It’s that time again where I post the books I’ve managed to read over the past month, and this time I think I’ve not done so well. Anyway, here it is; a grand total of *drumroll* 5 books. Oh the humiliation…
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini (4/5)
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford (4/5)
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (3/5)
Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth – Xiaolu Guo (4/5)
Amulet – Roberto Bolano (3/5)
It’s been a mixed one this month and not bad by the look of the ratings. Out of the five read, ‘Twenty Fragments’ was the most enjoyable. There was a fresh, crisp quality to Guo’s writing that awoke very deep emotions within me about youth. Guo managed to capture the moment a child turns into an adult and opens their eyes and their heart to the devastating fragility of life. Roberto Bolano’s ‘Amulet’ also relates loosely to the passage of time, growing up and realisation, but is written in a more metered, measured way. Bolano’s novel has none of the savage immediacy of Guo’s; which can only be credited to the fact that she was only barely twenty herself when she wrote it.
August was supposed to be a month of reading exclusively from my ever-growing TBR list. Not only that, it was also a chance to tackle those ‘classics’ that have been lying around gathering dust for god knows how long (not to mention to relieve myself of being one of those pretentious readers who display classic books on their shelves just to look clever!)
But my plans for the month did go very much awry, as my powers of concentration mysteriously took leave of me. This has taught me a lesson not to be so ambitious! Oh, and just for the record, I’m still dragging myself through Madame Bovary three weeks since I began it and I’ve put the other titles I planned to read back on the shelf. But this doesn’t spell defeat, oh no, I’ve figured out the best way to get through that awful little pile is to ‘sandwich’ read. Yep! That’s when you begin 3 books at once. Requirements are as follows: two titles must be of the irresistible page-turner variety and the last one (the undesirable) you wedge between the other two. You make a pledge to read 50 pages a day of only one book and rotate the books one for each day. By the time you know it, you’ve gotten through the damn thing, or so you hope. So far this literary placebo plan has worked very well. I manage to keep to the 50-page promise which gets me through books surprisingly quick.
Well, that’s that for August, how did you do? September is already upon us, here’s wishing everyone good reading for the months ahead!
Wordly Obsessions 
This sandwich method is clever – I wish I knew about it when I was dragging my feet through Jane Eyre! In any case, I know I’ve disappeared so it’s good to catch up on what you’ve been reading.
A fine list of books you have. I’m preparing a post on books I read-but over the summer. I had planned to read from my TBR list, as did you, and got side-tracked by Robert Parker’s Spenser. I spent the summer reading the entire series. Each book is short, completed in 1-2 days, so not bad, but it ended up about thirty-forty books to get through Spenser’s 35-year career as a PI.
I’ll miss him.
Hi Friande! Long time no read lol, how’s it going? I’ve missed reading your witty posts. The ‘method’ is what gets me through some of the more difficult books. In fact, I read a great post over on Dead White Guy’s blog about classics that people know they should read, but just can’t, either from the language barrier or for other reasons. Looking at the list I put together for last month I think all those books were the ones I’ve been dreading to read for a long time. Considering how long they’ve been on my shelf I’m not surprised! I was hoping I could tackle them now that I’m a seasoned reader of sorts, but I’ve been proved wrong!
Wow WordDreams! You have some incredible stamina reading all that material. I could never be do diligent. There’s always some other book grabbing my attention. I look forward to your post. Lately I’ve got this thing for crime fiction ever since I read ‘The Big Sleep’ back in March. I’d never paid attention to the genre before, but now I think it rocks! It takes a special kind of mind to write a story like that. As always, I hope you include your authorly spin on it. It’s interesting to see how authors ‘read’, what they look out for etc.