Books & Films / July 2004

This month's must read book is "The Last English King".
This month's must see movie is "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring".

Books Read

The Last English King - Julian Rathbone
Pompeii - Robert Harris
The e Before Christmas - Matt Beaumont
The Icelandic Sagas - W.A. Craigie

Here is my July reviews post to 50bookchallenge.


Cinema Trips

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring
One for the Road
The Stepford Wives

Film reviews

"Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"
Darker and scarier than the previous two. I like the hippogriff. I don't like the dementors : (

"Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring"
A Korean film set in and around a small wooden temple floating on an isolated mountain lake. A Buddhist monk trains a young boy, who later rebels and leaves the temple but eventually returns to the lake to replace his master. Season follows season and people are born, age and die, as the cycle of life continues.

"One for the Road"
My sister chose the film we went to this time. It's a film by a local director about a group of men convicted of drink-driving who are attending a course as part of their punishment.

"The Stepford Wives"
I quite enjoyed this. I wasn't in the mood for anything heavier today.

Mount TBR

I have just counted how many unread books there are in Mount TBR, after tiggsybabes confessed that hers contained 155 books.

The grand total is 131.

This is made up of 82 fiction and 49 non-fiction.
There are 24 from Bookcrossing and 107 others.

Unfortunately the numbers are staying fairly stable, as on average I buy about the same number of books as I read. July was an especially bad month, as I bought 6 books and only read 4. Of those, one was a library book, one was borrowed and one was an e-book, so only one of them was from my TBR pile.

Now how can I get rid of all these books, given that I've read 55 books in seven months, so if I keep reading at the same rate it will take 16 or 17 months to clear the backlog, even if I don't read anything else?

IDEAS:
1) Don't buy any more books.
2) DON'T BUY ANY MORE BOOKS.
3) My brother (who is also a BookCrosser) and his family are coming up to Nottingham next weekend, so when he phoned this evening I said that he and my sister-in-law can have anything they want from my BookCrossing bookshelf, even if I haven't read it yet.
3) Every time I go to a BookCrossing meet-up, I should choose the 5 least appealing unread books, register them and give them away at the meet-up.
4) Stop participating in the MF book club, as it leads to me borrowing books from the library and reading things that I'm not keen on, just so I get to nominate a book for the next time.