Yet again, June has seen me busily sorting out wedding things; every time I think we’ve got it all done someone thinks of something else that we need to organise.  On top of that, we’ve been battling against the church beaurocracy which is making things unnecessarily difficult for us for a number of reasons, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed and holding our thumbs that it all works out.

June has been a mixed month for books, there being a fairly even spread of books that were great, books I really enjoyed and books that were just ok.  As in May, I only managed 13 books this month, totalling 3,968 pages.  Although I read some pretty chunky ones, this was balanced out with some much smaller volumes in between, averaging out at 305 pages per book.   This month I read:

1. Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg
2. Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss
3. Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham
6. Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey*
7. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter
8. Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson
9. Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov
10. The Pleasures of English Food by Alan Davidson
11. The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret C. Sullivan
12. Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy
13. The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn

Rather surprisingly, the best book I read this month was the first one: Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg.  I picked it up expecting something light and entertaining, but while it was definitely entertaining it was actually rather insightful and the narrative voice of Daisy Fay is just captivating.  I also really enjoyed Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey although that was no surprise as I’ve read it before in 2009.  It’s a huge, sweeping fantasy book set in a world which is an alternative middle ages Europe and I found it just as absorbing on the second reading as it was on the first.

Additionally this month I’ve enjoyed American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which was good but not as good as I wanted it to be; I returned to Winifred Holtby’s Yorkshire in Anderby Wold which shows the beginning of the themes and ideas which are so beautifully expressed in South Riding; I continued watching the antics of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia which was delightful, if not my favourite of the series; and, although I don’t think he’s ever likely to become a favourite author, I conquered my fear of Thomas Hardy by reading his Wessex Tales.  The short story format and very pretty Folio Society edition that I read might have helped with that last one.

As in any month, there were some books which I found less appealing.  In fact, it was a month of disappointing follow up books as three of the duff books were by authors that I’ve really enjoyed in the past.  The Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss was nowhere near as entertaining as his previous novels about the camp, roguish spy Lucifer Box; Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham was rather a let down after how much I liked my first book of his, Up at the Villa; and I loved Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin last year but the sequel Penguin Lost unfortunately left me cold.  The top of the list of shame is The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn, a historical novel about Catherine Parr but written in a bizarrely modern idiom.  I couldn’t get into it at all, and it’s saved me buying any of her other books, some of which had seemed quite tempting before so at least it’s done a service to the TBR pile.

Speaking of the TBR pile, I’ve been really rather restrained (for me) in my book buying this month: just 13 new books have found their way into the house, 4 of which I’ve since read.  I was given a copy of Virago’s reissue of Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby at the Virago Book Club meeting discussing South Riding and I started reading that almost as soon as I got it.  I bought Living Dolls by Natasha Walter from Amazon and read it immediately, in anticipation of last night’s Virago Book Club event with the author.  Swiftly after that, I bought Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey (also from Amazon) to act as a sort of reading antidote for Walter’s book.  Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami came from Amazon in anticipation of a new book club which is being started up near where I work.  Sadly I can’t make the first meeting, but it’s introduced me to a really interesting new-to-me author as I think I’ve benefitted in the long run.

Then there’s the books that I haven’t yet got round to reading.  I purchased Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons from Amazon as I want to read it quite soon after reading the terrible House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb, which it satirises, so the original is still fresh in my mind.  From one of the second hand book shops along Charing Cross Road I have picked up The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby, as the more I read of her the more I want to read; New York Mosaic by Isabel Bolton which I’d never heard of but looks rather interesting; and Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell, who I didn’t know wrote anything other than medieval scholarship until I spotted this little novel.  From charity shops for the princely sum of £1 each I bought Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo (a Spanish novel of 18th century France), The Stone Boudoir by Theresa Maggio (a book about the little villages in Sicily that tourists never visit) and My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin (a Virago; need I say more?).  The bargain of the month has to be a brand new hardback copy of Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil which I loved, which I snapped up for a mere 49p in The Works.  It’s too heavy for train reading but I can’t wait till I have time to pick it up.

