petronia has a tumblr meme: "This is a list of the books on my shelves which I haven’t read." Which is hahahaha NO. There's a word limit to LJ entries, guys.I give you instead a list of the unread books on my kitchen table. Not the living room table, mind you, nor the dining room table, nor the bedroom table. Just the relatively recent stuff that winds up in the kitchen, because that's where I unload my hauls from the Front Lawn Library, the Public Library, and the second-hand bookstores, and then reload them into the backpack when I go out. Five years ago I went to the hospital for an outpatient procedure without bringing a book, and consequently spent two interminable days with nothing to read. Never again. Now I always have something sensational to read in the ambulance.
Note that once I put table books on the kitchen shelves, the chances of their being read diminishes greatly, is why there are some books here that date from the summer.
Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (PL)
Deborah Pinborough, The Shadow of the Soul (PL)
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (FLL)
Dick Francis, Wild Horses (FLL)
Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (FLL)
Lynda La Plante, The Red Dahlia (FLL)
M John Harrison, The Pastel City (2ndhand)
Nalini Singh, Archangel's Kiss (2ndhand)
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit (2ndhand)
Charles Palliser, The Quincunx (2ndhand)
Stephanie Clement, Meditation for Beginners (2ndhand)
Edgar Wallace, The Casefiles of Mr. J.G. Reeder (2ndhand)
What I'm reading now: Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness. Because the nearby library has it but Liar has to be put on hold. So do the other two books in the trilogy, and I've just done so.
Other People's Raves are necessarily hit and miss. Frances Hardinge's oeuvre was well enough, but didn't knock my socks off. I got nowhere with The Queen of Attolia. We won't even mention Phillip Pullman
Which distinguishes it from the other on-the-go, Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Seampunk and Supernatural Suspense. I begin to suspect that steampunk is not my thing. Sherlock Holmes, yes; Captain Nemo, no.
What I've just finished: Joan Smith, A Masculine Ending. I am so very not used to reading mystery novels published by Faber. Wouldn't have known it *was* a mystery if there hadn't been a blurb on the front 'The First Loretta Lawson mystery, now a major film for TV.' So instead of being a comedy about an English don who discovers a blood-stained bed in a Paris apartment and thinks someone has been murdered when in fact they've just had a miscarriage, it's a mystery about an English don who discovers a blood-stained bed where someone *has* been murdered. In the book's favour, the amateur sleuth is an amateur. In the minus column, the amateur sleuth is an amateur.
What I'll read next: Ohh, probably one or other of the library books up there, possibly even in tandem. Pinborough requires something to off-set the sheer grubby downerness of her world.
