Last month was a really good reading month for me. Not only did I read a number of really excellent books, but I read more than I normally can manage in a month. This month, however, as much as I seem to be reading it feels as though I'm not making any progress with anything at all. As a matter of fact I did a bit of book switching on my side bar (and night table) to reflect just what I actually have been working on. I think the difference has been that last month I had a set reading plan and particular books that I needed to concentrate on and this month I've just been reading bits and pieces of whatever strikes my fancy. It makes for entertaining enough reading, but there's little to show for it all at the end of the month. I'm definitely spoiled for choice and want to try and read everything at once. Sometimes this works for me, but apparently not this month.
Here are a few of the books that have been distracting me. Library books and a few galley copies of forthcoming books have nosed their way into my reading pile and upset things a bit. I have been lusting after Michelle Paver's Dark Matter ever since Cornflower wrote about it last year. When my library got a copy I snapped it up and have just started reading. I do love a good ghost story, and from what I hear this is a very good one. It's set in the 1930s when a group of men--several very posh gentlemen (well students at least) and one working class fellow decide to travel to the Arctic on a scientific expedition. Whatever they find there is enough to scare the lot of them away save for the working class fellow who keeps a journal of his experiences. I'm not far enough in to get to any of the 'juicy' parts, but doesn't the dark, brooding cover set a creepily atmospheric tone?
At the end of last year I went on a mystery reading binge but have only just finished my first mystery of this year, This Body of Death by Elizabeth George. I'll only say that I think George is back in form and I'll write about it properly soon. It is a long one and I almost grabbed another shorter mystery to read 'on the side' but now am glad I waited, as I soon hit the point of no return and had to read through to the end. Now for something a little different I've picked up Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary. This is the first Tommy and Tuppence mystery. I've not yet read about these Christie characters, though they seem a little like adventurers who get mixed up in murder. The Secret Adversary was published in 1922, and I'm very much in the mood to get back to that era mystery-wise.
Claire at Paperback Reader is hosting a Persephone Reading weekend next weekend, and I've already started my book. It isn't the one I planned on reading, but no matter as it came across my desk at the library, I had to have it and am now enjoying it--another novel by Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. Last year I read The Pumpkin Eater which was such a curious and interesting read. It's very much domestic fiction though not a happily domestic sort of novel and unsurprisingly Daddy's Gone A-Hunting is proving to be very similar. The women in these novels lead lives they see as pointless and empty and bleak as the stories may be it's all very riveting and maddeningly understandable. Their sense of being unfulfilled is palpable.
I am nearing the end of E.M. Delafield's Gay Life about a group of merry-makers, who mostly behave badly, on France's Côte d'Azur. This is definitely closer to Delafield's Thank Heaven Fasting than The Provincial Lady. The Gay Life has its charms, but is also quite satirical in it characterizations. I'm reading along with Simon at Stuck in a Book, though he's already finished so I'm trying to catch up quickly.
One more mention--I'm rereading Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? for Caroline's Literature in War Readalong. Since it's not been too long since I first read it, I am hoping to read more closely and see how much more I take in.
So, now perhaps I do have a little direction in my reading for this last week of February, and maybe this will help me stay on task rather than continue to 'book graze'.