I have become a very fickle and faithless reader. When I was younger I would never have considered not finishing a book. These days I do it all the time, even though I still feel bad about it. I am also so easily seduced by beautiful book covers and blurbs that I buy and borrow way more than I can read, and I currently have about 20 books in my house that I am reading parallel to each other. Actually, I have not dared count how many they actually are, 20 is just a guesstimate…
Here is, however, a selection of the current reads on my nightstand. And there is no reason why I haven’t finished any one of these yet, just that my attention span has grown short and I cheat on each book with a host of others.
- Phoenix by SF Said. It’s a page-turning space adventure with some serious undercurrents. Fear of those who do not look like us, for instance. It’s also gorgeously illustrated by Dave McKean.
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I can’t believe I haven’t read a whole book by him yet, the writing is so gorgeous and magical. And this is a book about a secret library – of course I love it!
- Lockwood: The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud. I read the Bartimaeus sequence when it came out and fell in love with Stroud’s clever world building and even cleverer sense of humor. Truly funny fantasy is hard to find. Lockwood isn’t as funny, but it’s something even rarer: honestly frightening YA ghost stories. Plus I have a huge crush on Lockwood.
- A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones. I grew up reading Wynne Jones. Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my all-time favorites. When I recently read her posthumously published collection of talks and essays, Reflections, I realized that there are many books of hers I have not yet read. This is one of them, and it has all the trademark Wynne Jonesiness: wit, imagination and completely unexpected twists.
- Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan. I am making an effort to read non-western literature, and this novel caught me with its first sentence: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after having been dead for twenty-one years.”
- Reckless: The Golden Yarn by Cornelia Funke. The Reckless series is one of those “Oh how I wish I had written this”-experiences for me. It takes all the fairy tales we know so well and twists them a turn, making them darker and utterly edge-of-the-seat-thrilling.
