Top Ten Tuesday: What I am reading and have just read

 Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is The First 10 Books I Randomly Grabbed from My Shelf (Stand in front of your book collection, close your eyes, point to a title, and write it down. If you have shelves, point to your physical books. If you have a digital library, use a random number generator and write down the title of the book that corresponds with the number you generated. You get bonus points if you tell us whether or not you’ve read the book, and what you thought of it if you did!)

Because I read physical books, eBooks and audiobooks this felt a bit tricky to me, so instead I am going to be sharing the three books I am theoretically reading at the moment, and then the last 7 books I read. 6 of these were books that I read while I was on holiday and the other was the last one I finished before we went away

Dear Mrs Bird by A J Pearce - This is one book that I am actually reading at the moment. Somehow I ended up both with a library copy and a copy on my Kindle. I am really enjoying this one 

The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan - I started listening to this before I went away. I did take my earbuds with me but I didn't listen to a single second of it. Mostly because I didn't think of it, but also because my phone died on day 2 of my trip. 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - This is the theoretically book. I was doing well at keeping up with a chapter a day until I went back to work and now I am woefully behind. I do intend to catch up but not sure when that will be

Saving Starlight Hall by Debbie Viggiano - This is the second book in the Starlight series. I read the first one last year and knew I would read the follow up. The review for this will be up later this week. 

The Lucky Sisters by Rachael Johns - I can always rely on Rachael Johns for a good read and this was no exception. I did feel exceptionally lucky to be able to read this while I was on holiday in The Maldives. I am also attending an author event for her tomorrow night. 

A Christmas Gift by Sue Moorcroft - I really enjoy Sue Moorcroft's books and this was another good one. The review for this one will be up later this week. 

A Family for Christmas in Pelican Crossing by Maggie Christensen - Maggie Christensen is a comfort read for me every time so I was always going to read this book, and the next one, and the one after that. The review for this one will be up later this week. 

Escape to the Northern Lights by Carrie Walker - It did feel kind of strange to be reading this book set in snowy Norway while I was in very hot and humid Sri Lanka. The review for this one will be up later this week. 

The Tea Planters Wife by Dinah Jeffries - I chose to read this book as it is set in Sri Lanka. I will read more from Dinah Jeffries now. 

Christmas on Fifth Avenue by Julie Caplin - Christmas in New York. Yes please! (My review)

As you can see I have quite a few reviews to write this week now that we are back from holidays!

Top Ten Tuesday: Big Books!

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Books with a High Page Count (Share those doorstop books!)

Once upon a time if I saw a big, thick book on a bookstore shelf then there was every chance I would buy it. The bigger, the better! I even used to participate in a Chunkster Challenge. These days, I don't read that many chunksters. Also, if I am going to buy big books, it would most likely be an ebook that I can read on my Kindle.

Originally I was planning to refer to my spreadsheets and do this topic by looking for the books with the most number of pages. However, I decided to go with a simpler approach. Instead I scanned my overflowing bookshelves and looked for the thickest books I could find! The only rule/guideline I had was that I could only use one book per author. Of course, when I was putting them back on the shelves I found several other books that I should have used for this prompt too!

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb -(863 pages) I swear that I got this book not long after it came out, but I still have never read it!

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - (1270 pages) I am currently doing a chapter a day readalong so after talking about reading it for 15 years I am finally doing it!

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes - (614 pages) This is another one I haven't read yet. It almost feels like a pattern forming here right?

A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon - (980 pages) Most of Gabaldon's books could fit this theme. I have read this one. (My review)

The Shadow Sister by Lucinda Riley - (672 pages)I am not even sure why I have a paper copy of this book because I listened to all 8 books in this series. That's a lot of listening time.

Bettany's Book by Tom Keneally - (599 pages) It looks like I got this off of a remainders table. I haven't read it yet and I am not really sure if I will or not. It survived the last cull of my bookshelves. It might not survive the next one whenever that happens!

