yessssss

The library texted me that my reservation is in, Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I read about it in the paper and decided that it needed to be checked out. A quick google gives me lots of blog write-ups so I'd have heard of it before if I read other book blogs which I don't because it's too depressing since mine is a bit shite and also so many books so little time etc. I mean, I'm currently upset about not having had a proper chance of writing about The Singing Sands and Death in Five Boxes and also The Window at the White Cat (which I actually stopped reading so I'd feel pressured to write about the other two first). Bla bla bla, no fun at all.   

I have to post something this time of year

I do believe I always post this time of year, my favourite time, and waffle on for a bit about nature being at its finest now before the greenery starts greening, the bare bones of it all so to speak yada yada yada. Which is all true. We've had a long, cold spring so here we are in May still without more than a few buds and very early spring flowers, so even though this spring post is late it really isn't.

I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to keep the blog up, since I don't have computer time. It has led to me not reading. I want to blog about the books I read. If I can't blog, I don't read. I actually find this ridiculously upsetting. Haven't decided if I should just call it quits and live in the Now of the IRL  instead of getting too hung up on a digital journal that shouldn't be allowed to become the reason for enjoying literature.

I read all the Gregor the Overlander books, bar one, which I don't think I'll work to hard on getting hold of. I liked them, and like some reviewer I read find it a little surprising that they're not better known. Collins writes so well for kids, the stories don't shy away from darkness and difficult moral choices and are still easy to understand. I also read something somewhere about how this is one book that is NEVER going to be filmed - this may be a very accurate assessment. Giant rats and bats and other creepy-crawlies? Not really workable. I'd post links but this was ages ago and I'm not looking for them now (feel like I'm writing on borrowed time).

Other than that I've read nothing, bar a novel written by a fella I work with. Exciting, isn't it! It hasn't been published, so we'll keep it anonymous. Ever since he mentioned that he wrote a novel I've been pestering him to let me read it - especially after he showed me the rejection letter he got from a publisher. It was rather a good rejection letter as such ones go, pinpointing briefly but accurately what the problems were with the book. Anyway, my colleague is a tad miffed because he'll never get it printed now, because it's much too much like Kristian Lundberg's Yarden (which I've written about before and which was one reason why I was so keen to read this one). This is true. It's just bad luck. They wrote at the same time, and Lundberg got there first. And Yarden is a better book, I have to say. How much this is thanks to it being actually published and having the benefit of an editor (let's hear it for editors!) I don't know  (as I've also said I wasn't keen on book 2 so my confidence in Lundberg's writing went way down). My colleague's book could benefit from some sprucing up, some tightening up of certain passages and a clearer purpose in the storyline; all things he admits, but he says he just accepts that it's not going to be published now, so he'd rather keep it the way it is. It's sort of a document of himself, I suppose, since it's about a young man working a menial, soul-sucking job in a warehouse, despite being from a cultural middle-class background and "so promising" - which is what my colleague did a few years ago. In short sparse episodes he describes situations, emotions, people trapped in the warehouse, like a separate universe. I've become very curious about my colleague after reading this. How much is based on himself? If it's a lot, I'm immensely flattered and touched that he let me read it at all, because then it's very revealing and personal. But he's an intelligent man with plenty of empathy, so it's not at all impossible that it's only loosely based on himself and perhaps more inspired by someone else he worked with.

Because of this I've found that it's been a bit disconcerting to have read it, actually. Since I know the author it opens up for lots of questions - did you feel like this? Tell me more! What really happened? How much is true? - but the coffee room at work, with all the others around is not an appropriate place for the third degree. Probably, if I'm honest, nowhere is - we don't know each other well enough for me to be permitted to quiz him on personal matters. But he did let me read it, and I'm a very curious person and I want to know darn it. Ah well. So I passive-aggressively write about it here instead, in my own anonymity. I'm so terrible at this blogger lark, I should obviously have posted an interview with him instead, but there you go.

Well.

So.

