Let's Play 52 Pick Up

I humbly submit my application to join The Classics Club

Like the time I moved to Hobart in Tasmania because it was as close to wilderness as I could bear, I have taken up a mildly difficult and hugely exciting and fun challenge that in no way impares my access to tea or chocolate: I have taken up the challenge to read 52 classics in five years. They are my own selection, and the method I used to choose which classics would make the cut was mixed, but was heavily influenced by several walks around my apartment peering at the bookshelves. Fans of useless trivia will be delighted to discover that I already own 36 of the books on this list.

Here is my list, with a few things marked out for those of you who like added detail:

* = re-reads, because I want to see if an older version of me has a different take on the book in question.
@ = As most of the people taking part in this blog challenge seem to be American, I have marked out all the Australian classics.
# = non fiction

I have chosen to read some short stories, but they are all in published collections. Since I plan to read the whole volume I have listed the volumes in question as one single book. I also feel compelled to point out that, according to the rules, The Significance of the Frontier in American History might be considered too short to count as one book. But I beg you to allow me to take a couple of hundred pages off my Anna Karenina entry and tack them on to The Frontier essay quota. I'll only do it the once, I promise!


1. Lolita - Vladimi Nabokov *
2. Eleven Kinds of Lonliness - Richard Yates
3. Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
4. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
5. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
6. Great Expectaions - Charles Dickens
7. Hard Times - Charles Dickens
8. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorn
9. The Muddle Headed Wombat - Ruth Park * @
10. Missus - Ruth Park @
11. Harp in the South - Ruth Park @
12. Poor Man's Orange - Ruth Park @
13. My Life in France - Julia Child
14. The Australian Ugliness - Robin Boyd @#
15. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery
16. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
17. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
18. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
19. Persuasion - Jane Austen
20. Voltaire in Love - Nancy Mitford #
21. Madame du Pompadour - Nancy Mitford #
22. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
23. Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
24. Careful, He Might Hear You -Sumner Locke Elliot @
25. The Glass Canoe - David Ireland @
26. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
27. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
28. The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse
29. I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
30. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories - F Scott Fitzgerald
31. Tender is the Night - F Scott Fitzgerald
32. The Beautiful and the Damned - F Scott Fitzgerald
33. The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner #
34. Friday's Child - Georgette Heyer *
35. The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise - Georges Perec
36. A Void - Georges Perec
37. Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep - Georges Perec *
38. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
39. Twilight Sleep - Edith Wharton
40. The Glimpses of the Moon - Edith Wharton
41. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett *
42. The George's Wife - Elizabeth Jolley
43. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
44. 1984 Orwell - George Orwell
45. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell #
46. Short Stories - Somerset Maugham
47. Theatre - Somerset Maugham
48. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
49. Through The Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll *
50. Dracula - Bram Stoker
51. The Wizard of Oz - Frank L Baum
52. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

Expected finish date: 12th September 2017

All reviews I post of books from this list can be found by searching for the label Classics Club

Edit: below is the list-in-progress of any classic I read not from the original list:

1. Starlight - Stella Gibbons

Stuck in the Middle With Me

I am in the middle of two things at the moment: a book and a list.

The book is Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld. I reckon that if Jay Mcinerney ever decided to write one of the Tales of the City books by Amistad Maupin, this is what you would get. The chilled, artistic, hip neighbourhood of Tribeca is populated by faintly hopeless almost-failed artists and irritating pricks. When I was a popular music wannabe-academic snob, I was surrounded by faintly hopeless almost-failed artists and irritating pricks, so perhaps that is why these characters feel so lifelike to me.

Each chapter is narrated by a different character, and Taro Greenfeld is so good at giving each one a distinct voice that I initially thought it was a disparate collection of short stories. Although I am yet to finish the book, I am loving the way the plot is developing almost by stealth; tiny drips of clues from previous chapters are scattered through subsequent ones. The bigger picture is emerging inch by inch.

I have read some pleasant things in the last few weeks, but this is the first book in a while that I have been able to really sink my teeth into. The characters and the plot are, as the back cover says, "darkly funny". The social commentary is sharp and biting. The book is readable as hell and I can't wait to finish it.

The List I am compiling is for something these guys have scared/dared/cheered/willed me into doing. I am going to attempt at least fifty Classics in five years or less. Five years sounds like a long time, but ten classics a year sounds hard, especially since some of my (so far half baked) list are - like Anna Karenina - thicker than a body builder's torso.

I have realised that I love making lists about as much as I love reading, so when I am done with this one I might make a list of Lists I Should Compile. When I have finished my classics list I will be duly posting it here, and fulfilling all other requirements that membership of The Classics Club entails. These include (but are not limited to) drinking sherry from a stemmed glass while discussing pre-post-modern plot development styles, and pledging to use at least one of the following words once a day: scullery, ratafia, furbelow, bosky.

Ceci n'est pas un livre

This is a post about a book that is not yet a book; something I have just read that I can't really tell you anything about. But it is set in Iceland.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have swapped the bookshop for the publishing house, and that I wasn't sure if, or how, this would change my blog. Well yesterday I finished reading a truly amazing manuscript. It has only belonged to the company I work for since Thursday. It happens to have been at the centre of the most hotly contested bidding war seen in publishing for many months, and it started in a office on the other side of the lift bank from my desk.

I feel especially lucky to have come onboard at a time when I was able to see the excruciating anticipation, followed by champagne-y elation that marked the bidding war to acquire Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. I get all shivery and goosebumpy when I think about it, especially after having read the manuscript which was so incredible and assured and moving in a wonderfully human, un-schmaltzy way. If this book were food it would probably be fennel fried in black pepper and sugar, served with soft goats cheese and pine nuts.

