The Lenten Read - It Begins

'Tis the first day of Lent and I'm itching to begin my first forty-page foray. With the proviso that I may change my mind at any time (why yes, I am playing the female card), I have chosen the following books for my Lenten Read:

Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes (Cannongate), 313 pages, 7.82 days




The Sorceress, Michael Scott (Randomhouse), 483 pages, 12.07 days




Invisible, Paul Auster (Faber), 308 pages, 7.7 days





The Missing, Tim Gautreaux (Sceptre), 422 pages, 10.55 days




Which all adds up to 38.14 days (N.B. I will always go for the good stopping point over exactly 40 pages). Interspersed with the above will be stories from Simon Van Booy's Love Begins in Winter (it won The Frank O'Connor Short Story Award this year over Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned which I loved so I have high expectations (Rosita Boland asks about the influence of book awards on reading choices here)).

I've been waiting to read The Sorceress for ages after flying through the first two in the series (the fourth book, The Necromancer, will be out May 25th). I've also been waiting on Invisible, especially after hearing the author on Open Book way back in the summer of 2008, a very interesting individual indeed.

The Missing has been highly recommended and really, what's not to love about a novel set in 1920s Louisiana, "a wild world of jazz, moonshine and lawlessness"? Little Hands Clapping arrived in last week and I was hooked from the first sentence of the synopsis: In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives the Old Man.

In content the books are quite a mix, yet all are fiction, all written recently by Western white males. If we are to judge ourselves by what we read, I'm not sure what this says about me other than the abundantly obvious fact that I love a good yarn well told.

Daily updates on progress will be tweeted with possibly a blog post or two thrown in for good measure (if I'm not too busy reading).

~Louisa