I have mountains of books, so why is it I can never decide what to read next? I look at the piles and I think I will most likely die of old age before I ever get to the bottom of them. The amount of books sitting on my dresser would comfortably last me well into the next decade. The ones on the top shelf of the wardrobe (who needs clothes, when you can have books?) would easily provide me with two or three years' worth of reading. I won't mention the extra hundred or so that have been put in storage.
During the week I read -- and finished -- Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness. It's been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize and with good reason. The prose is so beautiful and eloquent and the narrative so expertly structured I can't see why it shouldn't win. (I'll try and get my review up sometime over the weekend.) But having finished that yesterday I woke up this morning scrabbling around for a new book to suit my mood.
Over the past couple of weeks I've been trying to read Claire Kilroy's All Names Have Been Changed, but it just hasn't been doing it for me. I'm not sure why, because it's another book filled with beautiful, well-crafted prose, but the characters haven't really gelled in my brain and apart from the narrator and the star of the piece, a successful literary writer, they fall flat and so I don't really care about them. And, as shallow as this may sounds, this means I don't really care for the book. Perhaps I just need to be in the mood for it...
So, this morning after struggling with about 20 pages of Kilroy's book, I put it aside and thought I might try Paulo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a proof of which was sent to me by the publisher for review about six weeks ago. I thought this book would be a brilliant read, which was why I agreed to review it, but the proof is basically a computer print out, bound together with glue, that has revisions typed on the margins. That's fine; I can cope with proofing marks (it's what I do for a living, albeit for a specialist newspaper) and I can cope with flimsy paper. But the text size is minuscule -- my guess is 7pt. Now, I don't know about you, but text size is very important to me, and if I have to strain to read text I'd prefer not to read it. Sorry Doubleday, but I don't think I can read this one just yet...
Which leads me onto Helen Walsh's Once Upon a Time in England. The kind folks at Canongate posted this to me last week on-spec, and having read the blurb I wasn't sure it was really my cup of tea: did I really want to read about a family in northern England during the 1970s and 1980s? I filed it away and thought I might read it when I was "in the mood", so when I opened it up this morning and started to read, I hadn't expected to get much beyond a couple of pages before abandoning it on the premise that my gut reaction to the blurb was correct. How wrong could I be! I'd raced through the first 45 pages without realising it. This is shaping up to be a great book...
So, what are you reading right now? And do you have as much trouble as me when it comes to selecting the next book to read?