In my defence, such as it is, I haven't actually been reading much, only blogs. For a while I listened to the radio on my commute instead of reading (mostly Spanarna and På minuten, but also some Tendens - yes, Swedish radio only), but now I'm having this huge blog-enthusiasm thing going and I've actually read several newly discovered blogs back-to-back. So I'm going to have to update my links I think to stuff I actually am reading. I added heaps of things to my Google reader too in a fit of go-get-'em but I don't actually want to follow more than say half of it, so I'm going to have to delete quite a few things and was most piqued when I discovered that it wasn't just hey, delete, it was Tricky. Google really are quite shite with lay-out, aren't they? A lot of my new blog favourites are clothes and/or sewing blogs, mostly retro, because I discovered Looks Good From The Back first and was so inspired to have more fun with clothes - and let's face it, retro is where the fashion fun is, isn't it. Because there is feck all in the shops, at least here. So now I've worked my way to Gertie's blog for better sewing, and am feeling that urge I sometimes get that maybe I'd like to sew my own clothes? I should take a sewing class. There's no way I can learn on my own, I'm too thick. Also, I felt ashamed and inspired to take more of an interest in my OWN blog, and maybe post stuff? With pictures, to make it more interesting! But it's not going to happen until I get my own computer somehow, one I feel I can use whenever. Until then the blog is not going really work, because the phone blog thing is a bit rubbish. I could of course just take a picture of the book I've just finished and post that but. how. dull. My unfulfilled wish to blog about what I'm only after reading has just led me to owe the library about a week's worth of late fees, because I read Backman's Saker min son behöver veta om världen and thought I'd post about it and didn't and didn't return the book because I wanted to remember to post first and there we are. And ironically, the only thing I really wanted to say was that this book is not very great. It's not even a proper book, just blog entries put together. I hate that. I also wanted to say that when I read En man som heter Ove I wrote that I just knew he was going to be offered a film deal, and then I meant to write that in a comment on his blog to say that even though it's going to be tempting for them to cast Kjell Bergqvist as Ove I think they should think carefully about that because it's a little too obvious. But then didn't he beat me to the revelation and then there were 600 comments. Bleurgh. 

But anyway, last post was a LIE, because I got books for Christmas! They were just late to arrive to The English Bookshop, but my husband gave them to me this week. And they are not just any books, he REMEMBERED that I told him I like Cyril Hare!!! That's worth three exclamation points!!! He got me An English Murder and a collection of short stories - I took a rubbish photo but can't upload it from my work phone because it's a bizarre Samsung I don't understand. I've linked you to them instead, they are so gorgeous and I'm so psyched. He asked me today if I was enjoying the book but in all honesty I'm hesitant to get into them because I want to savour them. I was so in the mood for some vintage crime!

Oh, and I read a rather meh teen dystopic novel called Pure by Julianna Baggott that my eldest brought home - it's not terribly good, but a quick and so-so entertaining read, if you happen to be on a flight or something. The author is much too enamoured with her idea of the survivors of the explosions being fused to whatever object they happened to have been near to remember that story, plot and characterization have to come first. Also, she gets praise for her prose I notice when googling briskly, but myself I felt like it was a bit of a copy of Burgess' Bloodsong to be honest. To be fair though Maxima didn't agree with me at all. That reminds me that Mortal Engines also reminded me of Bloodsong and I kind of felt that people need to be un-inspired, you know?

Anyway. CYRIL HARE!

What did I get for my sister then?

Since I had to write about it here? Well, Jenny Lawson's book of almost course, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Don't come here and accuse me of not being au courant with the blogging world. (But I'm really not.) Bonus: I get to read it later too.

Three books in three days. Or maybe it was closer to five. And other stuff.

I am, at a guess, thirty books or so behind. It's so much it isn't even funny. I should just write the title and the author in a post, and leave it at that, instead of saving it and thinking I'll catch up - how can I? I also have a few on the draft list actually, so maybe it's more like forty. I honestly find this very depressing. I have no internet persona at all these days, apart from a Facebook account. And let's face it (hardehar), no internet persona is more boring than the Facebook persona. It's not cool at all.

My husband told me once that I moaned too much on my blog about how bad it was and how I never had time to blog. Well let's face that too - he's right, yet the heart must say what the heart is full of to paraphrase a Swedish saying. Where the bloody hell else am I to give out about this? I've been really grumpy these past few days and snapped today with Maxima, telling her how I never got any computer time at home and she lost patience with me and said I should stop being such a martyr and just ask instead. But I don't want to have to ask. Feels like I have to ask to do everything, I can't just do stuff. Need to sort this out.

Right, Livejournal part over. Good Friday today. Mr Bani is watching the Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of  Christ. Minima is sitting in the armchair next to him with headphones in her ears. Watching but not listening, I suppose. I have not given up the internet for Good Friday. I can't find the post where I did.

The last three books I read where three paperbacks I picked up in Myrornas, where you can still on occasion find second-hand paperbacks at a decent price (which means no more than ten crowns, thankyouverymuch. Fecking Stadsmissionen think they can get away with thirty. I'm all for charity, but I'm not buying Lee Child for more than ten crowns.) So one of them was a Lee Child, one was a Charlaine Harris, and one - oh joy! was an Ellis Peters.