May has been yet another very busy month in the non-reading world, and June looks as though it’s going to be equally packed.  This month’s exciting news is that the Old English Thorn and I have put down a holding deposit on our first rented flat together!  With no particular requirements other than a decent commuting time from London it took us a while to settle on a location that we really liked, but this month we went to visit a lovely little town in Sussex and the very same day found the perfect flat.  A morning off work later in the week and another trip back there made it ours and we’re both really happy.  It even has a second bedroom that (naturally) is going to be a library.  The landlords want to refurbish it after the previous tenants vacate (how terrible for us!) but it should be ours by mid July, although I won’t move in until after the September wedding.  Speaking of the wedding, I’ve also just heard that our flowers are now all sorted, so things are moving along apace.

And now back to more bookish concerns.  In May I read fewer books than usual, totalling fewer pages as well, which is an indication of how busy I’ve been.  I managed 13 books this month, comprising 3,480 pages in total, making each book an average of 268 pages long.  However, unlike in previous months when I’ve found reading shorter books a bit unsatisfying, in May it was exactly what I needed: nearly all of the books that I read were enjoyable and some are among my favourites for the year so far.  Unusually for me, I’ve done quite a bit of rereading this month, three out of the thirteen books (marked with an asterisk) being ones that I’ve read and enjoyed before.  This month I read:

1. The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2. Wild Swans by Jung Chang
3. Ballet for Drina by Jean Estoril*
4. Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim
5. Song of Sorcery by Elizabeth Scarborough
6. Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
7. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
8. Drina’s Dancing Year by Jean Estoril*
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
10. The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb
11. The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson
12. My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen

I’ve had three stand out books in May.  Pride and Prejudice was the next book on the pile for my rereads of Jane Austen and a guaranteed winner as I already knew I loved it.  In fact, it was even better than I remembered and I enjoyed it even more than before, if that’s possible.  Wild Swans by Jung Chang was also one that I expected to find interesting and it didn’t disappoint.  The story of three generations of women growing up in China, from the author’s grandmother in the days of emperors and warlords to her own experiences during the Cultural Revolution, was absolutely fascinating and made the historical events of which I was vaguely aware seem real and personal.  I cannot recommend this enough if you haven’t read it already.  The surprise of the month came in the form of Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson.  I had no particular expectations of this book, but the way in which the author played with fairytale tropes and with language just clicked with me, making it another five star read.  I also particularly enjoyed Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (a good thing considering how many of her other books I have awaiting my attention) and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen.

This month’s dud was yet again a Virago title, I’m sorry to report.  The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb, my lucky dip book for this month, proved to be absolutely atrocious.  Thankfully it was terrible to the point of being amusing, so I at least had some enjoyment out of it, even if it was a very long way from what Mary Webb intended.

May saw the start of a fresh influx of books following the end of Lent’s (mostly successful) book buying ban.  The first book I ordered was My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen, which I’ve already read and really enjoyed.  The remainder of my order from AwesomeBooks arrived, providing me with seven new Viragos to add to the teetering stack in my room: The Wind Changes by Olivia Manning, My Next Bride by Kay Boyle, Olivia by Dorothy Strachey, Rumour of Heaven by Beatrix Lehmann, She Knew She Was Right by Ivy Litvinov, Phoenix Fled by Attia Hossain and Never No More by Maura Laverty.  Virago books were also very much the order of the day when I visited the Oxfam bookshop in Richmond while waiting for a train.  I ducked in to avoid the rain and somehow emerged with The Matriarch by G.B. Stern, Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty and The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard.  They all sound really interesting so I feel spoilt for choice!

My two rereads besides the Jane Austen were books that I bought this month from Amazon and then read immediately: Ballet for Drina and Drina’s Dancing Year by Jean Estoril.  These are books that I used to own prior to the disaster with the leaking shed, and throwing away all my damp and mouldy old copies had made me nostalgic to read some of them again.  This is a series that I’m going to continue to collect and read for when I need some simple, pleasant light relief.  Another book which I bought and read instantly was The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  Reviews of these will follow eventually, I promise.

I’ve picked up some more books to add to my selection pool for the Victorian Literature Challenge.  I managed to complete my Folio Society Barchester set by picking up the final three books in the series from Ebay, meaning I now have Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicles of Barset waiting for me when I finish those I already have.  I also couldn’t resist a copy of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood in an Odhams edition which matches my Dickens set, particularly as she’s a new author, helpful for my additional aim to read all fifteen challenge books by different writers.

