Week 2: B Shelves

Today in the library, someone made me cry (in a good way, this is a happy story).

A local group, who assist adults with learning difficulties, come into our library fairly regularly on a Friday morning. They always manage to time it for our busiest period, when we also have a toddler group doing music time, so they often wander into the middle of a group of twenty toddlers and their grown-ups doing the hokey-cokey.

(As a side note, yeah, I think we’re quite a non-traditional library. We almost never shush people. The only time I’ve ever told someone off was when one grandpa ignored the sign saying DO NOT TOUCH THE LOBSTERS.)(That was the day we had lobsters visiting the library.)

So anyway, one of the women who comes along with the care group is super-keen on the royal family, especially Princess Diana. She has already read all the books we have on the shelves about the Royals. I always feel a bit sad when we can’t find her anything knew to read. Plus she needs a specific type of book – preferably one with less writing and more pictures. So I ducked out to the stacks in the other room, where we keep our thousands of home library service books, and had a quick rummage in the Royal section. Long story short, I came up with three nice big picture books, including one of Charles and Diana that predated Diana’s death.

I figured this was a fairly average, everyday thing to do – I mean, it’s literally my job to find books for people. But this woman was so happy to see this new selection of books that she got completely overwhelmed and on the verge of tears. She had to ask her carer whether she could borrow all three books instead of the one she usually gets (obviously the carer said yes). Usually the woman gives me a high-five before she leaves; today I got a hug. Hence why I was crying like an eejit at lunchtime.

(Also, the Charles and Diana book had not been borrowed since 1997, and I’d just been reading this thread on Twitter about neglected library books, so that set me off again.)

At the risk of sounding super-pretentious, it turns out distributing a hundred books to a hundred people isn’t necessarily as important as getting one particular book to the right person at the right time.

Anyway. Back to my 2020 reading project.

The first book of the year was THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS by Poppy Adams. You can check out my less-than-comprehensive review here.

We now move on to the B shelves.

There are NINETEEN of these buggers. Nineteen. I haven’t even counted how many separate authors that includes. So, with the help of a random number generator, I picked shelf number 10:

Which is... hmm. Well, I guess this was bound to happen. Quite a lot of these shelves are taken up by just two or three authors (and sometimes just one – Danielle Steele has two full shelves to herself) so sometimes I won’t have a huge choice. This fortnight we’ve got Maeve Binchy, Tim Binding, and Charlotte Bingham. I’ve not read any of these people. None of these books look like my usual comfort zone.

I eventually settled on Maeve Binchy:

It’s a solid, hefty tome of a book.

I’ll post an update at the weekend to see how I’m getting on. At that time, I will hopefully also have SOME EXCITING NEWS about another new project we’re working on. It’s gonna be awesome.

It’s been noted that, rather like Rizzo in MUPPET’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, I am not suited to literature. Or, more accurately, I’m not suited to literary fiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read smart books, I’ve enjoyed smart books, and I think I’ve understood smart books (they’re about girls, right?), but the older I get, the less tolerance I have for capital-L Literature. There’s only so often I can cope with a story about ennui and aging and the sheer thinginess of life.

(This is obviously a broad, sweeping generalisation. Literary fiction can be about so much more than the weight of life, just like genre fiction doesn’t have to be devoid of heavy themes to be enjoyable.)

The book group I currently attend was formed (in part) because everyone was fed up of reading books about middle-aged professors who are consumed with ennui and therefore absolutely must start an affair with their nubile young secretaries. If you personally happen to like those sort of books, good on you, whatever floats your boat. But speaking for myself, there’s only so much of that I can take before I start wishing the author had written in a salty dragon or a car chase or something.

Anyway, in my 2020 quest to read the library, it occurs to me that I’m going to run into more Literary Fiction than I usually consume.

Which brings us nicely to THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS.

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left, forty-seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it.

But with Vivien's arrival, dark, unspoken secrets surface. Told in Ginny's unforgettable voice, this debut novel tells a disquieting story of two sisters and the ties that bind - sometimes a little too tightly.

