Reading Down the House

As you all know, I am always up for a challenge, one that will add to my journey to gorgeousness, health and organised living.

So I am jumping straight into an exacting life’s challenge: reading down the house; reading being one of the cornerstones of my idea of a gorgeous life.

Like an exacting life, books somehow seem to enter my house. I do buy a new book every second month (I take turns with a fellow bookclubber and we share the book for that month) for my book club, and there are always new titles coming out that call their siren song. And I do like to support writers. So the arrival of some books I can account for, but others just appear.

When I take books to the second hand bookshop to trade in, I walk out with a couple of replacements. I keep hoping that I will reach that point where my trade-ins will not get me a book. But that point never seems to be reached – because I keep buying new books and exchange most of the book club books after we have discussed them.

I have drastically reduced the number of books I buy, mainly using the public library, which is a four minute walk from my home, or the library at work. Yet when I look at a shelf to do some decluttering, I am reminded of books I bought but have not yet read, some that I don’t even remember buying.

Here’s my goal: to read these 13 books by the end of next year. Some I have bought new, some second hand. A couple I bought recently; most have been on my shelf for years. A couple I started but just couldn’t get into. (I am hoping Wolf Hall won’t defeat me again.) Two, the Waugh novels, I am re-reading after having read the first in the trilogy, Men at Arms.

The books:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

The Amber Amulet by Craig Silvey

Officers and Gentlemen & Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh

The Second-last Woman in England by Maggie Joel

When Will There Be Good News? & Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Hannah and Emil by Belinda Castles

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

and finally Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

I will be buying new books. As a member of a book club, I read a new book every month. And my book club meets in a book shop, which in itself is dangerous as there are other books that fall off the shelves into my hands, clearly wanting a home. So that means I will be reading at least two books a month until the end of 2014. (No, my maths isn’t out. Wolf Hall counts as two books at the very least.)

I am starting with Hannah and Emil.

Any on this list you know, like, loathe, recommend?