This month I paid my first visit (but definitely not my last) to the Notting Hill Book and Comic Exchange, much loved among bloggers.  It’s a bit of a jumble sale and probably somewhere to go only when you have plenty of time for browsing through the rather haphazardly arranged books rather than on your lunch hour as I did.  Still, I went with a large bag of books to get dispose of and came out with a considerably lighter, less stuffed bag containing nine exciting books as it was considerably more lucrative to take book vouchers in exchange for my unwanted books than cash.  I was pleased to come across a selection of Virago Modern Classics down in their bargain basement where all books are £1.  Thankfully for the groaning TBR pile, I already had most of them, but I still managed to come away with four: The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor and The Land of Spices and That Lady, both by Kate O’Brien.  I also picked up two other Virago books that aren’t in the Modern Classics series: Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood (one of those authors I seem to be more interested in collecting than actually reading; I must rectify this next month) and The Paris Wife by Paula McClain in the gorgeous hardback ARC edition I’ve seen floating around on various blogs.  My remaining purchases were The Burning Stone by Kate Elliot, part of a fantasy series I want to start soon, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg of Fried Green Tomatoes fame, and a curious looking little hardback book entitled Jocasta and the Famished Cat by Anatole France.  Although it has a dust jacket there’s no indication of what the book is about, but I was so intrigued by the name that I had to take it home with me to find out!

I also did a bit of book shopping when I had the pleasure of meeting some friends from LibraryThing in person.  I was only able to go along and join their outing at lunchtime, which rather fortuitously coincided with their visit to the Persephone book shop.  Of course, it’s impossible to come out of that shop with fewer than three books, and after much initial narrowing down of titles through browsing the website I plumped for Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey and Miss Buncle Married by D.E. Stevenson, which I’ve been looking forward to reading ever since I read Miss Buncle’s Book in February.  There was just time for a quick visit to Lamb’s Bookshop further down the street, where I picked up The Fire Gospel by Michael Faber, one of the Canongate Myths books, before I had to head back to my office.  It was lovely to put some faces to names and have a quick, bookish chat, not to mention it makes my book acquisition feel far less unreasonable when shopping with people buying just as many books as I am, if not more!  I hope it’s an experience that will be repeated soon.

So, which of these books should I attack first?  Have you read anything particularly good in May that I should add to my list for next month?

I also mostly kept to my resolution to read larger books this month (though a bout of feeling sorry for myself did mean that some smaller books snuck in here and there), and although I read a 4,387 pages this month which is a similar figure to last month this was spread over only 13 books, averaging 337 pages each (362 if you don’t include the tiny 46 page poetry book that I read).  I decided to do this last month in the hopes of reading meatier books that would be more absorbing, and that’s by and large been successful.  Although I haven’t had a five star read in April I’ve had a lot of books that have been worth four stars and the rest have been three stars, so it’s been a very good month in terms of bookish enjoyment.  In reading order, the books I read in April are:

1. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
2. Perfume from Provence by Lady Winifred Fortescue
3. Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham
4. The Circle Cast by Alex Epstein
5. Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
6. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
7. The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind
8. Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons by Gerald Durrell
9. Wedding Tiers by Trisha Ashley
10. Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
11. Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
12. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
13. The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

The Mill on the Floss is a book that I’ve tried to read twice before now several years ago, but somehow I’ve never managed to make my way through to the end.  When I picked this one up again there was a bookmark at page 139 marking the furthest I’d ever got with it and I was determined not to let it defeat me again.  My decision to persevere turned out to be a fortuitous one in this case, as I fell in love with George Eliot’s writing which was so engaging it almost (but not quite) made up for the horrible way the plot developed.  I have Middlemarch waiting on my shelves and hopefully I’ll be able to knock it off the TBR pile and into the main library by the end of the year.

This month has been a good one in general for the Victorian Literature Challenge, as I also read Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Victorian writers rather lend themselves to my aim of reading longer books), both of which I enjoyed.  I’ve discovered that, while Dickens is verbose and his characters tend towards caricatures, I usually enjoy him more than I think I’m going to, and that I vastly prefer the Sherlock Holmes Short stories compared to the full length novels that I’ve read about the character before.  He’s far less irritating in small doses.

