News from Nowhere

I keep a diary of what I have been reading. It has been slipping away from me for some time, the pile of books to be written up in the big spiral-bound book getting larger - it is now several piles, plus a written list which I use to re-establish the piles when one or more of them fall over. You may point and laugh. But I persevere, I do not give up hope, and when I reach the end of a volume, I index it. So here's - not what I've read, but what I have entered in my diary since November 2011: ( behind a cut so you can skip it and read something more interesting instead. )

Some great stuff, and some not so great. Less of it seems to have been written up in LJ than previously; but then, some of what has been, has been written up at inordinate length. So it goes.

As I've explained before, I keep notes on the books I've read, and I've just reached the end of another notebook. And, for the record, these are the books I've read since September 2007. It seems to be a very long list, partly, I think, because the notebook was more narrowly ruled than usual, and so had room for 18-months worth of books, partly because - at last! - I have very nearly cleared the backlog of books to be written about. ( List behind the cut )
I've linked the title to my review of the book if I've written one, here or elsewhere; I'm happy to discuss books of which I haven't published a review (on the understanding that 'discussion' may be no more than "I have nothing to say about this book!")

I've been keeping a reading diary for almost twenty years now. I started at a time when I was unemployed, a little depressed, spending too much time reading aimlessly, gulping books down and not really tasting them. A friend mentioned that she kept a diary, and I thought it would be a good way to slow down and reflect a little on what I was reading.

It doesn't have to be a very intellectual exercise; the deal I have made with myself is that I can write what I like. If all I think about a book is "Why?", I can write that. But if I feel like writing half a dozen pages of plot analysis, I can do that, too. Occasionally I'll write a more formal piece (some of which I've posted here), but mostly this is stuff I don't want to publish: I want to be able to discuss a book without worrying about spoilers, and to look at my response to it without getting all self-conscious.

I write in an A4 notebook, and when I reach the end I index it, and I've just filled the book I've been writing in since January 2005. Since then (give or take - I'm rarely completely up to date on this) I've read ( and the full list is behind the cut: mostly for my own benefit ) some 115 books, of which about 30 are comics/ graphic novels.

More comics than in the past, I think, because I have been making some effort to keep up with the reading for the Graphic Novels Reading Group. Not all of them were worth reading, but then again, one of the real stars of the list is a graphic novel (graphic autobiography, really), David B's Epileptic.

It's also clear that LiveJournal is eating into my reading time: but we knew that, didn't we?