First Full Moon Report

Full moon update!

Here I am about to go to bed and read a little bit more of Brian Cox's Wonders of the Universe.  Thursday is science day, after all.  I started reading Stephen Hawkings in the first week of the challenge, and now that I am done with his dense tome, I need something else.  Thankfully there are many many pictures in Cox's version.  And explanatory diagrams.  Note that Hawkings didn't have any pictures, it's just that his pictures didn't actually make it any easier to understand what he was trying to say.  With Cox, you can almost hear his soft Lancashire Lilt as you read the text, and you can see his pretty face, and then you picture him dancing to Things Can Only Get Better and suddenly you have to reread the page from the beginning again.  Clearly I'm easily distracted when it comes to science books.  Jokes aside, I do like his book.

I really wanted to have finished 10 books by the time I got to the full moon.  There was no chance I was going to finish Dickens' Copperfield or Steve Jobs biography over the weekend but I needed something new to read on Monday and I picked up Beryl Bainbridge's The Bottle Factory Outing which she wrote in 1974.  It was Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize.

At less than 200 pages long I felt this would be a doddle to finish in a day... but I was wrong.  Not a doddle.  Actually I thought it might be down to Mondayitis that I just could not concentrate on the prose, but David has just called me from Cornwall (he's been at a conference) and he's just started it, 50 pages in, and he too is finding it difficult to get into the rhythm of it.  Certainly by 100 pages (where I got to by Monday night) you are well acquainted with the characters enough to begin to enjoy the read, but there is a point at the beginning where it is all a bit muddled, as if Beryl wants us all to pay very close attention to what she is saying, else we might as well just pack up and leave if we aren't going to concentrate.

For DAvid it may be that he has just finished The Snow Child.  We gushed a bit about that one on the phone for a while there. I did so much enjoy Eowyn Ivey's novel.  And to think this is her first novel.  Wonderful stuff.  But I digress.....

So I didn't get to finish Bainbridge's book on Monday, and Tuesday was Cloud Atlas day.  I very much am enjoying reading this, but I got to within 100 pages of the end of it and I just could not read any further.... I was so tired!  I was practically falling asleep trying to read on. I stopped.  So Tuesday, no luck, still the book remains unfinished and still I had only finished nine books!

Then yesterday I cracked a book in a day.  I picked up James Carnac's The Autobiography of Jack The Ripper.  Clearly this is a work of fiction, but it is packaged as if it is a real manuscript.  Whatever, given that it supposedly dates back to the early twenties it is probably one of the very first novels to be written about an actual serial killer who has no motive to kill his victims other than he enjoys it.  Oddly enough, found amongst the personal papers of the creator of Larry the Lamb.  Perhaps he had a dark side?  Who knows.  It was published last year, although it came to light a few years previously.  I found it quite enjoyable, but then I do like a bit of a murder mystery thriller.  Funny, really, as to why Jack the Ripper became so famous.  I guess it has something to do with him being one of the first serial killers, although if you read Colin Wilson's excellent treatise on the subject you'll find that there were others, previously, although they were quite rare.

So I managed my 10 books by the Full Moon.  AND I am well into 7 more.  At this rate, I will have no problem completing the challenge.  Mind you, I've still got that Dickens to get through.... and another 89 books as well!!

Days Left:    335

Books Read:   10