I had planned on posting a review of Wake by Anna Hope today but I always find it hard to review books that I really like so that's going to hang on until tomorrow (or Wednesday, if I am feeling as inarticulate tomorrow as I feel today!) and instead I'm going to sign up for this month's Classics Club spin.
I've watched on enviously for the past year or so as Classics Club members line up a list of 20 books and let fate decide which one jumps to the top of the pile. I'm about three quarters of the way through my first Classics Club read (Villette by Charlotte Bronte) and, although it hasn't all been plain sailing, I'm pretty into it now and *may* have snuck in a couple of chapters over lunch in my eagerness to know what the future holds for Lucy Snowe so it'd be good to get cracking on another while buoyed up by that winner! I don't know why I find the random element such a fun idea but I really do. Probably because I know that if I don't have a push in the direction of some of the scarier tomes I'm going to find myself with just scary tomes in a couple of years' time...
So what's this spinning malarkey all about? The "rules" look like this:
Go to your blog.
Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List.
Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, rereads, ancients — whatever you choose.)
Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog by next Monday.
Monday morning [10th February], we’ll announce a number from 1-20. Go to the list of twenty books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce.
The challenge is to read that book by April 2, even if it’s an icky one you dread reading! (No fair not listing any scary ones!)
Super simple and (hopefully) a kick in the right direction to topple a second book off my list early doors (is that an English/Yorkshire phrase? It looks odd written out for some reason!).
My spin list this time around is...
Books I'm keeping my fingers crossed for
1. John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
2. Shirley Jackson - The House on Haunted Hill
3. Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers
4. Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five
5. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
Tomes that have me quaking in my boots
6. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
7. Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind
8. George Eliot – Middlemarch
9. Victor Hugo – The Hunchback of Notre Dame 10. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
Books about which I am currently non-plussed
11. Anne Bronte – Agnes Grey
12. Daphne du Maurier – My Cousin Rachel
13. Edith Wharton – The House of Mirth
14. Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse
15. Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Random picks (that also sort of happen to have a theme of being linked to my childhood in some way)
16. J.M. Barrie – Peter Pan
17. C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia (or, more specifically, I'd like to re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
18. Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island
19. Jules Vergne – Around the World in Eighty Days
20. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
If you could keep your fingers crossed for a number between 1 and 5 and 16 and 20, that would be great. Be kind, Lady Luck!