Incidentally, you can tell I read too much YA, because I was completely caught off guard on page 1 by the protagonist being an old woman (I didn’t read the blurb before I started). When was the last time I read a book about proper grownups?? But apart from that, okay, we’ve got a crumbling gothic house (lovely), dark family secrets (even better), and an unexpected wealth of information about moths (perfect!). Honestly, the level of details about moths, pupal soup, parasites and larvae might put off some people. When the narrator starts cutting open chrysalises to examine the soupy goo inside, or when she finds a caterpillar that’s being eaten alive from the inside by the parasitic larvae of another creature... it’d probably be too much of an ick-factor for many readers.

But, predictably enough, the forensic details about moths were my favourite bits of the book. The rest of it was a bit... literary for me. There are flashbacks to Ginny’s childhood, involving trauma and death and alcoholism and neglect. There’s an insistence on skipping over explanations and salient plot-points: Ginny has a habit of tuning out anything she’s not interested in hearing about, which leaves the audience to fill in a lot of gaps. And then there’s some stuff that happens at the end, explained away with a bit of hand-waving about free will (or the lack of it), and then the book finishes.

It was okay. I liked the stuff about moths. But it does make me worry that I’m going to struggle with other Literary books this year...

So, onwards into the Bs! Our library has 19 full shelves of authors beginning with B, so I’ll need a random number generator to pick a shelf for me. Update on Friday.

Welcome to week 1 of my 2020 reading challenge, Reading the Library!

Here is a summary of what I intend to do this year, and why.

(TL;DR - I'm planning to read one book every two weeks off the General Fiction shelves in the library where I work, starting at A and working through the alphabet, in an attempt to fill in some shocking gaps in my reading education.)

This fortnight, A is for:

There are six shelves of authors beginning with A, and, in a completely arbitrary fashion which will probably become the hallmark of this challenge, I've gone for the very first shelf, right at the top.

One book in particular popped out at me:

So, book number one of this year's challenge is THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS by Poppy Adams. I know nothing about this book, or this author, and I don't intend to look at the blurb before I start reading. Let's see how this works out.

Progress update next Friday!

There’s nothing like working in a library to make you realise the gaps in your education.

I started at the Mobile Family Library six months ago. It’s delightful. For my first week, there wasn’t a spare desk for me, so I had to work in the stacks, alongside 37,000 books, which was, as you can imagine, a terrible hardship.

One thing that became abundantly clear was how little I’d read. I like to think I read quite a lot, and quite widely, but here I found whole shelves of authors I’d never even heard of. A glance at the loan records showed how popular some of these authors are (anecdotally, the library used to have a copy of a Barbara Cartland novel that was loaned out over 300 times). So why haven’t I read them?

The obvious answer is a lack of time, I suppose. And, also, I am very comfortable in my comfort zone. I like reading the books I like reading. Who has time to expand their horizons when there’s so many wonderful books and authors that you’re already familiar with?

This year I turned 40, which is nice, but it brought with it a realisation that I will never read all the books I want to. Isn’t that dreadful? If there are 37,000 books in our stacks at the library, and if I could read a hundred a year, it would take... *counts on fingers* ... 370 years for me to read them all. And that’s just the books here in this one bit of the library, never mind the Family Library next door with its shelves full of YA and MG, or the Douglas Library downtown, or my own stupid house which is full to bursting with books I haven’t yet read.

If I’m fortunately enough to live to a hundred, and I keep up my reading pace, there are only 6,000 more books that I could realistically read in my lifetime.

That’s quite a sobering thought. How on earth can I narrow down which books to exclude?

I think it’s time to start being realistic about my reading habits. I should accept that I will never read Martin Amis, or Jeffrey Archer. I should come to terms with never ploughing through all of Nora Roberts’ back catalogue. I have been trying and failing to read Ulysses for twenty-five years – perhaps it’s time to give up on it?

With that in mind, I would like to announce my reading plan for 2020. I call it READING THE LIBRARY.

Here’s the deal. Every two weeks I will read one book from the fiction section of the library stack, going alphabetically by author name from A to Z. In this way I will (hopefully) read 26 books (one from each letter of the alphabet) in 2020, while leaving me plenty of space to read books from other sources as well. I will pick a shelf within each letter at random, and choose the book that interests me the most.

