TBR20

I’ve belatedly decided to join in with the #TBR20 reading challenge put together by blogger Eva Stalker. Briefly, the challenge is to read twenty books from your ‘to be read’ pile before buying any more. It’s easy to get into the habit of coming back from any trip into town with a bagful of paperbacks, before dumping them into a pile next to the bed and never looking at them again – TBR20 is an opportunity to read all the novels you were excited about in the shop, but never quite got round to actually reading. I was aiming to choose 10 novels and 10 non-fiction books, but because I am a) a compulsive book hoarder, and b) quite indecisive, I’ve not managed to narrow it down quite that far. Here are the books I’ve picked: let me know what you think, if there are any you love or hate, or there any any that feature on your TBR piles too. 

Fiction:

The reason I finally decided to join in with TBR20 was a trip to the Buddhist Centre in Manchester (secretly the city’s best bookshop), where I picked up The Crimson Petal and The White, The Blind Assassin and A Death in the Family for £1 each. I’d been keen to read these novels for a while, but knew I’d just end up shelving them when I got home, unless I set myself some rules. I’ve read The Penelopiad and The Handmaid’s Tale before, but nothing by Faber or Knausgaard.

I Am A Cat is the sort of book TBR20 is designed for – I’ve wanted to read it for about 10 years, since spotting it in Deansgate Waterstones, but when I finally got a copy (Oxfam in New Mills, £1.50), I just let it sit on my shelves. I love the idea of a novel narrated by a cynical kitten, and am really looking forward to this one.

Quite a few of the books on the list are recommendations from friends, which I’ve picked up but never actually got round to starting. Disgrace and The English Patient were pushed on me by Sam Mills, The Phantom Tollbooth by a work colleague, and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by my mum, because it’s got her favourite opening line. The Phantom Tollbooth is intriguing – a very odd looking Fantasy/YA novel. Antonia Honeywell described it on Twitter as ‘everything that’s good about writing for children married to everything that’s good about reading’. Riders proved unexpectedly popular with book bloggers; one friend, who shall remain nameless, compared it to Dickens, more for the complex plots and large cast list than for its gritty depictions of urban poverty.

I got into Hilary Mantel late, when I read Wolf Hall as part of my Read Women 2014 challenge. After that, I read Bring Up The Bodies and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher; I was tempted to read either A Place of Greater Safety or The Giant, O’Brian next, but prompted by Dan Carpenter’s description of Beyond Black as ‘possibly the best English novel I’ve ever read’, I thought I’d go for that. I’m looking forward to seeing what Mantel’s non-historical novels are like. I picked up A Game of Thrones on a whim, after spotting a slightly damaged copy for £1 in Waterstone’s. It’s not the sort of thing I normally read, but I’m kind of intrigued, and I can’t afford the box sets, so I’ll give it a go.

Marabou Stork Nightmares is the only one on the list I’ve read before, but I was still at school at the time, and I don’t remember anything about it at all – I’m looking forward to something disconcerting and strange from Irvine Welsh though, after being disappointed by his last few novels. I read a few of Gordon Burn’s non-fiction books last year, but I’ve never read any of his fiction, so Born Yesterday will be high up the list. And Bad Wisdom by Bill Drummond (The KLF) and Mark Manning (Zodiac Mindwarp) might be the strangest book on the list, the story of two popstars journeying to the North Pole to sacrifice an icon of Elvis Presley.

Non-Fiction

After going to the Read Women event at Waterstones Hampstead last year, and hearing all five speakers talking at length about Freud, I decided that I needed to learn something about psychoanalysis, so there is a bias in that direction in my non-fiction pile. I picked up Studies in Hysteria and Adventures in the Orgasmatron at the Wellcome Collection’s brilliant Institute of Sexology exhibition earlier this year. I’m especially keen to read about Willhelm Reich, after first hearing about him in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger books. On the same theme, there’s A Dangerous Method – I loved the film, with all its Keira Knightly jaw-jutting action, but I’d been put off starting the book because of its length.

Towards the end of last year, I’d had a bit of a true crime phase, and there are a couple more books from then on the list: Under the Banner of Heaven is an investigation into murders and cover-ups in America’s Mormon community, recommended by CollaborateHere, and Injustice is an account of racial bias in America’s legal system by the lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. There are also a couple of literary biographies: Somebody Else focuses on Rimbaud’s life in Africa, and comes from my parents’ bookshelves. The Marquis de Sade was a charity shop find earlier this year: it will struggle to live up to Angela Carter’s brilliant The Sadian Woman, but will hopefully be more enjoyable than de Sade’s prose is.

The rest of the books on this pile are a mixed bunch. I picked up Icons in the Fire by Alexander Walker at Stoke train station’s bookswap a few years ago. It tells the story of the rise and fall of the British film industry from 1984 to 2000. Discipline and Punish was a book I’d looked at briefly at university, but since I spent most of my time there trying to avoid theory, I never finished it. I found this copy in a Stoke charity shop for 50p last month, doubtless donated by a frustrated undergrad. I started reading Geoff Dyer’s books last year, and Yoga… seemed like the obvious next step. I think that was another New Mills Oxfam find, as was The Baader Meinhoff Complex. Conversations With The Classics and The Origins of Sex were also part of my Wellcome Collection binge. Finally, I got Errol Flynn’s autobiography My Wicked Wicked Ways from a charity shop in Buxton last year, and it’s on the list partly because of the gloriously unrepentant cover photo, and partly because I’m amused by its close proximity to Discipline and Punish.

So, there’s my TBR(slightly more than)20 challenge: I’ll post my thoughts on them as I go.