Newest Addictions To My Bookshelf

While i was in London at the London Book Fair this month, i also did a load of sightseeing in the city as we went for a few extra days.

We did all the usual hotspots, such as Big Ben, the Shard, and Trafalgar Square, but we also had a list of bookshops to visit as well!

Our main choices were Foyles and Waterstones Piccadilly! I think we spent about 5 hours in these shops in total, all in one night! I really love that these shops are open so late, especially with Waterstones Piccadilly being open until about 9pm and having 5 floors of books! We were in book Heaven!

I came out of Foyles with:

The Horologicon – Mark Forsyth

And i came out of Waterstones Piccadilly with:

“Moranthology” by Caitlin Moran, “Is It Just Me?” by Miranda Hart, “Warm Bodies” by Isaac Marion, and “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky.

Got most of them on special offer so only spent about £30 on all 5, which is good considering 3 of them are hardbacks!

So, i have got lots to reading through in May!

Reading versus the Internet

INTERNET (Photo credit: fisakov)

I don’t know about anyone else, but i personally find that it’s harder to make myself read a book now i have easy access to the internet, whether on my laptop or my phone.

I always loved reading since i was little, and even though i’ve gone through stages of reading lots and reading very little at all over the years, i always come back to  reading a book eventually.

However, since the Internet invaded my life and became a fact of everyday life, i find it harder to open a book and read. There are so many distractions online, from social networks and instant messaging, to addictive online games and blogs. I am easily distracted these days, as proved by my frequent bouts of procrastination when i was at university for 4 years. There were days when i knew i should have been studying, but found myself playing games into the small hours of the morning. Oops.

These days, i am working 5 days a week during the day, and as i finish about 3pm, i have a lot of free time leftover. I try to read and i try to write blog posts here, but lately i find myself playing Tetris instead, determined to beat my best time and beat other people to a higher level of skill. It’s a little bit sad!

I have a large pile of books on my shelf waiting to be read, yet sometimes i find myself scrolling through the book pages of Amazon looking for ebooks to download onto my Kindle instead of picking up a physical book! And this is the girl who said she would never accept the Kindle as book replacement!

I still like physical books, but my Kindle means i can take a dozen books on long train journeys and switch between them if i get bored of one. That said, i still find myself listening to music on trains or playing on the internet on my phone. There it is again: the Internet!

Sometimes i wonder what would happen if i got rid of my phone and my laptop (and my Kindle!), and forced myself to find other forms of entertainment. I guess i would pick up a paper book! I will always return to the physical book!

A sneak peek…. at my Kindle reading list

Although i am still in love with print books, i am growing increasingly fond of my little Kindle, with its amazing capacity for holding many, many ebooks! I am harbouring a slight addiction to downloading paid for and free ebooks and the fact that it is instantaneous!

Here is a little sneak peek at some of the books sitting on my Kindle reading list:

My Kindle reading list

I have read all of the titles shown, except for “H10N1″ and most of the plays by Shakespeare!

London Book Fair 2012- belated bits and pieces

I know it’s been a whole week since the LBF (woah, that flew by!) but i thought i’d share some stuff.

Firstly, the amount of leaflets and newspapers which i gained from the LBF:

LBF12 leaflet collection

It’s a bit less than last year, mainly because i wasn’t on a mission to pick up as many bits of interesting leaflets as i could get!

In all the seminars i went to, i was Tweeting and taking notes simultaneously! My handwriting just gets worse and worse these days! Not all of us were lucky enough to have iPads or tiny laptops and had to resort to good old pen and paper!

My LBF12 notes

In my bid to find some more useful stuff on translated fiction, i went around some of the foreign publishers and organisations to find some information:

Translated fiction stuff

A lot of it is Scandinavian because i like that sort of thing, so i’ve got Swedish and Norwegian book lists. A relatively new find of mine is Amazon Crossing, which is Amazon’s attempt at translated fiction. I also got a leaflet about the Göteborg Book Fair in Sweden, which is like the London Book Fair but is more open to the general public, and this is one Fair i hope to go to this year.

At Euston train station while i was waiting to catch my train home, i decided on a whim to buy the Times Literary Supplement for the first time because i was curious about what it contained:

TLS April 13th 2012

It was interesting but to be confronted with such a vast expanse of text when i opened it was a little overwhelming! I have to admit i didn’t find it massively interesting, although there were a few good bits. If i get into buying it more often, maybe i’ll find more reasons to appreciate it.

