So many books...

Having recently committed myself to using this blog properly, I've been surfing around and reading many fascinating book-blogs. It's so wonderful to discover there are other people out there as interested in reading great books as I am and a blog is the perfect way to record one's thoughts and impressions.

The downside about reading all these blogs is that every one makes me want to add yet more books to my already hugely long TBR list!

On Facebook recently I completed a ticklist that was sent round of 100 books that it was suggested everybody should read. I have already read around 70 of them! My brother, who is certainly not as fervent a reader as I am, commented that I would have nothing left to read by the time I reach the age of 40. Fortunately this is not true: though I do want to read the very best books as soon as I possibly can, there are hundreds of them and there are already so many I'd like to re-read some time.

Re-reading is something I keep putting off as I've felt there are so many books I haven't got to yet that it might be a waste of time to read a book I've read before, even if it's a great one. But from looking at other blogs, I'm beginning to see the virtue of it. You already know the plot and the characters when you return to a favourite, so a re-read can uncover other pleasures that you may have missed the first time around. And of course, there are some books I may not have fully understood on a deeper level the first time I read them (when I was in a hurry to get on to the next one!), so a re-read could be a revelation.

Having said all that, there are dozens of unread books I already have in mind to enjoy this year, so re-reading will have to be put off for a little while longer!

My TBR list for this year includes, in no particular order:

Graham Greene - The Comedians
Evelyn Waugh - Sword of Honour
Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
James Joyce - Dubliners
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Homer - The Iliad
Peter Carey - Parrot And Olivier In America
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Martin Amis - Money
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Julian Barnes - A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters
Ian McEwan - The Innocent, Solar
J.G. Ballard - Empire Of The Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View Of Hills
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-5
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Patrick Susskind - Perfume
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Anthony Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Emile Zola - Nana
Stendhal - The Red And The Black
Thomas Hardy - The Return Of The Native
John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River
John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

An exhausting, but not necessarily exhaustive, list!

Will post some thoughts on Wolf Hall, which I'm still very much enjoying, tomorrow.