Yeah, I'm late to the party, but I'll settle for a proportional amount.

Pages total as of:
14 Aug - 2199

seems reasonable

no! IH focus on your TV project!!!!!!

It's just 27 pages a day, I'd read that in under an hour...

yeah i figured 30 pages a day, but I haven't done that, I am way behind. I will lose.

I read 40 pages one day and 0 the other, so I'm behind atm (even with this half-thing), but I will catch up.

yeah i hear you. it's easy to get behind.

Podstrochnik - Lungina - 367 pp. - Russian
Autobiographical work by a Russian translator - an insight into a life of a woman who surrounded herself with very creative people (her husband, for instance, wrote several early Klimov films, amongst others, and her son is the famous modern Russian director Pavel Lungin; the friends are even more famous) in a country that submerged creativity. Gets too political in the middle but otherwise a very poignant and interesting work with some very cool name-dropping.

Birdsong - Faulks - 501 pp. - English
Quite impressive. The structure works to the extent that the non-war sequences work almost as well as the war sequences (clearly the crucial scenes of the novel, and very well written and described). A bit too over-reliant on obvious symbolism and coincidences, but still powerful. A non-entity though, when compared to...

Im Westen nichts Neues - Remarque - 188 pp. - German
This time, there is no 100 page prelude detailing a love affair, and there's no attempt to involve the characters in important battles. War through the eyes of a man who actually fought in it. Harrowing. The frequent switches between descriptions of trivial aspects of soldiers' lives (eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom) and the hero's pondering of the meaning of it all work amazingly well, and that ending just floored me.

Män som hatar kvinnor - Larsson - 533 pp. - English
Better known as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, of course, though this title is better (nothing is as bad as the English titles of books 2 and 3, though, marketing people, are you suffering from sclerosis or something?). Nothing special, overall - despite the unusual heroine it has a lot of cliches. A lot of references lost on me, but for a 500 pages book it's a quick read. Wouldn't do so again, but quite curious about the sequels regardless.

Sokol i lastochka - Akunin - 610 pp. - Russian
I love Akunin's work, he's a genre writer with great attention for historical detail and his work is usually subversive and inspired by literary tradition (and his roots in Japan studies). This one's no exception - at its centre is a diary written by a Buddhist parrot on a treasure-hunting ship! The guy's Erast Fandorin series is even better, but this is a real cracker.

Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics - Smith - 250 pp. - English
I'm not sure whether that sort of stuff should count, but that's not a text-book, I read it in my own time. Quite an entertaining read for what it is, with some nice historical snippets about economics, and a good summary of what I learned last year.

Madame Bovary - Flaubert - 347 pp. - English
Truly classic, a realist work which is never dull as realism often is, and its observations about the pathetic characters are sharp and haven't dated at all. A collection of wonderful and memorable episodes. The prose is still a bit too flowery at times, but this is far less dated than I expected it to be.