Other favourites from this month included the charming memoir by Lady Winifred Fortescue Perfume from Provence which has me longing to visit the south of France and Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham which is part family history and part memoir.  Both books have me wishing that I kept diaries, but then I remember that a) I don’t live in the south of France or a stately home, b) my diary would read “Woke up stupidly early, spent two hours on the train, went to work, spent two hours on the train, went to gym, came home” for five days out of the seven, and who wants to read that? and c) it would only be another thing to have to keep up to date with writing.

In terms of book acquisitions, this has been a very modest month, mostly thanks to the tail end of Lent which, unlike last month where I had a few slips, I managed to adhere to properly.  I put in a book order online on Easter Sunday to celebrate, so no doubt I’ll have plenty of new books to talk about in May as they start to trickle in.  However, one book somehow got separated from the rest of the order and made it through before England shut down for the bank holidays, so I have a very speedy copy of They Tied a Label on My Coat by Hilda Hollingsworth waiting to be read now.  It’s a memoir of a girl who was evacuated during the Blitz and promises to be a good read.

My copy of the latest Persephone The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson which I had pre ordered for £1 back in February arrived at the beginning of the month.  I haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting and very short, if quite different from a lot of the other Persephone books that I’ve come across.  I’m saving it for a time when I’m in the mood for some non-fiction.  Also arriving out of the blue was a review copy of the latest Scarlett Thomas novel, Our Tragic Universe.  I won this from LibraryThing Early Reviewers back in January and had all but given up hope of it arriving when it finally turned up mid way through April.  I got stuck in straight away as I’d been dying to read it since I first saw it in hardback, so a review is already on its way.

Amazingly, that’s it for this month!  No one is more shocked than I am, I assure you.

March’s statistics look very much like February’s in that I have once again read 17 books.  They totalled 4,358 pages, averaging a rather short 256 pages per book.  I found myself enjoying these books a lot more than the previous month’s.  I don’t give star ratings here on the blog but I do on LibraryThing and I’ve given a goodly proportion of my books four stars in March.  However, I’m still finding that although  the majority have been good, enjoyable reads they are still not the sort that stick with me for very long.  This is fine, as I do read primarily for my own entertainment and entertaining these books were, but hopefully my aim to read more chunky books in April might lead to a bit less dross.  March’s books were:

1. April Lady by Georgette Heyer
2. More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs
3. The Flower Wedding by Walter Crane
4. Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped by Saki
5. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
6. Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham
7. American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter
8. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
9. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber
10. Far to Go by Alison Pick
11. At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald
12. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain by Hallie Rubenhold
13. The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp
14. Miss Mapp by E. F. Benson
15. Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
16. Alice Hartley’s Happiness by Philippa Gregory
17. The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead

My two favourite books this month couldn’t be more different if they tried.  An unexpected stand out was The Flower Wedding by Walter Crane, a gorgeous facsimile of an illustrated poem produced by the V & A Museum to tie in with their new exhibition The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 which opened this weekend and to which I’ll definitely be paying a visit sometime soon.  At the other end of the scale is Michael Faber’s novel of the seedier side of Victorian England, The Crimson Petal and the White.  I’ve been reading this one since last year as it’s too big to carry to work with me and so it was read in half hour snatches in the evenings, but it was ever so well written and definitely worth savouring.  Notable mentions are also deserved for The Nutmeg Tree  by Margery Sharp which was just the sort of light, amusing novel I needed to see me through my convalescence, Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham which came from the Vintage Maugham Collection you may remember I acquired last month, Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham which has awakened an interest in graphic novels, and The Warden by Anthony Trollope which promises much exciting reading to come.  I’m sure I’ll be reading more Trollope in April as he certainly fits the requirements of large, slow books.

Less successfully, March also brough about one of only three single star books I’ve read so far this year, and it was a Virago Modern Classic, no less!  Try as I might, I just couldn’t get on with The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead and I’m sure I’ll rant a great deal concerning why when I come to finish that review.  Has anyone else out there read this one?  What did you make of it?

The list of incoming books is much less intimidating this month (a meagre 34 compared to February’s 59; it’s all relative) thanks to my resolve to give up buying books for Lent.  I have to admit that I have fallen off the bandwagon twice so far, although both in extremely forgiveable circumstances I hasten to add: the first occasion was after consigning most of my childhood books that I had kept stored for years to black bin bags after they were ruined by a water damage and the second was on discovering I had a forty-five minute wait for my train and nothing to read as I had finished my book on an earlier train (sometimes I swear I spend my life on trains).

