thorold's controlled detonation project for 2012

My target for 2012: to read at least 60 books acquired before 01.01.2012.

That's ambitious! More than one per week. Good luck.

Mark, I've added you to the enlistments. Welcome aboard!

I need to make me one of those graphs. Seems like a nifty way of keeping track.

Good luck with your challenge this year!

So: the starting parameters. At the beginning of 2012, I had 62 unread books acquired before 2011 and tagged http://www.librarything.com/tag/2011+Off-the-shelf+candidate
as well as 56 unread books acquired in 2011 and tagged http://www.librarything.com/tag/Unread+2011+acquisitions

That makes a starting total of 118 TBRs: the target is to read sixty, roughly halving that number.

(Thanks to a bit of quick thinking I did my post-Christmas shopping on New Year's Eve, so the holiday purchases are all eligible to be BOMBS!)

1. All points North by Simon Armitage - bought on New Year's Eve, read on the train home after New Year

Engaging miscellaneous pieces from the Marsden poet.

2. The whole day through by Patrick Gale - also bought on New Year's Eve and read on the train home after New Year

Pleasant comfort read, but I'd expect a bit more from a writer with Gale's track record than what he delivers here.

I also did my new acquisitions before New Years to add more BOMBS to the list!

3. The Finkler question by Howard Jacobson — bought July 2011

British novelist starts to believe that he is really Saul Bellow, and ends up winning the Booker

4. The Card by Arnold Bennett — bought October 2011

Engaging rags-to-riches comedy: published three years before Sir Alec Guinness first saw the smoke in Maida Vale, but the big set-piece scenes make it read as though it was written with the film version in mind.

5. Have I Got News For You: Guide to Modern Britain by Nick Martin — Published in 2009, Christmas present in 2011

Rather past its read-by date, but there are a few nice jokes. It will do for the guest-room shelf.

6. On the art of writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — bought June 2009 (I seem to be on a BOMB-clearance roll this weekend...)

A wonderful, idiosyncratic ramble through the world of literature in twelve lectures. Must have been frustrating for the undergraduates trying to find something they could use in an exam, but a great source of pleasure to everyone who's read them since.

7. On the art of reading by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — bought June 2009

Q's second set of Cambridge lectures, discussing how and why English literature should be taught and studied in schools and universities. The controversies may be long-buried, but his eloquent defence of liberal humanism against the background of a terrible war is still well worth reading.

8. English journey by J.B. Priestley — bought February 2011

It's hard to express your empathy with the unemployed convincingly when you're on a chauffeur-driven tour, but Priestley has the right mix of technical skill and humility almost to get away with it.

9. Clea by Lawrence Durrell — bought March 2008 (true to form, I celebrate the last day of the month by finishing at least one book)

More fun than the other three, or perhaps it's just all starting to make sense now...

10. Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa — bought March 2011

Perhaps not as funny as it's said to be, but entertaining enough to keep me going through a very frustrating day (snowbound at the airport).

11. The bluest eye by Toni Morrison — bought about 15 years ago, at a guess...

Reads like the first novel it is, but still interesting. No idea why I left it sitting around so long.

12. Die Ursache: eine Andeutung by Thomas Bernhard — bought December 2011

Asserting that there was no fundamental difference between the Roman Catholic church and the Nazis was a pretty effective way to stir up trouble in Austria in 1975: Bernhard didn't make himself very many friends when he published this first part of his autobiography.

13. Ending up by Kingsley Amis — bought July 2011

Grim little black comedy about five ill-assorted people getting old disgracefully. Very English.

14. Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann — has probably been sitting on my shelf since the early 90s

Still in the seventies, back in Austria again, but Vienna instead of Salzburg, Mahler instead of Bach.

15. Twee lege stoelen by Han Nefkens — given away by the Aids Fonds in 2005

Newspaper columns in which an HIV-positive Dutch journalist contrasts his own situation with that of people with AIDS in Thailand who don't have access to expensive drugs. A book I felt I ought to have had a better reason for reading than simply to bump up my statistics on the last day of the month. The message is the same, whatever reason you have for picking the book up, I suppose.

16. L'usage du monde by Nicolas Bouvier — bought November 2011

It's a bit of a cheat to count this as a BOMBS, since it didn't spend any appreciable time on the TBR shelf. More-or-less as soon as I bought it, it went into my backpack, and I've been reading it as it deserves — slowly and with great pleasure — on buses and trains for the last three months. Even three months feels a bit rushed: ideally, one ought to read it in real time, taking eighteen months for the journey, just as Bouvier and Vernet did.

