Bookish (and Not So Bookish) Thoughts

I realized I've developed a Blogger's Bad Habit called Overthinking. It means I've got tons of ideas for blog posts that I'd really love to show you readers, but the moment I'm sitting at my laptop trying to actually write something, I get carried away with fussing about exact wordings and clarity issues and all sorts of perfectionist woes. I find it impossible to just let my thoughts flow onto the blog post and then go publish it – instead, I plan and procrastinate for ages, and then maybe get something finished. This is interesting, because I'm not a perfectionist generally.

To cure this Bad Habit, I'm going to try out another weekly blogging event, Bookish (and Not So Bookish Thoughts, hosted at Bookishly Boisterous. The idea is to let bloggers share their thoughts and experiences of the week, meaningful or random, without necessarily having to develop these ideas into blog posts of their own. So here we go, my "spontaneously getting my thoughts out on the blog" exercise of the week:

1. I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now, can someone please give me a Time-Turner or put a Memory Charm on me so I can forget everything about it? I won't say anything more because some readers might still want to avoid spoilers, feel free to ask me in the comments what exactly horrified me so much – if you dare.

2. One of my best friends visited London, and whenever someone travels to the UK I very nicely ask them to bring me a couple of books which are hard to find here in Finland, in exchange of eternal gratitude and the price of said books. This time, I got David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the play version of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and a surprise bonus of Shakespeare breakfast tea! Cloud Atlas is one of my absolute favourite books which I need in my own collection, I had been looking for Peter Pan for ages without any luck, and the Shakespeare tea has the most beautiful box ever, so I'm over the moon. Thank goodness for friends who visit the civilized world when I can't.

Have you ever seen such an exquisite wooden box of tea?

3. Finnish television is finally showing the new series of Hollow Crown. I watched the first episode, which is the first part of King Henry VI, and got basically the same, wonderful feels that the first series produced: excellent British actors playing brilliant Shakespearean dialogue in beautifully-shot locations. The first episode opens with a prologue by Judi Dench, and, as I expected, Sophie Okonedo as Margaret is ruthless queenliness incarnate. I reviewed all of the Henry VI plays while waiting for this adaptation to happen.

"I'm the bloody Queen, mate."

4. I read Oscar Wilde's fairy tales and am completely spellbound. There is such beauty on those pages that it's almost impossible to take it all in with a simple, human understanding. Go read them, if you haven't. Your life will get infinitely better.

5. I have been reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children for a long while now, and I'm still in the middle of it. Not because of any loss of interest issues – it's one of the most intriguing books I've ever read. There's just so many ideas to take in there, it appears to be quite a challenge even for an obsessive reader like me. I love it.

6. A curious thing happened in the library the other day. I wandered off to the epic poetry section, which I don't normally do, and this one book just demanded to be taken off the shelf – Gilgamesh. I have vague memories of hearing the name somewhere, but until I read the back cover I had no idea of it being an ancient Mesopotamian epic, considered to be the oldest surviving work of literature in the world. So apparently, I will be reading Gilgamesh in the near future, without ever having planned to do so.

7. All in all, my To Be Read list has been completely re-arranged. I already had that list planned, then rummaged through my bookcase to find a staggering stack of books that I realized I couldn't wait to read. So, once I'm finished with Midnight's Children at last, my near-future reading list will include:

• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (with the added bonus of delightfully pretty covers)
• Gilgamesh
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel

Just had to show off the Peter Pan cover and my illustrated edition of Treasure Island.

My thoughts for the week turned out to be mostly of the Bookish sort. I'm not surprised. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Spring TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created here at The Broke and the Bookish. This feature was created because we are particularly fond of lists here at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list  that one of our bloggers here at The Broke and the Bookish will answer. Everyone is welcome to join. All we ask is that you link back to The Broke and the Bookish on your own Top Ten Tuesday post AND add your name to the Linky widget on that day's posts (typically put up midnight EST on Tuesday) so that everyone can check out other bloggers lists! If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Have fun with it! It's a fun way to get to know your fellow bloggers.

I know it's Friday already, but on Tuesday I happened to be burrowed in bed with hankies and throat pastilles and when I finally re-emerged to the human world, I decided I really wanted to do this topic anyway. I got to a very slow start with reading this year because I made the unwise decision to start 2016 with A Dance With Dragons – the fifth book in The Song of Ice and Fire series, which you find it hard to believe came out of George R.R. Martin's pen because it's so stuffed with pointlessness. Anyway, now I've chucked that one aside for a long while at least and this week's Top Ten topic came just in time to set my reading pace right again:

Top Ten Books On My Spring TBR (to be read) list

Most of my TBR books are already waiting in my bookshelf! Apologies for the dismal phone camera quality.

1. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (currently reading)

I had bumped into Frank McCourt on a few sporadic occasions in the past. I have a vague memory of seeing the film adaptation of Angela's Ashes and how it managed to find humour despite being set in an environment seeping with desperate poverty and Catholic guilt. Later, there was a chapter from his other book, 'Tis, in an English school textbook, where McCourt recounts how he came to America and managed to get enrolled in the University despite having minimal education. He seemed like someone whose life story I would like to know, so I decided to read him one day. 

2. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

I happen to own a beautifully covered, illustrated Finnish translation of this book, which I've never read completely. Now, I watched the Disney film and decided I'm going to do it and find out what the original vision was. I already know Mr Kipling is going to make wonderful use of the Indian setting, so I should be thoroughly enjoying myself with this one. 

3. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

My blogger friend Hannah is reading through the Anne series right now, we got into a bit of a discussion about them, and I realized it's been such a long while since I read those books that I can't really express a definite opinion. I remember having some issues with the tone and characters of the later books in the series, and I'm suspecting I might find them even more problematic now that I'm much older. I'm excited to revisit and find out! We've had the entire series of the 1960s Finnish translations in our family bookshelf forever, and for the sake of nostalgia I'm going to read those again.

4. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

I've been fascinated by Rushdie since I saw a documentary film where he talked about his multicultural upbringing and the fatwa that he endured after The Satanic Verses caused an uproar. He had such a captivating way of knowing exactly what he wanted to convey and how to express it, that I once again decided here was a writer I was surely going to read one day. The premise in Midnight's Children seems like a wonderfully imaginative combination of historical events and the supernatural: 1001 children who were born at midnight when India was declared independent are telepathically linked to each other and have other special gifts. Just typing that down makes me want to open this book straight away!

5. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 

I've read Neverwhere and Stardust from Neil Gaiman so far and loved them both, Stardust being one of my favourite books ever. Gaiman has such a unique way of world-building, where he takes inspiration from something that already exists, then takes it through the phantasmagoric machinations of his imagination, and out comes something beautifully strange, befuddlingly original, so unpredictable it will keep you on your toes constantly. So I really don't know what to expect from American Gods, other than something from the furthest reaches of imagination.

6. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is my newest author crush. How amazingly brilliant can a man possibly be? Just search for any quotation by him and it will be the pinnacle of extraordinary wit. Despite being such a prolific writer in various genres, Wilde's oeuvre only includes one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. If Wilde's handling of people and society in this novel is anywhere near the genius of The Importance of Being Earnest, I will definitely love it. 

7. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Jane Austen loved to mock Gothic horror novels; I love to mock Gothic horror novels. Therefore, it's high time I set out to mocking Gothic horror novels together with Miss Austen, and also reach my goal of reading all of her works. The last Austen novel I read was Persuasion, which was her last work and a disappointment to me. I suppose Northanger Abbey might represent the opposite end of the spectrum regarding Austen's style in writing, as it is one of her earlier novels and apparently more light and funny in tone. Let's see if my opinion of it will also be different to Persuasion.

8. The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian

I can't wait to be reunited with Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Those two have become incredibly precious to me in a very short time. Aubrey will be leading a very different sort of life on land now, as spoiler he got married at the end of the previous book. Maturin will be Maturin whatever he does and it's glorious. 

9. The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Arthurian legends are one of those things you know all the basics about even if you're Finnish and never actually read into it. So far, the closest I've done to reading about King Arthur is a children's book by Mauri Kunnas, Kuningas Artturin ritarit. Mind you, that's a very good place to start – Mauri Kunnas is a divine gift to parents who want to teach their children the magic of stories and reading. Anyway, T.H. White's take on the mythology is apparently what inspired Disney's The Sword in the Stone, for which I have a bizarre, childhood nostalgic but still lasting affection. So now it's time to find out what one British writer had to say about King Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin and all the rest in the early 1900s. 

This goes slightly off-topic, but one does not simply mention the brilliance of Mauri Kunnas without providing a picture. In his take of the legends, Arthur and Guinevere fall out because Guinevere uses the Round Table for playing darts.

10. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

My Top Ten will include one non-fictional book. I bought this for my dad as a present some years ago, because he and I share a borderline-masochistic interest in learning about how white Europeans brought down indigenous peoples and exploited their lands basically wherever they landed. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is one of the key works in describing the conflicts on American territory from the Native Americans' point of view. According to my dad, it's every bit as sad as one might expect: broken treaties, people being backed down into reservations, an entire culture made insignificant. I'm probably going to have my heart buried somewhere in the depths of despair while reading this, but we should all educate ourselves on histories such as these – especially as Finland, at least, is experiencing a significant wave of discussion (and also "discussion") of cultural and ethnic tolerance. 

There's my list! What exciting things are there in your reading future? Have you read any of the books on my list, or did any of them spark your interest? Throw me a comment to let me know!