Holiday Reading

Today, my family and I are going away on holiday. We’re spending a week in a nice cabin in a beautiful part of Denmark and planning on visiting various zoos and other child friendly sights as well as the beach if the weather stays sunny and warm. I’m also hoping for a book shop or two…

When we go away on this type of holiday, my boyfriend and I like to read in the evenings. We usually bring some board games and some books and never even open the game boxes but just spend every evening reading. And since I love to read, that’s perfectly fine by me. (Even though we need to stop buying board games if we never intend to play any of them…)

Of course, this means that I have to choose which books to bring. And this year, it has been really hard. Last year I spend most of the holiday reading Ken Follet: The Pillars of the Earth and loved it. This year – I’m not sure I want to read a chunkster. I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo and can’t quite handle to dive into another huge book so soon after.

So what I’m opting for this year, is options. I’m bringing several books and hoping that they will cover whatever mood I feel. And I’m bringing my kindle. In part because then I can read whatever I fancy but also because I have the complete Sherlock Holmes on it and I plan on reading that this year. I might also have a couple of other books on it and some 20+ samples – just to be sure that I don’t run out of reading material…

Now let’s see what else I’m bringing:

Virginia Woolf: Orlando. I’ve been wanting to read Orlando for years. Ever since the movie came out back in 1992! I can’t remember when I bought the book but I’ve owned it a while. I’m really intrigued by how the protagonist changes sex in the novel and lives for 400 years or so as first a man and then a woman. This book is also on my list of reading goals for the year; a list, I’m falling a bit behind on so I plan on starting with this one.

Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus. This next choice was between Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus and Christos Tsiolkas’s book The Slap. I ended up choosing The Night Circus because I have kept postponing reading it because I’m scared that it can’t live up to my expectations. And now I want to force myself to read it because I do think it is a novel that I will enjoy – and Morgenstern is working on a new one and I would like to have this one finished before she does.

Stephen King: The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3). The fantasy category. Here, I chose between the third installment in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, the fifth in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and the first in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I decided against A Song of Ice and Fire since I am already reading the other two series. And I decided against A Wheel of Time because, frankly, it’s not all that good and the writing annoys me. I know King can deliver a good and thrilling read!

Hassan Preisler: Brun mands byrde (Brown Man’s Burden). A debut novel which has gotten a lot of praise in Denmark. Apparently, it is a modern version of Rudyard Kipling’s poem White Man’s Burden but set on it’s head where the author and others like him have to teach the ordinary white Dane that we live in a multicolored and multicultural world. It seems to be not about the importance of tolerance but of respect – to respect each other enough to also tell each other if something we’ve made sucks.

I don’t plan on posting a lot next week. I hope to write a lot of notes to the books I read so it will be relatively easy to write (hopefully a lot of) reviews when I get back but I don’t plan on  actually finishing anything – except a lot of books!