Book Beginnings: A Year of Reading

Book Beginnings on Fridays is a meme with this theme: Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Visit this week's post at Rose City Reader and view the other links and get a glimpse of books you may not be familiar with.


The first sentences in the book I am currently reading are:

It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.

The book is Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill.

The subtitle of the book is "A Year of Reading from Home" and the goal the author set was to read only books from her own shelves at home for a year. In other words, buy no new books. She talks about the books she finds in her house, and thoughts about books she has read.

I have been reading this book for a couple of months and will probably take another month to finish it. I sample it a chapter at a time, in between other books.

This year (or most of it) I have committed to buying only books by authors I have already read. I have cut back drastically on my book buying and made much more progress on my TBR shelves, boxes and stacks.

My problem had been buying too many shiny books and then not reading them...

So I have a huge pile of books by authors I have not read or series where I read the first one and never continued. My commitment to less expansion of the TBR pile and joining reading challenges and writing reviews has helped me meet my goal of reading more new authors and reread some vintage authors I read when I was very young.

The amazing thing is, like a lot of new habits I adopt, I have had no problems sticking to my book buying "chill". No regrets. I thought it would be hard.