[Sunday Salon] – New additions, a fresh challenge and seeing novels from the writing side

Greeting Sunday people!
You know, this Sunday Salon is beginning to feel more like a Daily Salon. It only seems like yesterday that I was posting last week’s submission. Then again when I was a kid my dad always used to tell me that life hurtles past when you reach 21 and he wasn’t kidding. I should come clean though and admit that I’m almost double that at 41, but at this age life seems to speed by even faster! Anyway I digress; my focus for this post should of course be reading-centric, so moving on swiftly, here’s a rundown of the highlights of my bookish week:

• A few welcome books (as shown in the pic above) were added to my collection this week. The first, and most exciting is a 1955 hardback copy of John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday. I’m hugely excited about this title. It’s the follow-up to one of my most favourite novels of all time – Cannery Row, and I’ve waited weeks to pick up a good 2nd-hand copy. I’m straining with every sinew in my body not to just dive in and start reading this straight away, but I’m conscious of the need to complete my other novel-reading commitments before I do (it’s so, so hard to resist though )).

  Thanks to BookMooch I also added one of the titles on my 50 Novel list to my collection – Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I’ve heard a lot about this book, especially from previous Reader of the Week Krista, so I’m pretty excited to have received this (thanks for sending it Bill)

  A sweep of 2nd-hand bookshops also added 1991 Man Booker Winner The Famished Road by Ben Okri to my collection (I have a fetish for collecting and reading Booker winners )), and I also picked up Terror by Night, a really nice ghostly-themed short-story anthology by Ambrose Bierce, a writer I’ve had quite a lot of contact with the past 2-3 weeks (see next bullet).

• On Friday I completed the excellent ‘31 Tales of Terror’ challenge, that was created and run by Memory over at Stella Matutina. This was a really fun challenge which consisted of reading a vintage ghost related tale on each day of October. I’ve never read so many ghost stories in my life but it opened my eye to a genre I’ve not really explored much. I had to play a bit of catch up with the challenge at first but I thoroughly enjoyed it; I must have, considering I grabbed that Ambrose Pierce anthology (see above bullet).



• Talking of challenges, I’ve hinted at it long enough and finally, on Halloween, I announced the launch of the latest reading challenge to my list – the iPoe Short Story Reading Challenge.

  It’s a challenge to read the entire collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories (which I’m pretty sure amounts to 73 unique works), and I’ve begun this challenge for two reasons. Firstly I’ve fallen in love with the ‘Poe prose’. I may only (shamefully) have read three of his stories so far – Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado and The Oval Portrait, but they’ve moved me in a monumental way; so monumental in fact that I feel the need to absorb every story Poe has written (doesn’t this all sound a bit like the reasons I gave for launching my Chekhov challenge? )). Secondly, mainly because of my new-found reverence for the man, it’s also the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth on January 19th 2009, and I wanted to personally mark it in some way.

  As ever I’ve created a hub-page for the challenge, and as always I invite anyone to jump on the challenge should they wish to do so. Head along to the hub page for all of the info.

Finally I should mention that I began the really exciting project of entering my first NaNoWriMo event yesterday. I’d been aiming to do so since the spring of this year, and now the event’s upon us it’s all systems go. My working ‘novel’ is entitled Blood Words, and it’s a story set during the 1830s in Edinburgh, and it’s based around the notorious Burke and Hare murders of 1827/28. A few more details can be found in my announcement post.

I’m hugely excited about being on this writing adventure. I’ve never written any fiction of real note in my life ever; reams of academic stuff yes, but no fiction. Seeing the world of novels from the other side i.e. that of the novelist, is a huge milestone for me so I’m blogging it as much as I can. So if you’re anyway interested in grimacing at an uber-amateur novelist wrestle with the prose, and no doubt crash and burn ), then keep an eye out for my updates. The burning question I want to know is whether anyone else is doing NaNoWriMo this month? I’d love to hear from you!

So that’s my Sunday Salon post for this week. I’m not sure how things are going to pan out over the next week, what with the novel writing and all, but hopefully I’ll be able to check in again next week.

Have a great week everyone and continued luck in all of your reading goals and challenges.

**This post has been specifically written for Sunday Salon participation**