What I want to do is talk about my emotional journey with the book, but I think that would give away too many details of the story's structure. Damn! I also want to quote some heartbreakingly beautiful sentences from it, but I am sure that is utterly verboten at this stage. Double damn! As you can see, I am utterly bursting with the knowledge of this work and I have to keep mum for months to come.


As a bookseller, I am used to seeing reading copies of books that have the publishers gushing for a page or two about the wonderousness that is the book within. To be honest, that gets a little tired after a while, and you tend to ignore it. This will be a book beyond all that, and I desperately hope that the people who will love it and be enriched for having read it will allow themselves the privilege of letting it into their lives. The more I think about it, the more excited I am that Kent will be writing more books in the future that I will be able to read. In a mere three days, I have become a huge fan. And I can't wait until others have the chance to become fans too.

Nighty Night

I won't lie: I feel disappointed by the diet book I've been reading. It is called The Sleep Diet (Dr Carmel Harrington), and I was seriously hoping that it meant that if I wanted to lose weight then all I would need to do would be to go and have a nice lie down. Sadly, this is far from the case. You actually have to do shit as well, like, exercise and eat healthily and stuff. What a drag!

This is really a good thing, however, because it means that the book actually makes sense. From what I've seen of most diet books, this is nothing short of a miracle. In a nutshell, the book's basic thesis is that if you are trying to lose weight by eating less and exercising more, this will only work if you are also getting adequate sleep. I could go into the reasons why this is the case but I won't becasue someone else has already done that, and published the book. It's called The Sleep Diet!

It isn't really a conventional diet book at all. It is more of a general study about sleep and how our bodies are affected by lack of it, with a particular focus on weight loss and weight gain. There is also interesting stuff about sleep disorders and a whole chapter on 'Good Sleep Practices'. Zzzzzzzz.

Sshhhh

Did I mention that I am in a bookclub? I am in a bookclub. Our latest book was one about introverts called Quiet by Susan Cain. It was fascinating, as was the subsequent discussion at the meeting. A few of us changed our views of where on the introvert/extrovert scale we are, and others of us found deeper understanding of the more introverted people around us.

I love book club because: we talk about stuff, Nick makes really yummy guacamole, and (depending on which household hosts the meeting) there are usually two little poodles who like to fall asleep in a floppy bundle of curls on your lap. What's not to love??!?!


There was so much info packed into the book which made me rethink myself and the people I know many times over. It is one of the most thought provoking books I have ever come across and my fellow bookclubbers seemed to agree. The other great experience that came from reading the book was how many conversations I had with family and friends as a result of telling them I was reading a book about introverts. So many stories and ideas and shared experiences. I give it 4 out of 5 for style an structure, and a whopping 5 out of 5 of content.

Boring But Important

Hello there, dear Bookerlytes! I like this blog to be all about books and am not keen on wasting too much time discussing other matters on it. However I have some news which could very well affect the way this blog is administered and received so I hope you'll be happy to bear with me and read this post. I'll try to fit in a fart joke somewhere so it isn't too boring for you. The thing is, I have a new job working for a publishing house.

Girl Booker has always been about me documenting and sharing my reading delights, but it invariably helped me along as a bookseller too. I started the blog to address the problem of my day job being quite fun but far too easy. I now have a job that is (at least in the learning stages) filling those gaps of mental laziness for me. This makes Girl Booker feel like a delicious indulgence rather than a (self imposed) requirement. So at this stage I am not sure how regular my posting will become, or if my posts will perhaps turn into wafting jumbles of adjectives and emotions with little structure or thoughtful discussion. Or, indeed, if I will stop writing altogether and instead post photos of puppies and kittens. We shall have to wait and see.


The other issue this raises is that of bias or conflict of interest. I wanted to be clear about what this blog means to me, and that I do not intend to become a spokesperson for my employer on this site. I do nevertheless feel compelled to point out that I will inevitably read a lot of books published by my employer, simply because I am cheap and lazy and their books will be cheap or free and very easy for me to access. How many people would NOT read a book that looks interesting if someone dropped it on their desk? As it happens, I read many a free promotional book when I was a bookseller, but because they came from many publishers it didn't feel like favouritism. So I am still a Girl Booker, but I will Girl Book in a slightly different way from now on. And I just farted.

Old and New

I've recently finished a couple of books that could not have been more different. I love the fact that I loved them both. A few days ago saw me complete The Mystery Of A Hansom Cab, written by Fergus Hume and first published in 1886. I think I learnt from my experience with Wilkie Collins, and only picked it up when I had lots of time and inclination for a ponderous and meandering reading experience. As a consequence, it took about three weeks for me to finish but I was happy to read it slowly. It is like a BBC Sunday night historical mystery in a book. And the cover is yellow which made me very happy.

In contrast, Shadowfell by Juliet Marillier hasn't been published at all yet, and I read it in five days. Not only is this a teen novel, it is teen fantasy. I don't tend to go in for fantasy these days but perhaps this reminded me of the times when I happily read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe over and over again. Despite the book being a composite of two genres I rarely read, I was gripped. I put tasks aside to read, I squeezed in a paragraph or two while on the train station escalators, I thought about the story when I had to put the book down.

I love the fact that my reading experiences can be so different in terms of genre, content and my responses to the texts. What makes this even cooler is that both these books are Australian; it's nice to know such diversity can come from one place.