Category: Weekly Geeks

Now it’s Spring, this week’s Weekly Geeks task asks us to look back on the first quarter of 2011 in books, as well as our anticipation for the beginning of the second quarter of the year.

My reading pace is pretty regular, as I read about 8 books a month and in the first three months of the year I’ve read 25 books. Thirteen of these are crime fiction and six are non-fiction, mainly biographies or autobiographies.

The top five books are (in the order I read them):

• Wycliffe and the Last Rites by W J Burley
• The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter (A Morse mystery)
• The Art of Drowning by Frances Fyfield
• Exit Lines by Reginald Hill (Dalziel and Pascoe)
• Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon (Commissario Guido Brunetti)

They are all crime fiction and pretty old crime fiction too, apart from Donna Leon’s Drawing Conclusions which is a new publication this year.

My choice of reading doesn’t change with the seasons, so I expect I’ll carry on reading a mixture of fiction and a sprinkling of non-fiction. The main change in my reading has been through using a Kindle. I’ve downloaded quite a few classics, so I’ll be reading more of those in the coming months.

As for organising books I’ve been weeding out some books that I think I won’t want to read again and either taking them to the charity shops or exchanging them for others at Barter Books in Alnwick. I have actually taken more there than I’ve brought home so that’s made some space on my bookshelves – but as the books are double-shelved it doesn’t actually look as though there is more space. :)

This week’s Weekly Geeks questions are:

• how do we avoid BBD (Blurry Book Disorder): When one can no longer keep characters and storylines straight? Often brought on by reading multiple books from the same genre in a short period of time.
• and secondly how we avoid reading ruts.

If I’m not careful I do suffer from BBD – if I read one book after another too quickly without pausing between them. This is one reason I write at least a few words about the books I’ve read, as it does fix them in my mind a bit longer, and I can check back what I thought about it. But unless it’s an outstanding book the details of plots and characters don’t stay with me for very long.

I also find sometimes that I’m not sure whether I’ve read a book or not. This can be because I know the story from seeing a TV adaptation or a film as in the case of some of Dickens’s novels, like Oliver Twist. As for Crime and Punishment, I think I read it years ago, but then again maybe not, maybe I just started it and never finished it. This is another reason for keeping a list of the books I’ve read. The difficulty is that I only started to do this about ten years ago and then only spasmodically.

Books can become blurry when I’m looking at them in the library or in bookshops. It’s not so bad borrowing books I’ve already read but buying duplicates is bad. I have duplicate copies of a few books because I think I’d like to read them, buy them and then discover they’re already in the to-be-read piles.

As I read from a wide range of genres I rarely find myself in a reading rut and if I do I try to read something completely different. That usually works.

This week’s Weekly Geeks question is:

The other day I was noticing the old books on my book shelf. Old, meaning books that were “born” a long long time ago. Books that were published AND printed a long long time ago. (Not simply books that have been sitting on our shelves forever!)And it made me wonder what old books other readers have in their collection.

So this week, write a post sharing with us what old antique books you may have on your shelves, and tell us the story behind them. Did you inherit from a relative? Are you a collector of old and rare books? Did you just discover a certain book in a used book store and couldn’t pass it up? What’s the very oldest book you have? Do you even like old books? Or do they creep you out? Do you read and enjoy your old books, or is it more a “look and don’t touch” thing?

I love old books as well as new books. I don’t own any antiquarian books – old, rare and valuable ones for example. My old books are just that – old. I don’t value them just as objects, but for their content and some of my old books are not in prime condition. They are well used and well loved.

The oldest books I have belonged to my parents. The earliest is Where Flies the Flag by Henry Harbour. The book has no publication date but was presented to my father for “Regular Attendance at Vicarage Lane Wesleyan Sunday School during 1921.”  The inscription notes that he had “Not missed during the year.” In 1921 my father was 7. This book is in good condition, although the pages are now brown with age and I’m not sure he would have read it then as it seems hard reading for a 7-year old.

Both my parents went to Sunday School and each year were awarded books for attendance. One belonging to my mum is the Empire Annual for Girls which was given to her in 1925 when she was 11. Another is The Girl Guides Book and inside this one she wrote that it was an award for 1st Prize for Sewing, so that must have been from her day school. I loved both these books when I was a child.

And shown below are two of my Dad’s books – My Adventure Book and The British Boy’s Annual – this one was a Christmas present. They are both un-dated, although from “The Editor Chats” I see that he was asking for postcards listing the stories or article that had appealed most strongly to the readers to arrive not later than March 15 1928, so it must have been before that. Talking about the readers of The British Boy’s Annual, it wasn’t limited to boys as the editor wrote that he’d had a complaint from a boy that his sister had found it so interesting that she kept worrying him to let her have it for a while. I found it interesting too.

My favourite book of theirs – I don’t know which of them originally owned it – is The Coronation Book of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. I think this was published in 1936 as it was published before the Coronation in 1937, so I suppose it could have belonged to one of my grandparents originally.  It’s a history of the Royal Family and the Coronation ceremony, full of photos of the Family – including Queen Victoria with her children and grandchildren in the garden of Osborn House in the Isle of Wight in 1898 and our present Queen and her sister as children. Queen Elizabeth was 11 when her father ascended the throne.

I’ve spent hours as a child reading and looking at this book.

(Click on the photos to enlarge)