Day 25 – Any five books from your “to be read” stack

Ah. Heh. Interesting question.

Five, you say? Hmm.

A while ago I copied a friend, who’d got all of her books in a stack and taken a photo of them. Wish I could find my photo… my stack was taller than me (I’m 172cm), and I realised afterwards it didn’t actually have all of my books in it.

Now, the situation is not so bad at the moment. Since coming home from our epic adventure overseas, we have been massively decluttering our house, and for me that has meant clearing out both books I have no intention of ever reading again OR lending to people, and losing the books that I have no intention of actually picking up. While this sounds somewhat sacrilegious, it has been immensely freeing. As well, I have basically been on a book-buying ban in anticipation of Aussiecon4 (eee getting so close!). So I have been actually reading some of the books on my TBR pile, and – wait for it – reading books from the library rather than buying them. Incredible.

All of this is a long, torturous way around to saying: most of my TBR pile is getting old. I still want to read them, they’ve just been waiting a fairly long time, mostly. They’re essentially split between sf&f (mostly sf these days) and history.

Five that I’m really looking forward to are:

Silver Screen, Justina Robson. Part of my reading in anticipation of Natcon50, that I’m really hoping to make it to.

Liberty, Lucy Moore. The women involved in the French Revolution.

The Stone Key, Isobelle Carmody. This one has been sitting there since my last Swancon, I think. I feel like I ought to re-read the other Obernewtyns before I read this, but… I’m not sure I can face that.

Northwind, Gwyneth Jones. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Jones novel. I also have Escape Plans sitting here.

Dirk Bogarde, John Coldstream. My mum gave me this bio… oh, too many Christmases ago now. I was a very, very big fan of Bogarde when I was younger (and would be still, I think, if I’d seen any of his movies recently). I happened on the very end of A Tale of Two Cities on the tv, one afternoon at about the age of 16, and was immediately in tears because they were about to chop his head off. Noooo! Apparently he was a very, very interesting man. But the sheer size of this tome is a bit offputting.