What I Read This Year

It's not been the greatest year of reading that I have ever done, but all the same here is what I did manage to get through. My aim, unrealistic as it might be, for 2019 is to read one book a week. We'll see how that goes!

I Will Repay - Baroness Orczy

13 Minutes - Sarah Pinborough

206 Bones - Kathy Reichs

Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis

23 Days in July - John Wilcockson

Eldorado - Barnoness Orczy

A Call to Spiritual Reformation - D A Carson

Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie

Crooked House - Agatha Christie

Quiet - Susan Cain

Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott

The Glory of the Cross - Tim Chester

Endless Night - Agatha Christie

Kenilworth - Sir Walter Scott

This blog has been hit by a migraine...

...normal service will resume soon

Hearing Problems

Next week I’m going to start reviewing some audio books that I’ve listened to, starting with the BBC’s adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. But before then does anyone have a novel that they have fallen in love because they heard it rather than read it? I had an unfortunate experience with Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens when I was younger because I tried to listen to it when I was ill and kept falling asleep. And now it is the one novel by Dickens that I can never remember the plot of!

Books and Migraine

On the arm of the sofa has a lot of books on it. It’s always looked this way because there are so many books out there that I want to read that I can’t help but pick up new ones before I’ve finished what I’m actually reading. And so it takes me longer to get through books, but I’m like a kid in a sweet shop – what am I supposed to do.

No self-control when it comes to books is only part of the problem. The other regular on the arm of the sofa is my migraine medication, Sumatriptan. As I’m writing this things are not too bad, I nearly made it to two weeks without a migraine. But last autumn as I was averaging 15 a month. And that can seriously get in the way of reading.

Having that many migraines is no fun. Ever. But what makes the pain worse is that you can do nothing productive. Even when the migraine has pretty much moved on there’s still the hours of lying there while your body tells you that it wasn’t just your head that was fighting the battle, it was all of you. Sometimes you wonder if energy will ever come back. But it does.

For me this all started when I was 17 so I’ve got my migraine routine nailed down now. The first sign for me is that my concentration goes. So from the very beginning of this there’s no chance of curling up with a book. As soon as I feel my concentration evaporate I know what’s coming and it’s reach for the nearest pain killer, or if it’s too late for that (sometimes I don’t notice the signs) it’s straight for the Sumatriptan.

If I’m lucky I head straight for a darkened room and to bed. But if I’m working then it’s take a deep breath, and push on through.

The first thing that comes back online is my brain. I am never more productive as I am straight afterwards. I might be exhausted but I want to be up and doing. And that’s when I get frustrated. Because I can’t just bounce back and achieve all that I want to. But in the last six months I’ve discovered something that helps me feel like I’m doing something but without me having to move. Amazon’s Audible. It’s brilliant – I can read without having to use my eyes.

Over the next few weeks I’ll try and post about what I’ve been listening to as well as reading, and maybe some sneaky migraine cheats I’ve discovered too.

Best Places to Read

Right now I’m listening to wind and the rain on the window and it’s making me remember one of my favourite reading spots. It was more of a one off reading spot, but it was one of the wettest days I’ve ever seen, and we had driven out to the moors above Haworth – true Bronte country and decided that it wasn’t worth getting out of the car. So we sat there for a couple of hours and read. I was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work at the time, which is a collection of her short stories that are well worth a read. Listening to rain lashing down on the roof of the car, and the gloomy grey clouds rolling over the moors – what better reading place could there be?

Achoo

Rather than zooming ahead this week with my reading I've been accosted by hayfever, or some sort of cold, and so have been snuffling my way through. But I was still thinking - and this is what I was thinking about:

If you could go back in time, with antibiotics or whatever else you needed to save their lives, which author's life would you prolong, in the hope that they would write more works?

For me it would be going back and saving Anne Bronte.

Comment below and let me know.

My Ambitious List

It’s almost half way through and already I’m disappointed that I’ve not read more. But there’s still six months to cram a load of reading in and this is the list of books I want to get through:

Follow Me Back – Nicci Cloke

Thirteen Guests – J Jefferson Farjeon

The World According to G – Geraint Thomas

Death in the Tunnel – Miles Burton

A Dark Night’s Work – Elizabeth Gaskell

Hamlet from Globe to Globe – Dominic Dromgoole

Echoes – Laura Tisdall

The Lie Tree – Francis Hardinge

One of us is Lying – Karen McManus

      

Racing Through the Dark – David Millar

29 Seconds – T M Logan

Friend Request – Laura Marshall

I also want to reread the Hunger Games Trilogy – thinking I might be a bit over ambitious!