A Mountain of Books….
…you guys have all been reading for the last 6 months, and a couple of days ago I stupidly, erm I mean with great interest, asked you all to pick just ONE book, the one that stayed with you, your favourite read of the last little while…
I asked Twitter and Facebook, Booklikes and people in my real life, tell me that one. I had a terrific response, leading to an animated and exhilerating discussion and the results were very interesting. Everyone (mostly) had a different choice. We had a wide range of genre, a wide range of authors, a lot of debate and some rash promises from me about mentioning every single choice made (a promise I intend to keep incidentally, but over several blogposts or this one would be a novel in and of itself) All in all there were 65 separate titles chosen as “the read” of the last six months and when I do this again, which I will, at the end of the year, I’m hoping to ask an even wider audience by requesting retweets and basically working a bit harder at it than I did this time – hey, look I was INTERESTED but there are books to be read!
So lets start small and build on this. Before I start though, inspired by the “Not Booker” prize run by the Guardian I am considering doing a kind Twitter Readers Choice award, using this list as a (very) long list and whittling it down by some means as yet unimagined – so DO tell me what you think of that idea, either by commenting or tweeting over the next few weeks and if people are interested I shall put some actual brain power into it. The prize incidentally, will be, as my good friend Janet put it, Kudos not Cash.
Right…here we go then…Lets take a look.
Today I am going to tell you some things that struck me about the choices and also list the first 20 books for you to have a look at. They are not broken down, I am simply giving them out in the order they were given to me. Or at least the order I wrote them down…Oh wordy Liz basically “In no particular order”. In a couple of days I shall write another post and give you some more. And lets discuss. Hey if we do the prize idea you are going to have to argue the merits of your choice over the next persons…fun fun fun!
First thing that I noticed: Not very many of the choices were Non Fiction. Which made me ponder, is it that we do not read much Non Fiction or is it just that most of the respondants do not, or at least have not in the last few months? I myself read very little Non Fiction but I tend to enjoy it when I do. So thoughts on that would be great!
The next thing that I spotted was that the majority of titles chosen are from women writers – which really helps me as I have an article coming up on the blog about some of the great women writers out there today…and also I think is interesting in terms of the many discussions I’ve seen lately about attitudes to women in writing. I think it shows that the READERS at least don’t really pay much attention to these things and certainly don’t dismiss a novel on the basis of the gender of the author. Although of course, the whole “girly cover art” debate is interesting, I think its the publishers who need to look at that rather than the readers – the readers seem an intelligent lot. Im sure we can debate that and I will ask for opinions on that when the “Women in Writing” article goes live.
Next. There are only three books that received more than one vote, and only one author who had more than one title in the mix. That was interesting, I thought that perhaps there would be a “stand out” book, but nope. So that bodes well for the standard of literature out there at the moment, which is terrific news! If you want to know – the books with more than one vote were these…
And the author with more than one title was THIS author with these three…
So thats 6 down 14 to go for today. Well as its my blog this was MY choice.
And here are some more in no particular order…
So there we have it. The first 20 titles for your perusal and thoughts.
In a few days I shall talk about the genre break down of the choices I was given a little bit and see if there is a pattern.
Hope you have enjoyed this little foray into the reading minds of others!
Happy Reading Folks!
Wow, that’s a long list, I’d better get cracking!
In terms of non fiction it would be The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery. Some great ideas for planning to make writing easier.