> 18: my husband and I lauged out loud when I readed this comment to him (he is a big fan of Thomas Bernhard)

PS I like your graphic in msg 1

17. De slag om de Blauwbrug by A.F.Th. van der Heijden — bought June 2011

Mini-Ulysses set in Amsterdam against the background of the riots on the day of Queen Beatrix's inauguration.

>23 FAMeulstee:
The chart is simply taken from a Google Docs spreadsheet - it's very easy to set up, more-or-less the same as a spreadsheet in Excel. Once you have defined a chart, you just have to set something in the chart options to "publish" and it gives you a URL you can paste into a talk thread as an image. I got bored with little locomotives and dragonflies moving from left to right...

18. Utz by Bruce Chatwin — bought February 2011

Chatwin's beautiful last book, going back to his early days in the art world and as an archaeologist. No idea why I didn't read it in 1988.

19. A mind to murder by P.D. James — bought April 2011

Early P.D. James. Interesting background on health service administration and a murder victim who sounds suspiciously like a self-parody, but the crime story itself is rather dull.

20. The price of love by Peter Robinson — bought June 2011

A couple of good pieces in an otherwise pretty mediocre collection of short stories. I'm still not convinced that Robinson is as good as people say...

21. Cold is the grave by Peter Robinson — bought July 2011

Another Peter Robinson, a bit more satisfying than the other two I've read, but not earth-shattering.

22. A taste for death by P.D. James — I somehow managed to buy two secondhand copies of this in 2011, one of which I've given away

London in 1986: The largely-irrelevant Anglican church has been corrupted by social do-gooding on one side and a Romish infatuation with miracles on the other; the left behave like 1950s Stalinists in a John Le Carré novel; the decadent upper classes are motivated only by self-interest, whilst the Conservative Party stands alone as a bastion of honour and common-sense. If it were anyone other than P.D. James, you would take it for an elaborate satire, but I have a horrible feeling that she actually sees the world like this.

You're really steaming through the TBRs. I'm running into another problem. Besides the real TBR pile of books bought in the last few months and yet to be tackled I keep finding books that I know I enjoyed and would like to reread but also a lot of others that I'm fairly sure I have read but can't remember much about them. Transferred to a purely virtual NTBRR (Need To Be Re-Read) pile whilst staying physically where they are now. Suspect this problem will get worse with increasing age.

Yes, that's the trouble. The more you read, the more you want to re-read.
And it's one thing polishing off a few detective stories I picked up from the charity shop last year, another thing altogether getting down to finishing the heavyweight tomes that need serious concentration and reflection. And I don't even count the classics I've downloaded from Gutenberg in anticipation of getting around to them one day...

23. Le club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte — bought August 2011

Entertaining intertextual romp with more than a hint of Umberto Eco about it. Didn't quite finish this in time for the end of March, but since the first Monday in April is the day on which the story of The three musketeers opens, and is a significant date for the Club Dumas as well, it was quite fitting that I should be reading the last couple of chapters on that particular day of the year.

24. Le tableau du maître flamand by Arturo Pérez-Reverte — bought October 2011

Nice chess-puzzle plot, but the characters are rather uninspired (even offensive) stereotypes.

25. Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann — bought September 2011 (another one that never quite got onto the TBR shelf, as I've been reading it on and off since I bought it.)

A bit of a slog, with all those pages and pages of abstract nouns, but worth it...

26. The fixed period by Anthony Trollope — bought September 2011

I've got a feeling we're not in Barchester any more.

27. Fatal beauty by John Godey — left here by an unknown benefactor sometime before 2007

Even I didn't manage to get beyond page forty. This one's definitely going to the charity shop.

28. Ich und Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann — acquired September 2011

Clever, but not as interesting as Die Vermessung der Welt

29. The Stone raft by José Saramago — acquired December 2011

The more Saramago I read, the more he impresses me.

30. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin — bought October 2007

One of those books you put off reading because you don't want to admit you've never read it...

31. The sailor who fell from grace with the sea by Yukio Mishima — bought ca. 1995

Yet another very short book that has been on the TBR pile forever. When I did an audit of unread books a couple of years ago, I actually found I had two unread copies of this (I gave one away in the meantime). What is it about me and novellas?

32. Señor Vivo and the coca lord by Louis de Bernières — bought June 2011

Philosophy professor cleans up Latin American country much-plagued by magic realism.

33. Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz — bought ca. 1994

18th-century madness in 1939 Buenos Aires

34. The heart in exile by Rodney Garland — bought ca. 1995

Endearingly bad pre-Wolfenden gay novel that's been on my TBR shelf nearly as long as the Gombrowicz was

35. Against the law by Peter Wildeblood — bought January 2011

The Montagus and the cops.

July was a washout for BOMBS clearance, and August isn't looking very much better. I've been reading too many e-books.

36. A traveller's life by Eric Newby — bought October 2011

Interesting collection of short bits and pieces by a man who knows more about ladies' fashions and underwater demolition than most travel writers of his generation.

37. Foe by J.M. Coetzee — bought May 2009

A small glass of post-colonial robinsonade: ideal for a hot summer afternoon.

38. The map of love by Ahdaf Soueif — bought ca. 2000

A bit sentimental, and pushes rather a lot of the obvious post-colonial buttons, but I enjoyed it.

39. De Elementen by Harry Mulisch — bought November 2011

Stylish but rather obscure novella: fans of Mythbusters will see the ending coming a mile off.

40. The Jackal awakens by David Patrick Beavers — bought sometime around 1995

This gay novel languished on the shelf so long because I strongly suspected it had been a mistake to spend good money on it. I was right. Anyway, it just goes to show that bad writing was alive and kicking long before the era of the self-published e-book.

41. Jump and other stories by Nadine Gordimer — bought ca. 2000

Troubling, unpredictable and often very subtle short stories from the last decade of Apartheid.

42. Het zingend hart by Gerard Reve — bought November 2011

Collection of short lyrics from around 1970: mostly dealing with death or Catholic faith, but with a few little excursions into love and literature. Plenty of Reve's usual delight in paradox, irony and the unexpectedly shocking.

43. The painted veil by W. Somerset Maugham — bought November 2011

Rather melodramatic colonial-adultery-and-redemption novel. As competently and professionally done as you would expect from Somerset Maugham, but a bit over the top.

44. Contes et propos by Raymond Queneau — bought May 2009

Miscellaneous absurd short pieces and language games.

45. The Manchester & Milford Railway by J.S. Holden — bought November 2008

An endearingly obscure product of the mid-Victorian railway mania that never got anywhere near either of its intended termini (it actually went from Aberystwyth to somewhere in the vicinity of Camarthen).

46. Hygiène de l'assassin by Amélie Nothomb — bought November 2011

Finally I get around to Nothomb's first novel. Clever, intense, repulsive, short. Just like her later books, really, but not quite as funny.

47. A word child by Iris Murdoch — bought July 2011

Good, solid, mid-period Iris Murdoch, with a narrator almost as unappealing as the one in The sea, the sea.

48. Notes of a native son by James Baldwin — bought ca. 1995

Baldwin's first essay collection, including some very fine pieces. No idea how this one got stuck on the TBR pile for so long.

49. De Kraai by Kader Abdolah — Boekenweek gift in 2011

Yet again, a Boekenweek gift comes to the rescue to help me bump up the total at the end of the month!

;-)) Good job!

your goal is getting closer and closer...keep it up!

>59 connie53:,60 Thanks! -I'll have to have a hunt and see if there's another slim volume that will get me up to 50 before midnight :-)

50. Die letzten Tage der Menschheit by Karl Kraus — acquired in 1999

"Austrian political satire" sounds as though it should be one of those famous examples of oxymoron - like "military intelligence" and "English cooking". But it isn't.

51. D'Alembert's principle by Andrew Crumey — bought ca. 2005

Half a rather dull historical novel stuck together with some silly 90s postmodernism. Probably clever when he wrote it, but 15 years on it just seems a bit past its read-by date.

52. The Black Tide by Hammond Innes — bought 2007

Late Hammond Innes, and not one of his best.

53. Fundbüro by Siegfried Lenz — bought February 2011

Pleasant, whimsical little novel about a young man who finds self-realisation in a lost-property office.

54. Herzog by Saul Bellow — bought ca. 1995

Divorced professor whinges about ex-wife for 300 pages.

Sounds like fun ;-)

>67 connie53: Definitely. :-(

55. Jazz by Toni Morrison — also bought ca. 1995

In fairness to Bellow, I ought to say "Black professor whinges about slavery....", but I enjoy Morrison's writing so much more than Bellow's.

56. Fury by Salman Rushdie — this one's a slight cheat. The Dutch translation of this novel was the (unusually generous) Boekenweek gift in 2001, and has been sitting on my shelf ever since, because I didn't really want to read it in translation. Finally, only eleven years later, I bought and read the original English version as an ebook. That takes the Dutch version off the TBR shelf, anyway, and puts me slightly ahead of my target for November...

