Reading report, February 13, 2017

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date and is "a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week."

Visit the Book Date to see what various other book bloggers have been up to in the last week.
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I didn't read much last week - didn't feel like making a push to finish any of the books I have been reading - but did finish one I have been steadily reading over the last couple of years:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. This monster of a book is more than 900 pages long and I have been reading it bit by bit in the loo. It's funny (or perhaps not) that when I started it I was going "I've read that!" almost every time I turned a page, but after the 1920s these silent exclamations got fewer and fewer as I got closer to my own time, and I had only read a handful of the books published after 1990, although I own copies of several more that I plan to read when that mythical "one day" rolls around.

Much as I detest books and articles telling me I must do something, I found it interesting to see what books were chosen for inclusion in this volume. The edition I have is the original 2006 one, but I know the list has been changed in subsequent editions.

I figured it might be interesting to see how many of these books I have read, but I haven't been able to find the original 2006 list online and I am certainly not going to type it all up myself, so it will have to wait.

Its replacement in the loo is 1000 Places to See Before You Die. I expect that one will take at least a year to finish. I hope I may find some places in it that I deem worthy of visiting, but I am no more  going to start chasing those places than I am going to read all the books in 1001 Books....

I have started reading Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron and expect to finish that in rather less time than 1000 Places.... I am having slight doubts about whether or not to continue reading it (Thubron can be a bit hard to get into, as I experienced when I read one of his previous books), but I am planning to give it the 50-page treatment before deciding.