Not dead!

I'm still here. Just not that much on-leasure-line.

Thursday I stopped by Väsby Centrum and went into the big charity shop there (a very good one!) to panic-shop something to wear to a dissertation party we were going to the next evening (a very smart lady deserves her guests to be at least moderately smartly attired, no?). Naturally I browsed the book section, which was surprisingly good, even for English books. I could have picked up several, including two Lee Childs because whythehellnot, but I settled for The End of mr Y which I've been wanting to read for ages and lo, lo, lo and behold - The Language of Bees.

I've finished the latter and reading it was like meeting old friends. I'll get back to you on that one.

Read and be rude

Despite still being a commuter, this year travelling even further and for longer (for my sins), I'm having trouble finding time to read. The reason being that I have colleagues who travel the same way. And if we sit together then I can't in all decency immerse myself in my book, because that would be rude. The train part of the trip is alright. Since the train is packed to bursting point it's every human for h**self, in an inhumane fashion - no holds barred in the struggle to get a seat on the train. Thus, no-one expects to choose who to sit next to. We are all islands on Upptåget in the mornings. I'm perfectly capable of reading no matter how uncomfortable I am, so I can use those 25 minutes to my advantage. The bus trip that follows is a different matter though, since we often re-find each other and sit next to one another.

Just writing this post feels terribly rude, but my intent is not to complain really. I've (almost) come to terms with having more limited reading time. And the colleague I most often travel with is lovely. It's more a case of, yet again, noticing how different the work-place culture is compared to my last job. There were several of us who commuted at my last job, but by tacit understanding we never sat beside each other while travelling. That time was private time. We slept, tried to work a little sometimes, we read. Nodded at each other, said hello, but we didn't encroach on each other's privacy, oh no no.

Although ... okay, slight complaint. This commute is different in that it's more broken up and I can't sit and relax for the full hour or so what with changing buses and trains and stressing over whether I'll make the connection or not. So it does affect me a little to not have all that time to myself, to wind down or mentally prepare myself for the day ahead. While I in theory have those three hours (oh dear Jesus that's depressing) to myself each day, in reality I don't, and it makes me feel like I Never Get Time For Myself - you know. Normally a book = two commuter days. Now - I have no idea. It takes some getting used to.

Yes, I do still read

I just don't have time to sit down and blog. Also, I don't read as much, because I discovered Angry Birds.

I know.

The shame of it.

Nonetheless I'm about four books behind, at least.

Birthday!

Mine!

But I'm not doing anything or having people over, so I'm not expecting presents. I consider my new phone, a supertouchscreenAndroidmonster, present enough. Yesterday I downloaded the Aldiko eBook reader and browsed the free books available. There isn't much, really, unless you want to read Shakespeare, Homer, Cory Doctorow and countless happy more-or-less-amateurs, but I downloaded a Bram Stoker novel I'd never heard of, The Lair of the White Worm. So far, it's ludicrously awful. Has me wondering if I've got the abridged copy - very probable.  I also dowloaded Gigolo by Edna Ferber (because I liked Fanny Herself a lot) and The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Lowndes, an author and novel I'd never heard of, but seems to be well known. I think I'll read that and give Bram Stoker a miss. Christ. I get all protective about my phone's prestanda, and don't want to download things on the off chance they'll be readable and only end up clogging the memory card with crap. Very lame and un-2010, I know, but I'll have to research all authors first, especially the happy possibly amateurs. Anyway, new cathegory/label - eBooks!

However, my husband told me yesterday that he'd bought me a special copy of Jane Austen's Emma in a second-hand book shop, some sort of scholarly edition with lots of background info that I might find interesting. He hadn't given it to me because he was gently erasing the previous owner's pencilled notes. I told him not to bother, I like other people's notes, which reminded me that I meant to comment on the notes in this book so I'm going back to edit that post a little now.

I am also dead on my feet from sleeping so badly, and haven't had the energy to do much of anything at work yet apart from sneakily write this post. I consider it a birthday privilege.

Chance of a lifetime

We only just the other day got home (ha, Swedishism) The Dead, the prequel-sequel to The Enemy. If Maxima hurries up and finishes it I might just be among the very first to review it online it seems (says I after just googling the book to see what critics are saying). One revels in small, tiny, minuscule glories, doesn't one.

Back to Blogger templates!