Also, at the station i popped into WHSmith, as it was the only bookshop i could find in the short amount of time before my train left. I was eager to buy “How to be a Woman” by Caitlin Moran after listening to her being interviewed at the LBF earlier that afternoon, so i found a copy of it. As there was a Buy One Get One Half Price offer on, i had a look around the shelves and found “Delicacy” by David Foenkinos, a title translated from the French language, and which has also been made into a film recently. I thought it sounded interesting and decided to try it (bonus points for being a translation!):

"Delicacy" and "How to be a Woman"

Still in the middle of reading “How to be a Woman” first, and i’m really loving it so far! Totally worth the money i spent!

Anyway, enough for now, i’m going to get back to reading it!

A different way to view book recommendations

I found this fascinating website where you can type in a book title and it generates all the book titles linked to it on Amazon in a fun visual way!

“Yasiv is a visual recommendation service that helps people to choose the right product from Amazon’s catalog. Being it a book, a perfume or a video game – Yasiv finds anything what is sold on Amazon.com.”

So this is a more interesting way to see recommendations for you based on your favourite books!

Try it and see! http://www.yasiv.com/amazon

YASIV Book Recommendation -Example “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

More Books I Find At Work

Today’s books!

“One Day” by David Nicholls

"One Day" by David Nicholls

“Detour” by James Siegel

"Detour" by James Siegel

“Scandal in the Village” by Rebecca Shaw

"Scandal in the Village" by Rebecca Shaw (via Amazon)

Books I Find At Work

As a housekeeper in a hotel, i inevitably come across books in guestrooms!

Call me nosy but i like to peek at what people are reading!

Lately i’ve seen a few more Kindles than before, so i can’t see what their owners are reading, but when the readers have print books i like to look!

Today’s books (found in one room):

Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox by Paul Goldstein

Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (via Amazon)

Both look quite interesting, i wondered if maybe this person is in publishing or something.

So Many Books, So Little Time

Lately, choosing books to read has become a lot more difficult.

Maybe it’s because I want to review every book I read for this blog and so I’m being more careful about my choices, so I seem more cultured and educated. (Although if you look at my reading list for 2011 you will see that i re-read Twilight several times, so make of that what you will, but i quite like an easy read from time to time!)

Or maybe I’ve just suddenly grown up and realised that, as a result of having studied a publishing degree, I am more aware of a wider range of books which I never considered reading before, particularly as I wrote my dissertation on translated fiction and now choose to read more of them.

Or maybe it’s because my parents have taken a liking to Scandinavian crime fiction, thanks to Stieg Larsson, and now seem to exclusively read crime novels by Scandinavian authors. I’m not a huge fan of crime but I loved The Millennium Trilogy.

My Amazon Wishlist has been steadily growing and lately it consists of more books than anything else, especially since getting a Kindle. Amazon will be so happy to see me searching through all their books and wishing for so many of them, but I feel like I’m betraying Waterstones and all the other book retailers and not supporting them by solely looking on Amazon.

I still pop into Waterstones every now and then, and wander around the shelves to see what is doing well in the shop displays and so on. I still like scanning shelves and picking up the books which stand out, and although you shouldn’t, I always judge a book by its cover first and then read the blurb on the back, and then maybe read the first page to see what its like.

The experience feels so much different online: I hunt through the bestsellers and then see what other customers have been buying or looking at and it goes on like that. Or I search for an author I already know and then see what other similar authors are recommended. I find myself finding an interesting book and doing the inevitable scroll down to the customer reviews to see what people think. I shouldn’t really base my choices on what other write about the novels as they aren’t always very positive and I should read the book and work out for myself what I think of it, but I find myself rejecting many a book due to whether it has a higher percentage of negative comments.

I also read newspapers and see what books their literary sections are talking about and their recommendations and reviews, and I use Twitter to see what like-minded people are reading as well.

So anyway, with these methods I still find plenty of intriguing books, both homegrown and foreign, and its got to the point where my Christmas list was composed of about 18 book titles, of which I only received 2! So I still have loads left to read, and there just feels like too many books to read them all, especially as every day a new selection of books is published or I discover more books which I havent read yet which have been around for a while!

So I can hardly write a list here of all the books I want, you only have to look at how many books I’ve got on the go at the moment in My Reading Journal to see that I’m constantly eager to start something new before I’ve finished the previous!

I wonder if anyone else works the same way as I do when finding novels to read, or if anyone else has the same problem when it comes to being overeager to start the next one?