Monday 5 January 2015

Reading Rainstorm

In the last couple of weeks I've become a little bit addicted to Goodreads. I used to be on it years ago under a different username but during some free time in December I decided that I really needed to add all of my last four volumes of book journals to some sort of record online.

I started with LibraryThing and once I'd updated that I started on Goodreads and then discovered the Stats feature. This may have been what prompted the sudden obsession with getting all of my past books added on to the site. I love seeing the graph of the year of publication of my book choices.

Snapshot of years of publication/date read on January 1st, 2015
It looks like a little rainstorm, doesn't it?

I'm still in the process of going through my 2011 book journal, which is why the left hand side is looking a little bit sparse.

You can see when I got my Kindle (April, 2012) and I started experimenting with free books. I got a lot of recently published free review copies and I began reading some of the free classics. The very first book I read on it was Dracula which on the graph is the right hand dot on the 1900 line of the third column).

Between 2012 and 2013 I was studying literature with the Open University (as well as reading free classics, which gave me a nice little scattering of pre-1900 books. The very oldest two are Othello (dating to 1603) and The Duchess of Malfi (from 1623). I'm pleased than not all of those old books are from my course though, the third oldest is The Pilgrim's Progress which I read in conjunction with my Children's Literature course but which wasn't a set text.

I mentioned that I was going to take part in the PopSugar Reading Challenge. Well, there's a group on Goodreads endeavouring to read through the list in the order that they appear. You pick the books and then share what you've chosen for discussion on the relevant thread.

I'm kick starting the year with Jane Austen's Emma (for a book with over 500 pages) then at the end of this week I'm moving over to Pride and Prejudice (for my 'classic romance'). I'm having a whale of a time joining in with conversations and sharing thoughts on the books we've all picked.

If you're interested, why not come and join in?

Just as a little note, there won't be any afternoon posts this week. I managed to get a wee bit ahead of myself but not enough to schedule them two weeks in advance as I was planning, I'll just be doing my Chapter-by-Chapter posts on Fridays for the next two weeks and then they'll go back to normal.
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6 comments:

  1. HeatherL5 January 2015 at 10:55

    I've been using Shelfari to track my books and have been happy with that. Goodreads was a little to overwhelming for me.

    Like you I love my Kindle and all the free books out there. I've had it in mind to read through the Harvard Classics...but then I got stuck on Francis Bacon and his fondness for turning a Latin phrase every other sentence. I got tired of having to stop reading and go look up Latin. This is my main justification for thinking that all students should be taught Latin in school.

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    1. Click9 January 2015 at 19:37

      I've never tried Shelfari. I do occasionally play with LibraryThing but I prefer the way things work on Goodreads.

      I've been using my Kindle to catch up on all those classics I should have read years ago. It's funny you mention Latin, I'm determined to study it at some point, purely for fun, hehe.

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  2. Mary Kirkland6 January 2015 at 01:54

    I use Goodreads a little bit. I've left a few reviews over there but I hardly ever use that site. Most of my reviews and book buying is done on Amazon.

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    1. Click9 January 2015 at 19:38

      I went through a phase of leaving reviews on books on Amazon but with limited online time each week I got behind and gave up.

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  3. Liz A.6 January 2015 at 02:06

    Tip for reading Emma: Don't give up on it. Perhaps it was just me, but I almost put the thing down early on. I think it took until about chapter 13 before things got interesting. YMMV. (I'd recommend that you start with Pride and Prejudice. Much more fun in the beginning.)

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    1. Click9 January 2015 at 19:44

      I got into Emma quite quickly but then slowed down a little around the halfway mark when I started to see how the story was likely to end. I did enjoy it though.

      I was a little bit slower with Pride and Prejudice in the start, partly because I wasn't reading it at the beginning of the year so I've not had as much time to read. But I'm around 30% of the way through now thanks to an awful storm in the night keeping me up.

      I like the fact that Jane Austen writes short chapters so you can read them in little bitesize chunks.

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Let me know what you think. :-)

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