Of course, a fair few managed to sneak in before Lent began on 9th March.  Books are tricky like that, I find.  As usual, the culprits were mostly Virago Modern Classics which I somehow find myself unable to leave behind in bookshops.  In March I acquired Nobody’s Business by Penelope Gilliat, Mad Puppetstown, The Rising Tide and Two Days in Aragon by Molly Keane (I’ve got quite the collection of her books built up now and I really should start reading them), Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson, Brother Jacob by George Eliot, Devil by the Sea by Nina Bawden, The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West and a little book which looks like it was given away free at some point entitled No Library Is Complete Without Them containing a list of all the Virago Modern Classics at the time it was published and excerpts from several of them to tempt the reader (as if I need any encouragament).  Also published by Virago, I picked up The Short Stories of Willa Cather edited by Hermione Lee and a memoir by Joan Wyndham called Dawn Chorus which I’ve already read and thoroughly enjoyed.  What good luck I’ve had!

There were only three non-Virago charity shop books this month.  After reading lots of enthusiastic praise for Elizabeth Bowen from Carolyn I had to snap up The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen when I saw it on the shelves.  It’s a bit big to have as a commuting book, but I’m looking forward to diving in when I next have some time to read at home.  The other is The System of the World by Neal Stephenson, the final installment of his Baroque Cycle.  I battled to the end of the first volume, Quicksilver, back in December but decided that it was worth the struggle and would continue with the series.  I also picked up A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell as I’m intrigued by A Dance to the Music of Time and find this slim novella much less intimidating than the larger volumes which contain several parts.  We’ll have to see how it goes.

I also had three books come my way from BookMooch in March.  The first two are Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney and Any Human Heart by William Boyd, and I can’t remember why I wanted to read them or what they’re about at all.  I quite like this though as it means they’ll be a (hopefully) pleasant surprise when I eventually pick them up.  The third book is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which I’ve read before but don’t own.  I’m planning to reread Jane Eyre at some point soon and decided it would be an interesting exercise to read this one again afterwards.

Unusually for me, there were also some new books in March.  Walter Crane’s The Flower Wedding was one that I’ve already mentioned and loved.  Additionally, I succuumbed to the lure of the Penguin Mini Modern Classics under the irresistible influence of the Waterstones buy-two-get-one-free deal and so Filboid Studge, the Story of the Mouse that Helped by Saki, The Sexes by Dorothy Parker and the intriguingly titled The Mark-2 Wife by William Trevor came home with me.  They seem a great way to experiment with new authors.  Last but by no means least, I was given a copy of A Life Like Other People’s by Alan Bennett as part of the World Book Night giveaways.  I didn’t have time to participate by giving out books myself, so I was really pleased to see this book left carefully on a bench with a tag saying “Please take me home and read me”.  How could I possibly refuse?

By far my biggest bookish investment this month has been Trollope.  After the success of The Warden I’ve evidently decided that he’s an author I’m going to love and so have bought more of his work.  Recently I’ve started buying lovely hardback editions of classic books when I can afford it, and I was lucky enough to find gorgeous box sets of the Folio Society Trollope within my price range on the second hand market.  So I now have the next two books of the Barchester series, Barchester Towers and Doctor Thorne, and all six of the Palliser novels (Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children) waiting patiently for me to read them.  I’ll definitely be tackling at least one of them this month, probably Barchester Towers.  The Barchester books were bought before Lent began, but the Palliser novels were my weekend slip.  Technically though, they were bought on a Sunday and Lent doesn’t count on Sundays (I’ll keep telling myself this).

My other slip occurred when I found myself at a train station with a long wait and, inexplicably, nothing to read.  I headed off to a charity shop intending to come back with just the one book but somehow managed to return with three of the things all by the same author: Perfume from Provence, Sunset House: More Perfume from Provence and There’s Rosemary…There’s Rue by Lady Winifred Fortescue.  In my defence, they’re the sort of delightful books which are out of print and looked as though they would be impossible to get hold of again.  Besides, it would have been cruel to separate them…

So, it seems as though I may not be sticking to a total book buying ban (that was a little optimistic, I grant you) but at least it’s curbing my acquisitions rather substantially.  We’ll see what April brings.  (One day I swear I’ll get a camera for these posts, honest.)