You know the drill – it’s Thursday, time for another Tag Thursday etc. etc. I was somewhat struggling to find a tag this week, so I went onto some of my favourite blogs and discovered this short-but-sweet tag courtesy of Stephanie at Adventures of a Bibliophile. This is the My Life In Books tag and let us all just get going on the tag because life is short and there are books to get reading!
Find a book for each of your initials.
E – (The) Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
L – Longbourn by Jo Baker
B – Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Count your age along your bookshelf: What book is it?
I’m 24 and my 24th book on the top shelf of my bookshelf is *drum roll please*… The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Pick a book set in your city/country.
I’ve only just (relatively speaking) moved to Liverpool and no one writes books about the town I’m actually from so… let’s just broaden that to books set in England so that I have many to choose from, though I’ll at least try to stick to picking a book about the North of England. I’m going to pick North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell because Milton is totally Manchester.
Pick a book that represents a destination you’d love to travel to.
There are so many places I want to see, but Italy is pretty damn high on my list – y’know, on account of wanting to see Venice before it completely sinks. So the book that represents that (and that lodged this desire to see Italy in my younger, pre-teen brain) is City of Masks by Mary Hoffman, the first in her Stravaganza series. It’s about a boy who is able to travel to an alternate history version of 16th-century Venice when he falls asleep holding a Venetian diary.
Pick a book that’s your favourite colour.
Well I have two favourite colours – one is lime green, for which I choose Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre (because the spine is horrendously bright and it’s glorious), and the other is teal so I choose All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (whose cover is just stunning).
Which book do you have the fondest memories of?
Matilda by Roald Dahl probably? This also ties into my obsessive rewatching of the film when I was a child. Imagine, a girl who reads so much and finds herself the odd one in the family because she does so, then finding herself valued and appreciated by a teacher who then nurtures her love of reading and education. No I have noooo idea why that appealed to me.
And then all of the Harry Potter books, obviously, but I feel like that’s a given for the majority of my generation.
Which book did you have the most difficulty reading?
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy… the “peace” bits with the society stuff I’m fine with, the war bits are incomprehensible to me because my knowledge of history is shockingly bad, especially military history.
whispers I finally shelved this book as ‘put aside for now’ which really means ‘I don’t want to DNF this indefinitely because then I’d have to re-read like 300 pages but also by the time I get around to trying it again I will definitely have forgotten what happened in those first 300 pages’.
Which book in your TBR pile will give you the biggest accomplishment when you finish it?
See above? But, for another answer, I suppose… Moby Dick by Herman Melville or perhaps The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton – both are long and complex, I’m told, but rewarding if you stick with it. Someday I hope to have the drive to do just that but, until then, I’ll continue to just mention them in tags like this.
That was it – that was the My Life in Books tag. If you are reading this and feel the urge to do this tag then, please, by all means consider yourself tagged by yours truly! If you do the tag, please link to it in the comments below as I am nosy and would love to see your answers.
NB: After writing this tag post, I realised that I actually did this tag before, back in 2015, (click here to view) but my answers are different so that’s fun to realise that my take on these questions has changed since then!
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The Terror of Knowing 