A selection of rules:

1. I must read one book off the chosen shelf every two weeks.
2. I will restrict myself to the “General Fiction” section of our library, which excludes Crime, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Large Print, and Non-Fiction. If I included those shelves as well, this project would fast become unworkable.
3. Shelving is arbitrary and sometimes books get moved around or issued to other borrowers. We are a library, you know.
4. I will show a preference for authors I haven’t read over authors I have read.
5. I will show a preference for female authors and/or authors of colour (sorry not sorry).
6. Every two weeks I will post a review or an update on this blog.
7. I reserve the right to refuse to read (or continue to read) a particular book or author for any reason at all, including extremely petty reasons.

Are these rules arbitrary and restrictive and probably unfair? You betcha. There will be books and authors who get missed out, through no fault of their own. I can’t read everything.

But, hopefully, this project will help me fill in some gaps.

Check back here in the first week of January, for a random book off the “A” shelves! Who will it be??

Want to keep up to date with the latest news, releases, skeet, and random pictures of cats from me? I now have a mailing list:

Sign up to my shiny new mailing list here

Obviously I promise not to spam anyone with constant messages, because if you know anything about me, it's that I do not do frequent updates...

Announcing: THE FLOOD

Oh my gosh, I have been waiting to shout about this for so long. I am literally giddy with excitement to announce the impending publication of THE FLOOD, coming this September from Avon:

A gripping, atmospheric crime novel about a town on the edge of collapse, and a murder that shakes the community. Perfect for fans of THE DRY.

When Daniela Cain returns to her small hometown after seven years’ absence, she finds that flooding has left the village all but deserted. She’s there to collect something she left in her childhood home, then she plans to leave. But upon entering the old house she discovers her younger sister’s body half-submerged in the water.

As Daniela tries to work out what happened to Auryn, she uncovers dark secrets from her childhood as one of four sisters in the household, when the Cains and another local family begin to turn on each other with devastating results.

Anyone who knows me IRL may recognise this book under its working title, FOURTH TO THE DEVIL, aka That Sodding Book I've Been Working On For The Last Five Hundred Years. It's crazy to think it's actually going to be a real book and not just a jumble of files on my computer.

You can check it out on Goodreads or PRE-ORDER THE EBOOK FOR ONLY 99p at Amazon, or of course contact your local independent bookshop for more details of the paperback (which is due for release in November, I believe).

I am going to be shouting about this for days. Y'all may want earplugs.

As usual at this time of year, imma look back over my spreadsheet for the last twelve months and provide a short breakdown of what I've been reading and why, mostly for my own amusement:

Sooooo, in 2018 I read a total of 103 books (including graphic novels but not including books I read to my son), which is the exact same number as in 2017, conveniently. Like 2017, the majority of the books were Young Adult (18 books) but that's a really sharp drop from last year, when about half the books I read were YA. Non-fiction clocked in at the next highest (16) and literary fiction surprising me with 15. I've upped my game with reading more sci-fi (11) and crime/thrillers (13), and I've had to add a separate category for feminist dystopia (4) because it's apparently a new feature of my reading pile.

Disregarding co-authored books, about 60% of what I read was written by women.

Approximately one third of the books I read were by authors I'd previously read. Which means a respectable two-thirds were from authors I'd never checked out before. From those two-thirds, the highest number (13) were chosen at random from the library. Others were recommended to me either in person or online (or by a very enthusiastic librarian), or I picked them up because they were authored by our amazingly talented local author community, or they were being discussed at our book group (hence the rise in feminist dystopian fiction). I made an extra effort to read books I considered as "classics", including three from pre-1900 (the most I've managed in any year since high school).

I'm making an effort to read ebooks (in quiet moments when I'd otherwise be trawling twitter) but I've still not renewed my dalliance with audiobooks. I've also joined Netgalley, just in case I don't have enough books.

My book resolutions this year are to read more crime/thriller, since it looks like it's my area of interest now (oh, yeah, I have news to share in a later blogpost, check back for that), and to avoid bringing more books into my house unless I have an exit strategy in place for them (because hoarding).