Do the 2009 TBR challenge

am supposed to be reading lots of plays for my writing course. i’m not sure i have the imagination.

• Harold Pinter – The Caretaker
• Alan Ayckbourn – GamePlan (that was an easier read)
• Charlotte Jones – Humble Boy
• Mark Ravenhill – Shopping and Fucking (ugh)
• Alan Ayckbourn – FlatSpin (am getting into this now)

i’ve had a book tidying/consolidation session at home and now have two piles of TBR books, almost all of which i’ve acquired in the last year or so. the others, the ones i got sick of looking at, are somewhere else entirely. i’m not at home now, so can’t get my tape measure out, but at a guess each pile is at least 1.50m high. that’s 3m of books and counting. what on earth am i thinking?

STOP BUYING BOOKS, ZANNA, READ THEM!

1. The Solitude of Thomas Cave Georging Harding read
2. The White Tiger Aravind Adiga read
3. Mudbound Hillary Jordan read
4. The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry
5. Stalin’s Nose Rory MacLean
6. The Room of Lost Things Stella Duffy read
7. The Senator’s Wife Sue Miller read
8. Life Class Pat Barker read
9. The Believers Zoe Heller read
10. One of Us Melissa Benn read
11. Home Marilynne Robinson
12. Deaf Sentence David Lodge (read already, listed below)

• A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You – Amy Bloom (well, i’ve read the stories once, but i think i’m going to keep coming back to them, like poems. there’s far more to be discovered. one for the bedside windowsill.)
• Your Blue-Eyed Boy – Helen Dunmore (that one’s probably been on the shelves for 10 years … strange i decide to read it now, when i “should” be reading other things entirely.)
• A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon (ha, just what i needed for a sick weekend in bed. laugh aloud, short chapters, ill people. excellent.)
• Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates (the other bookclub book. oh my goodness, that was so good. i’ve spent the whole weekend reading it. shame i don’t now have another weekend to do everything i was supposed to do…)
• Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir – Margaret Forster (life writing in all respects, a wonderful insight into women’s lives over the last century and a half. highly recommended.)
• Taxi – Karin Duve (wow, i managed to turn the inner translator off and read a book in German!)
• Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger – Nigel Slater (life writing as recommended by my tutor. ace!)
• When Will There be Good News? – Kate Atkinson (I love Jackson Brodie!)
• JPod – Douglad Coupland (huh. started hilarious but then … well, i don’t get it. am i too old?)
• Hide and Seek – Ian Rankin (rebus, yeah)
• The Peppered Moth – Margaret Drabble (hm, hard work that one. glad i persisted, though, because it all makes more sense when you read the afterword.)
• 31 songs – Nick Hornby (worth it for this)
• Tulip Fever – Deborah Moggach (nice easy read, not as predictable as I’d feared, and learned a lot about 17th C amsterdam. makes me want to go, actually!)
• Bel Canto – Ann Patchett (i love this book!)
• Deaf Sentence – David Lodge (i really enjoyed that. perfect train reading.)
• Iran Awakening – Shirin Ebadi (fascinating book, formidable woman)
• Restless – William Boyd (ok, but i didn’t buy the two women’s voices…)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (perfect holiday and festival reading)
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie (from my facsimile First 10 Penguins, now itself almost 25 years old. amusing to start with, would doubtless have been better read in a single sitting…)
• The History of Love – Nicole Krauss
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (“two dates, separated by a little dash”—amazing)
• The Distance Between Us – Maggie O’Farrell (oooh, i enjoyed that too!)
• The Other Hand – Chris Cleave (omg. am going to make my ma read this, pronto.)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid (ace, and ditto the above)
• A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
  (25)

i’ve had a quick look at my shelves and piles, and found 12+ borrowed books that need to be read and returned:

1. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee – Rebecca Miller (M) read!
2. The Ghost Writer – John Harwood (M)
3. Waiting – Ha Jin (A)
4. 54 – Wu Ming (Ro)
5. Ghostwritten – David Mitchell (Mediatheque)
6. Lost in Translation – Eva Hoffmann (Ellen)
7. The Map of Love – Ahdaf Soueif (E)
8. The Rice Mother – Rani Manicka (E)
9. The Poisonwood Bible – Margaret Atwood (E, also on last year’s list!)
10. Kennedys Hirn – Henning Mankell (E) done. huh, can’t say i enjoyed that much. style really got on my nerves.
11. Im Westen nichts Neues – Erich Remarque (C+C)
12. The Bookseller of Kabul – Asne Seierstad (J)

Plus i need to finish the Regeneration trilogy so that i can give it back to J (who has already complained several times…).

i love this goal because it makes me realise how much i already have… i’m going to try to limit my new purchases for this year to reading group books. i really have more than enough here and in the library.

Edit: i found some more:
13. The Skull Mantra – Eliot Pattison (L)
14. The Glass Palace – Amitav Ghosh (E)
15. The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood (E)
16. A Small Island Andrea Levy (E)
17. What I Loved Siri Hustvedt (E)
18. Eve Green Susan Fletcher (P)
19. The Last Temptation Val McDermid (M) read! cheating, because i borrowed it after the compiling the list above, but never mind.