My next challenge – Toppling the Book Piles

The book piles have become towers. Sustained efforts over the past six months have made no inroads into the number of unread books that I own. It’s not that I haven’t read any books, of course. In fact, my two book challenges so far for this year have been very successful – see here for my final blog about my Springcleaning Challenge which I undertook in March, April and May, and here for my blog about my Travelling for the Summer Challenge. The problem is that I have bought more books than I have read.

My weakness is the easy and cheap availability of cheap books at charity shops, secondhand bookshops and supermarket book tables. There is also the opportunity to buy secondhand books via the Internet, which I do regularly. I buy new books, in shops and online, especially when it’s a favourite author. I also acquire them on my Kindle and on audio but those don’t seem so burdensome when they are not right in front of me, occupying the floor and the shelves.  I find it very difficult indeed to resist temptation but, it’s fair to say, I don’t try very hard.

All the books I acquire this way I really want to read. Occasionally I check through the book piles to see if I can discard any without reading them but it’s unusual to dispose of one this way. I often rearrange the piles to try and make the problem seem less but it’s difficult to hide the number that I have accumulated. I have never counted these unread books and I suspect that if I did I might be very ashamed of myself – the total will be in the hundreds.

So, I am going to do what I did earlier this year and pick 25 of the unread, physical books and read them between now and the end of November. These are books that have been in the unread collection for a long time, maybe even years. I shall split the selection between fiction and factual books. They should all be standalone volumes. Sadly, I could make several selections of 25 books and hardly touch the piles !

There are no prizes or medals for this activity so I will not worry too much if I don’t get to the end of my selection in the time I have allocated or if I abandon one and have to substitute it with another. Reading, after all, should not be a chore but a pleasure. I’ll blog as I go and I welcome comments from any readers as I proceed about the books and what you think of them.

So, here we go and here’s the list, in no particular order. Let’s see the towers topple.

Wish me luck…

	We Die Alone	David Howarth	A true story of survival during WW2 in arctic Norway
	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather	An historical novel about faith in New Mexico
	Shadowlands	Matthew Green	A travel book about lost and abandoned settlements in Britain
	China Room	Sunjeev Sahota	A novel about marriage and family life in rural Punjab
	The Gran Tour	Ben Aitken	A younger man takes a series of coach holidays with older people
	The Railway Children	E Nesbit	The children’s classic
	The Soldier’s Return	Melvyn Bragg	A novel about the issues facing men on their return to WW2
	The Forgotten Spy	Nick Barratt	A true story of spies between the world wars
	Elegy for a River	Tom Moorhouse	A nature book about wildlife by British rivers and its conservation
	Playing Sardines	Michele Roberts	Short stories
	Corsets to Camouflage	Kate Adie	The changing role of women in war over the years
	10 Minutes 38 Seconds in the Strange World	Elif Shafak	Memories of one women in the short time just after her death
	I Belong Here	Anita Sethi	A woman walks and travels in the Pennines
	The Last Story of Mina Lee	Nancy Jooyoun Kim	A novel about the relationship between a mother and a daughter in Korea and America
	Swell	Jenny Landreth	The story of pioneering women in the 1930s who wanted equal access to swimming facilities
	The Bookseller of Kabul	Asne Seierstad	A true story of family life in Afghanistan
	The Passport	Martin Lloyd	A history of travel documents
	The White South	Hammond Innes	A novel of survival in the Antarctic
	Burying the Typewriter	Carmen Bugan	A family history of life in Romania under Soviet control
	The Rapture	Claire McGlasson	A novel of life in a British religious cult
	The Poisoner	Stephen Bates	A true crime account of a Victorian murderer
	The Invisible Ones	Stef Penney	A mystery about a missing woman and an uncooperative community
	Tomorrow to be Brave	Susan Travers	The biography of a woman with the French Foreign Legion in Libya in WW2
	Light Perpetual	Francis Spufford	The alternative history of three young people if they had lived instead of being killed by a bomb
	Ancestor Trouble	Maud Newton	A women searches for her family history and examines how one generation’s trauma affects another