Skip to main content

The TBR Challenge is done! (plus, some news)

It just occurred to me that I have reached my goal of reading 60 books from my TBR pile. In fact, by the end of October there were 63 of them, so I exceeded the goal with two months of reading to go. By now, the number is 64 and I am reading what may become books 65 and 66. Yay!

The speed with which I managed this is in large part due to the fact that I bought a number of interesting books I couldn't wait to read. It is a sad fact that, once I have bought a book, if I don't read it within a few weeks I start to lose interest in it, and if I own it for long enough I forget I ever owned it in the first place. This is how I occasionally end up buying a second copy (rare, now that I keep a list of the books I own on my smartphone) and also why I sometimes end up culling books without having read them.

I had hoped to reach 200 books read in total by the end of the year, but as I have only finished 157 books by now, I expect the final number will be closer to 180. Not that the 200 book goal isn't within my reach: if I finish 22 books in November and another 22 in December, I will reach 200 before the end of the year.

This is unlikely, however, as I have a project I'm working on that will keep me quite busy for some weeks, possibly even until spring. I have recently become the proud owner of a brand new Volkswagen Caddy Maxi panel van that my father and I are going to transform into a mini-motor home for me. Work has started and will keep me quite busy, planning and working and possibly doing some freelance translating to pay for the whole thing. This may leave me too little time and/or energy to read as much as I am used to. As a matter of fact I think I would probably have managed to read 15 books in October (instead of only 10) if we hadn't already started the work. On the other hand, this just might energise me into reading more books than average - I really can't tell.

Also, while I found any number of foreign blogs and websites about van-to-motorhome conversions, I didn't find many of either in Icelandic (my native language). In fact what I found was mostly travelogues written by motorhome owners, and a handful of discussions about DIY motorhomes on message boards and Facebook, so I am trying to fill that niche by writing a blog in Icelandic about the whole process, which is also going to take time away from reading.

I hope to be able to take my motorhome on the road next spring. Until then I have one book about motorhome life lined up for reading: Queen of the Road by Doreen Orion (if I can find it - it seems to be playing hide and seek with me). I am hoping to find a copy of A monkey ate my breakfast: Motorhome adventures in Morocco by Julie and Jason Buckley, when I go to London at the end of this month. Incidentally, their blog, Our Tour, is a fantastic resource about the various aspects of motorhome travel as well as telling the story of their travels in Europe and North-Africa.

And now, dear reader, I have a question for you: Can you recommend any other books about motorhomes and motorhome travel, including guides to DIY motorhomes? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme