Stop buying books until I've read the ones I have on my bookshelf!!!

is proving a tough nut to crack. Must persevere!

Fini!

Poor old Anna! Poor old Vronsky! Poor old Dolly! Poor old Levin (I cannot stand Kitty)! Woe, woe, misery and woe!

And so, onwards with Ulysses. Ideally I’d like to put that one off indefinitely yet again, but it’s a borrowed copy so the timer is upon me.

Come on Bloom, I can take it!

fini!

Next stop: anna karenina

Well, it’s only taken me eleven months and 16 days of hard labour/ shirking, but I finally finished Kafka! In the end it turned out to be a bit like catch 22 – took me absolute aeons to get into it, and then once I hit the half way point I gobelled the rest of it up in a matter of days.

Phew!

Next stop: suite francaise!

At some point I got through the first section of Nemirovsy’s Suite Francaise. Found it under a pile of fabric this morning while looking for my sewing kit _{seriously, where exactly can a box of needles and thread and buttons hide itself?! Where on earth would I put it, and why??}

So there's another one for the list.  On the bright side I raced through the Subtle Knife yesterday and can mark that off.

Murakami: Kafka on the shore.

Joyce: Ulysses. Need I say more? I did kind of finish it already, but that mostly involved skim-reading over the difficultly punctuated parts and being reasonably sure that I hadn’t missed much in the way of narrative. Possibly not what the good man intended, so it’s back on the list as an “unread”.

Tolstoy: Anna Karenin. This one I really have already read, back in my 17 year old “let’s resolve existential angst by reading the Russian classics” phase. but I started it again a while ago and really should plough through til the end, as a matter of principle.

Steinbeck: The Pearl

McEwan: Enduring Love

Dostoeyvsky: Crime and Punishment (also already read, but it’s been a while, and for some strange reason I keep getting bits of it mixed up with Jude the Obscure)

Lee: To kill a mockingbird

Kafka: Wedding Preparations in the Country

Pullman: Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass. I don’t know why I keep re-reading instead of discovering new and exciting worlds, but I re-read Northern lights for the first time in 13 years a few weeks ago, on the back of the terrible reviews the film had been getting, and I got so desperate to re-read the others in the trilogy too that I did a very naughty thing and bought them both on amazon. At a wild guess, these two might possibly be finished before poor old Joycey even gets a look in.