Thursday 31 March 2011

March 2011 Wrap-Up

Another month gone, a few posts done at least (including a rather serious vlog effort), but the time for individual reviews has long passed - sigh...  Which makes my monthly wrap-up even more important!  Pay attention at the back there...

Total Books Read: 15
Year-to-date: 37


New: 15
Rereads: 0

From the Shelves: 3
From the Library: 6
On the Kindle: 6

Novels: 13
Novellas: 1
Short Stories: 1

Non-English Language: 5 (2 German, 1 Japanese, 1 Czech, 1 Russian)
In Original Language: 2 (2 German)

Books read in March were:
1) Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
2) The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes by Dan Holloway
3) Autofiction by Hitomi Kanehara
4) The Gift of Speed by Steven Carroll
5) Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
6) The Rector & The Doctor's Family by Margaret Oliphant
7) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
8) Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann
9) The Bone People by Keri Hulme
10) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
11) Short Stories by Franz Kafka*
12) The Rope of Man by Witi Ihimaera
13) Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome 
14) Plumb by Maurice Gee 
15) Rudin by Ivan Turgenev

* A bunch of random selected free e-texts - 
In der Strafkolonie, Der Kübelreiter, Ein Landarzt, Ein Hungerkünstler, Großer Lärm, Betrachtung, Der Bau, Das Urteil

Murakami Challenge: 0 (1/3)
Aussie Author Challenge: 1 (4/12)
Victorian Literature Challenge: 3 (9/15)
NZ Reading Month Mini-Challenge:  5/1

Tony's Recommendations for March are: Steven Carroll's The Gift of Speed and Keri Hulme's The Bone People

My reading appears very anglocentric this month, due partly to my being English and partly to the NZ Reading Month Mini-Challenge I decided to participate in.  Honourable mentions to Maurice Gee's Plumb (a wonderful book which I hope to say more about in an NZ round-up post!) and Thomas Mann's short but sweet Tonio Kröger.

The Gift of Speed, the sequel to Carroll's The Art of the Engine Driver, is a superb book and was always going to be a contender, especially for its poetical sections on former West Indies skipper Frank Worrell (I don't like cricket, oh no...).  However, it had to share top spot with Keri Hulme's tour de force, a stunning mixture of kitchen-sink drama, Maori mythology and Christ complex.  Sorry, not going to choose a winner here :)

That was March; see you next month...