Seeing that they're so much better now. And I can get pages, something I'll be playing around with I think. The perfectionist in me would like a photo of my own books as a background, but, well, one has to actually snap the pics and upload them then, for starters ...

I will catch up, I will I will

You have no ideaaaaaa how far behind I am. And I have a bunch of posts waiting to be edited and then published! Frightening.

Donna Leon: Death at La Fenice

The first of the Brunetti novels, and I see now why people like the series. Here the charm of the characters shows (which is why I read another one, and have borrowed more). I think I had some notes somewhere about things worth saying about the book, but I'm lagging behind, and have started on another truckload of novels so I'll be brief. Also, can't find the notes.

A world-famous conductor is found dead, poisoned, in the interval of a performance of La Traviata. The most likely suspect is his wife, but Brunetti doubts it, and finds the truth when he probes the conductor's past.

How's that for brevity? In other news, I'm so annoyed that Blogger came up with what certainly looks like three-column themes JUST as I'd done lots of work in downloading a third-party template. With this template I'm using, the "pages" feature (that I really want to use) doesn't work well - but it would, of course, if I was using Blogger's. Arse arse arse.

Revamped and raring to go!

I have all but one book left in that stack of Ngaio Marshes I mentioned. Sad isn't it that I haven't written about any of them yet! I got a bit pre-occupied with trying to do the blog up. I'm fairly pleased and hope it'll be easier to work with. And I hope to take a photo of loads of my fave books (that I own ... ) soon and change, the seaside one is lovely but I do need a book theme.

Biting the bullet and going for three columns!

Let's see if this works! I've downloaded a template from ourblogtemplates.com and am hoping to make great things happen with it. It's an awfully messy site, slow and difficult to find one's way around and all, so I just ended up taking the first best one. Now, apparently I'll have to re-add links and all. Work to be done!

Fooling around.

I borrowed a template from shabbyblogs.com, a site that on the whole is a little too shabby for me really, but it had books in it and I'm so tired of being too lazy to make my own. But I dunno. *thinks* Something must be done though.

Utterly utterly down in the dumps.

I was meant to go on a long-awaited and much-anticipated trip to England this week, but volcano ashes put a stop to it. It's very unfair and I feel very hard done by - I'd been looking forward to it so much, and I hardly ever get to travel. Plus I've lost money on it, which is very upsetting.

All in a trivial, industrialised-nation way, of course. But I really am sad.

In my childhood I used to always escape into books when I was down, preferably something homely and familiar like Enid Blyton. I don't feel the same urge now (possibly because I don't think it will work). Although I wouldn't say no to a stack - a STACK - of vintage crime. Do I have any? No. And part of looking forward to my trip was thinking about the possible second-hand bookshops there, just brimming with old Cyril Hares, Patricia Wentworths, Ngaoi Marshes.

I read a Patricia Wentworth recently, a book called The Silent Pool that I bought off Tradera a while ago and saved. It was enjoyable in it's own way, but the killer turned out to be the same type of character as in another one I read, so it was predictable. It's about a rich former theatre star who thinks someone is trying to kill her, and her suspicions are confirmed when murder is done and it is obvious that the killer thought it was her. Nothing special, but grand for it's purpose.

I've also read a very disappointing Kazuo Ishiguro collection of short stories, Nocturnes. Oh why can not a favourite author remain perfect? This was dull. The meticulous, careful, detailed and simple language that works so well in Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day feels bland, trite and almost contrived. Very disappointing. There is an overall theme to the short stories, namely music, and some of the characters appear in more than one, but I don't get that carefully crafted Shortcuts effect, I just feel meh.

Oh I just feel meh in general. But at least I've done my blogging duty.

Happy Easter!

A quick pop-in to wish everyone a wonderful holiday, whether you celebrate or not. In Norway I know they have a tradition of reading crime fiction over Easter - sadly I can't participate because I'm still not allowing myself to read until I'm finished blogging about the ones that I have read. But I strongly recommend everyone to make Norway proud if you happen to have a few days off. Go for it.

Now - off to Mass. Soon!

Not not reading

I have been reading plenty, just not finding the time to sit and blog about it. I've also joined another book discussion club, which is interesting! Reread The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, to avoid starting another new book and lagging even further behind on the blog... I'll be back soon.

Now would you look at this!

I borrowed The Hanging at the Hotel the other day (by Simon Brett), but I think I've read it. Not that I'd know from the blog, because apparently I never wrote about it. Arse. Then how'll I ever keep up? And then I found this post and there's more I never wrote about. Damn damn damn.