Feast of Fools

So I finished my hundredth book yesterday, which means I am FREE FREE FREE from the New Year's resolution which was threatening to take over my life ^_^;; Don't ask what book #100 was. Christmas reading is allowed to be trash. It was a proper book-length book, alright.

So here are some recommendations.

Books that everyone in the whole world should read on pain of death because they are AMAZING:

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - this was definitely my book of the year. I am a sucker for accurate historical fiction at the best of times and this is just a thing of such beauty, with its Mantelesque spare prose style, black humour, and indescribably complicated theme-age, that I do not even have words to describe it. One of the top five books I've ever read.*

*also responsible for the obsession with Camille Desmoulins with which I have been annoying everyone ever since**, and her obsession with Robespierre. We went to France and geeked. It was good. ^_^

**in case you hadn't noticed a certain theme about this blog at present.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Nearly as good as A Place of Greater Safety. Nuff said. In truly typical fashion, I discovered this book, geeked out about Hilary Mantel, and just as I had reached a point of true smugness about my highbrow love she went and won the Booker Prize and got cool, dammit. On the other hand, this is the first time IN HISTORY that the person I wanted to win the Booker actually won.

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphrys. You may be noticing a theme here ^_^;;; there are two things I love; historical fiction with obsessive accuracy, and spare prose styles that don't overload you with florid adjectives but give you the elegant structure of the text and let you work the rest out for yourself. This is a collection of beautiful half-poem half-prose vignettes about different occasions in London's history on which the Thames froze. Really lovely.

And just to complete the set, Regeneration by Pat Barker. I've read this before, but not so recently that it would have been cheating for the challenge. Beautiful, mournful, dispassionate study of the interactions between Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and WHR Rivers, while Sassoon and Owen were patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital during the First World War; and the changes in British society brought about by what was happening in France. Also featuring Billy Prior, one of my most beloved OCs ever.

Other books from the hundred that come highly recommended, but were not quite earth-shattering enough for me to be arsed to write a mini-review:

The Fears of Henry IV - Ian Mortimer
Sybil - Disraeli
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
Luminous - Greg Egan
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Camille Desmoulins and his Wife - Jules Claretie
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Bartimaeus Trilogy - Jonathan Stroud
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
The Rose and the Ring - W M Thackeray