are one modern and one classic, this month the modern one was ‘The Last Werewolf’. Well Marieke went crazy on it calling it ‘a very silly book’, and excuse my French, a ‘cock forest’, where else would you get a brilliant review like that? If you want to see it 
“I still think about Peter, the man I loved most in the world, all the time. At two in the afternoon, when he would come and pick me up and take me for rides; at five, when I would read to him, head on his chest; in the despair at seven p.m., when he would hold me and rub my belly for an hour; in the despair again at nine p.m. when we would go for a night ride, down to the Royal Cliffs Diner in Englewood Cliffs where I would buy a cup of coffee with precisely seven sugars and a lot of cream. We were friends, soul mates and lovers. I was seven. He was fifty-one.”
“For Patrick Melrose, ‘family’ is more than a double-edged sword. As friends, relations and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor – an heiress who forsook the grandeur of her upbringing for ‘good works’, freely bestowed upon everyone but her own child – Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn’t necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined. Yet as the service ends and the family gather for a final party, as conversations are overheard, danced around and concertedly avoided, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current. And at the end of the day, alone in his rooftop bedsit, it seems to promise some form of safety, at last. One of the most powerful reflections on pain and acceptance, and the treacheries of family, ever written, “At Last” is the brilliant culmination of the Melrose books. It is a masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional truth.”
I was listening to one of my favourite book podcasts 
Another author I have wanted to read on and off is James Ellroy. I saw the film ‘The Black Dahlia’ a few years ago and was left rather confused and also really compelled, I thought ‘ooh I should read the book’ and then of course didn’t. I did the same with ‘L.A. Confidential’ actually thinking about it. Strolling through the City Library, which I will be reporting back on very soon, I caught sight of a What’s On pamphlet and saw that it was LGBT month and there is a regular book group which is ‘a monthly group for anyone who enjoys LGBT-interest fiction’ and one I thought with The Green Carnation Prize now back in swing (yes we are receiving submissions already) it might be interesting to pop by. Their next choice of novel is James Ellroy’s ‘The Big Nowhere’ so of course now I need to read the book. I am just worried it might be a little bit too hard boiled for me. What do you think?
Finally there is an author I seem to be seeing everyone reading, and who was recommended by a few of you when I tweeted my desire for chilling crime the other day and that was Jo Nesbø. I was actually sent ‘The Snowman’ a while back and passed it onto 
I have only read one other William Boyd novel before, though I do have ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ on Mount TBR and that was ‘Restless’ which was in my pre-blogging days for an old book group. I have to say I really, really enjoyed it I also promised my self to read some more of his work… and then of course haven’t since 2007.
“The Pillars of the Earth” tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known; of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect – a man divided in his soul; of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame; and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother. A spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England, this is Ken Follett’s historical masterpiece.” 
Libby Day was just seven years old when her older brother massacred her family while she hid in a cupboard. Her evidence helped put him away. Ever since then she has been drifting, surviving for over twenty years on the proceeds of the ‘Libby Day fund’. But now the money is running out and Libby is desperate. When she is offered $500 to do a guest appearance, she feels she has to accept. But this is no ordinary gathering. The Kill Club is a group of true-crime obsessives who share information on notorious murders, and they think her brother Ben is innocent. Ben was a social misfit, ground down by the small-town farming community in which he lived. But he did have a girlfriend – a brooding heavy metal fan called Diondra. Through her, Ben became involved with drugs and the dark arts. When the town suddenly turned against him, his thoughts turned black. But was he capable of murder? Libby must delve into her family’s past to uncover the truth – no matter how painful…
When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, “The City & The City” is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
Ethan and his five co-workers are marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive game-design company. There they wage battle against the demands of boneheaded marketing staff who torture them with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan’s personal life is being invaded by marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, global piracy and the rise of China. Everybody in both worlds seems to inhabit a moral grey zone, and nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly strait-laced parents or Coupland himself.
In doing my research for ‘Reading for Brazil’ (no I won’t stop mentioning it, ha) I came across ‘The Silence in the Rain’ by Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza which is the first in a detective thriller series set in Brazil and just sounds like it’s marvellous, but is it really? “The first in a stunning new literary crime series featuring Detective Espinoza of the Rio de Janeiro Police Department. A handsome young businessman is found dead in downtown Rio, a suicide who left no note, who had everything to live for. But by the time the police are called, all traces of the man’s identity and the weapon have been removed. Then as Detective Espinosa discovers that the man moved in the upper echelons of Rio society, and meets his beguiling and remarkable wife, clues to the way he lived and how he died lead Espinosa tantalisingly close to the truth. But is he on the right track?” It also has one of the most stunning covers I have seen in a long time.
Speaking of covers… that brings me to book number two ‘Chronic City’ by Jonathan Lethem which I have been recommended by Amazon. I don’t think the book sounds 100% me though! “Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, living off his earnings as a child star. Chase owes his current social status to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancee, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, and trapped in a vague routine punctuated only by Upper Eastside dinner parties and engagements. Into Chase’s life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus’ countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Together Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth – that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought. Beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, Lethem’s new novel is as always, utterly unique.” It sounds a little bit ‘modern’ for me, but I like a challenge. It’s the cover though – I love it!
Finally how could I not mention the winner of The Lost Man Booker Prize ‘Troubles’ by J. G. Farrell. Why is it that a book you weren’t too sure you wanted to read, though I would love to read ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’ which is a later book in this trilogy! Now it’s won this prize I am desperate to read the blinker! “Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland – to the Majestic Hotel and to the fiancee he acquired on a rash afternoon’s leave three years ago. Despite her many letters, the lady herself proves elusive, and the Major’s engagement is short-lived. But he is unable to detach himself from the alluring discomforts of the crumbling hotel. Ensconced in the dim and shabby splendour of the Palm Court, surrounded by gently decaying old ladies and proliferating cats, the Major passes the summer. So hypnotic are the faded charms of the Majestic, the Major is almost unaware of the gathering storm. But this is Ireland in 1919 – and the struggle for independence is about to explode with brutal force.”
The first book is ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’ compiled by Peter Boxall. I love a good list of books and indeed I love books about books and so when I saw this at the library the other week I almost had to take it out. Two things stopped me. Firstly I had reached my limit and secondly it is massive and weighs a tonne. I do always ponder with these 1001 things before you die series of books ‘how did they choose that list?’ or ‘what gives that person the authority to decide?’ Do you know what I mean? I also fear I’d start to read the book only to worry that I might never read all 1001 and then panic and go into some kind of bookish despair or get very cross I don’t have lots of them in my TBR. Then again I do love reading about books and it might introduce me to some lovely rogue reads, you can see my quandary I am sure.
The second book currently hovering on my radar I am blaming on 
Savidge Reads 