...Another professor-as-victim novel, a Herzog for the 21st century, but with a very Rushdie twist to it.

57. Paradise man by Jerome Charyn — acquired ca. 2000. Miserable autumn weekends offer a great opportunity to demolish the TBR pile!

A French friend gave me a couple of novels by Jerome Charyn — apparently he's very popular in France — but I don't really have much taste for violent gangster stories, however stylishly they are written.

Don't you get to play the victim card when you've got a fatwa against you? And slavery, well, as far as I see it you whinge about traffic. Once you're talking about true human cruelty it's not whinging. I don't care what tone or language is used, there is no wrong way to denounce systematic cruelty.

>71 fundevogel:
Sorry, that's me being too glib, as usual.
I didn't intend to suggest that Rushdie was "playing the victim card" — if anything, Fury is a book that mocks privileged people (like Bellow's Herzog and Rushdie's Malik Solanka) who see themselves as victims. Given that Rushdie himself is a much-married man who moved from London to New York about the same time as his character does in the book, I imagine there's an element of self-parody there.
I also didn't mean to suggest that Toni Morrison whinges: just that it could appear that way to someone looking only at the subject of the book. Morrison makes the reader look at the problem of slavery in new ways — to anyone who's read her it should be clear that it would be ridiculous to suggest that she whinges. But I don't agree with your distinction between traffic and slavery (leaving aside the pedantic point that slavery is a form of traffic...). In my view, it's perfectly possible to complain in a peevish, childish, irritable, trivialising or unconstructive way about something that is a genuine evil, especially when it's something that happened in the distant past and can't be changed: "I won't tidy my bedroom because my great-great-great-grandfather was enslaved". There's no necessary relationship between the (literary) quality of an argument and the quality of the cause it supports.

Thanks for clarifying, though I still don't buy your example of whinging about slavery. The example you gave isn't even about slavery, it's just a childish invocation of slavery. And frankly I've never even encountered the more plausible "reparations" version of it in the real world. It's my experience that when people bitch about something like slavery or the holocaust or whatever it's out of genuine disgust. Because you really can't make it about yourself if you understand the issue. At least not unless you or yours were personally victimized.

And slavery isn't a type of traffic either. People certainly trafficked slaves. They also trafficked rum. I really don't think you mean that simply being transported for sale makes an item "traffic". In this sense traffic is merely the mechanism by which a commercial product is delivered. Also I'm pretty sure you knew I was referring to the other sort of traffic.

I'm a horrible pedant so only take this a seriously as that deserves.

...meanwhile, back at the the BOMB disposal, another iconic 60s work bites the dust:

58. The golden notebook by Doris Lessing — probably bought secondhand about 30 years ago

Brilliant, original writing: I was silly to let its formidable reputation put me off reading it for so long.

59. Störfall by Christa Wolf — left here by visitors some time before 2011

Spring 1986: when The Cloud was just as trendy as it is now, but rather more threatening...

60. In de val by Dean Koontz — gift for the "Maand van het spannende boek" in 1995

...shamelessly reading the shortest book on the TBR shelf to complete my target of sixty BOMBS for 2012!

Congratulations, thorold!

Good work, Thorold!

My thinking is that if it's on the shelves it needs to be read regardless of what it's size might be. Contratulations!

>77 staffordcastle:-79 Thanks!

Bonus BOMB:
61. Railways in modern India edited by Ian J. Kerr — bought February 2008

Interesting, but a serious candidate for a "bad academic prose" award.

Bonus BOMB 2:
62. Abaft the funnel by Rudyard Kipling — bought July 2011

Reprint of a pirated American collection of Kipling stories from 1909.

Bonus BOMB3:
63. Le protocole compassionnel by Hervé Guibert — bought 20 October 1995 (the receipt was still tucked inside the front cover!)

Oddly upbeat and optimistic for an AIDS memoir.

Age distribution, based on the rather approximate acquisition dates (some of them are just guesses, so not very accurate). As far as I can trust the figures, I calculate that average shelf time per book for the BOMBS I read in 2012 was just under 6 years. The anomalous-looking peak 17 years ago actually makes sense: at that time I was studying for an arts degree and thus coming across a lot of ideas I wanted to follow up, without very much time to pursue them, hence a considerable backlog built up.

Another Bonus:
64. Stationen Hamburger Architektur — bought August 2010

Nice photo-book if you like pictures of metro stations.