TBR Spin August: A Reading Game
TBR Spin is a reading game that has been taking place throughout 2023, you can join in at any time but I’ve been playing since it began in January. It is an amalgamation of two other reading games that have taken place in previous years from creators on YouTube.
This year’s game is being co-hosted by Sarah and Jill who are brilliant YouTubers and you can watch the introduction video here. I was previously joining in with the game on my School of Holly channel, you can watch my full series from January to July via this playlist if you are interested. However for this month I will be posting here for my August update. Where will I post going forwards? I’m not sure yet, but I’m really feeling blogging and so my guess is that this will be the location of my remaining posts for this game.
Today I will be sharing my August book pick and reviewing my read from July’s pick.
August Pick
For those who have not taken part before, the idea is to have a stack of books that you’d like to read. One book for each remaining month of the year. I’ve personally decided to limit myself to hardback books from my shelves of unread books. Each month we are given a prompt to help us choose a book from this stack to read that month.
The monthly prompt is chosen from a digital “wheel of fortune”. This months was to choose a book that features a protagonist that has a different lived experience to you. Essentially for me I’d likely be looking for a book with representation of a different gender, race or sexuality or something along those lines.
I chose Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. This is a book featuring largely POC protagonists (I’m realising it has multiple perspectives) and also gay male protagonists. To push this “different lived experience” idea further, it’s also a sci-fi split between a space colony and a future USA in which the Earth is all but uninhabitable. Very different to my lived experience.
I’m posting this quite late in the month so I am about half way through the book already but you will have to wait till next month to hear my thoughts on this.
July Book Review
In July, from the prompt “book published in the decade that your crush was born” I picked The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco.
I chose to do it based on celebrity crushes I had when I was a teenager and so I was working with Ben Adams from A1, Brendan Urie from Panic At The Disco, and Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy haha. Which surprisingly enough were all born within about 10 years of my husband and so also reflected my real life “crush” hahaaa.
Anyway, The Name Of The Rose… I hate to say it, I couldn’t finish it. I gave up at just shy of 200 pages. It is lauded as a classic of the postmodern genre which is generally a genre I enjoy but this was a little too information heavy for me to get into.
It is largely set in the 1300s in a monastery and follows a Sherlock Holmes style character who is investigating the death of one of the Monks and soon finds that further individuals are dying. Eco used a lot of in depth knowledge to create this book and this extends to using full Latin quotes (which are not translated), very in depth descriptions of buildings, books and historical facts. In a further nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it is narrated by the “sidekick,” our Dr Watson.
The only way I can describe my experience is that I found I just couldn’t bring myself to care. I was not compelled to keep reading, and with it being a 500 page book, it felt like a huge commitment to finish. It’s also a murder mystery, which you would think would make it compelling. You should at least want to know who the murderer is, or why they did it.
I just didn’t.
Funnily enough, earlier in this game I chose Ex-Libris by Ross King. Set in renaissance Europe and following an academic thriller type plot, I thought it would read like a Darren Brown (like The Da Vinci Code) but I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the characters or the situation they found themselves in. Now that I’ve read this one, I realise that this is sub-genre in itself, as my father likes both these books. Clearly there is an audience for this type of “dense mystery”.
In order to have a little success, I picked a different book published in the 1980s, this time from my photography shelves. I read The Autochromes of J.H. Lartigue which features an interview with the photographer and a collection of his images. Below are some of my favourite images from this collection.