A Song in the Daylight by Paullina Simons - (767 pages) I loved many of Paullina Simons's books, but this wasn't my favourite. I did see that she has just announced that she has a new book coming out. It sounds great, but I am not sure if I will rush out and read it or not.

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor - (860 pages) Gosh I loved this epic book! Someone I know is reading this at the moment and called it a great romp, and that is the perfect description of the book! I used the words bawdy romp in my review.

When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman - (909 pages) SKP is another author who wrote big epic books! 

Dawn on a Distant Shore by Sara Donati - (647 pages) This is a favourite series. I noticed when I took it off the shelf that there is a bookmark in it. I must have been intending to reread it at some point.

By looking at the variation in pages numbers on all the page numbers you can really see what a difference the way the book is produced from the thickness of the paper to the size of the font!

Do you love big books!

Six Degrees of Separation: All Fours to War and Peace

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month's starting point is All Fours by Miranda July which is nominated for 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Nominated or not, it's a book that I am really not interested in reading based on the things I have heard about it!

My first link is based on the number 4 and takes me to The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde. This is the second book in the Nursery Crimes series, which I seem to have enjoyed a lot when I read it 19 years ago (my review)

My next choice used the word bear as the link and is The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. This is a book that I started on audio years ago and have never quite finished. One day.

This time, I am using the nightingale as connected to The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. This is a book that I also listened to on audio but the difference is that I did finish it! 

Next, I am using the word nightingale as my connection to The Rose of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon. How does that work you might wonder? Well, this book tells the story of a young woman who went to the Crimea to work alongside Florence Nightingale. (my review)

This week I have been reading The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn, which is partially set in and around Sebastopol during WWII.

And next, we make a leap to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The connection on this one is probably a bit obscure but I chose it because one of the characters in The Diamond Eye carries a copy of War and Peace around with him on the battlefield. This also acted as a reminder that I am a bit behind on my chapter a day readalong!

I am pretty sure that there is no way that I can link All Fours to War and Peace to come full circle! Another time!

Next month, the starting point is 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s , Theory & Practice.

Will you be joining us?

This week...

 

I'm reading

We have a public holiday here today for Labour Day so, in theory, that means more reading time! Well, not really, as I do have quite a bit of reading time already. 

Last week I finished listening to The Truth by Terry Pratchett. I originally started listening to this back in January, but then I put it aside to listen to Jane Austen. I do intend to write something about this, but I will say here that my favourite character was Otto the vampire iconographer who had a terrible tendency to disintegrate every time he took a photo with a flash! 

I have now gone back to listening to Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt by Lucinda Riley. This is a long book so I will probably be listening to this for a couple of months at least. 

I finished reading If You Could See Me Now by Samantha Tonge. I really like Samantha Tonge's books but they are a bit tricky to review because there are things that you definitely need to not know when you are starting the book. My review is here. 

I also read and reviewed The Jam Maker by Mary-Lou Stephens, which I really loved! I had been to see the author talk a few weeks ago. I really think going to author events really enhances the reading experience! This was a 5/5 read for me!

For a bit of a change of pace, I also devoured Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young. I had read a couple of chapters a couple of weeks ago, but this week I picked it up and started again and devoured it! This was my first book by her, but it will not be the last! I thought it was fab. 

I have two reviews due later this week so I read Love and Laughter (and Other Disasters) by Elora Canne, and started reading The Shadow on the Bridge by Clare Marchant. 

In other big news, I finished volume 1 of War and Peace this week. It is funny what you find when you look back in the archives of your blog. I was searching for something last week and came across this post from 2010 which is the last time I attempted to read this book. I have made it further this time than I did then, but I have to figure out what my strategy is going to be for when we go away for a couple of weeks. I don't really want to drag the book around with me, and I don't want to change versions or translations. Maybe I will read a few chapters ahead and then catch up when I get home!

We had our read on a theme book club meeting on Saturday. The theme was Classics and this is just some of what people read. I listened to Pride and Prejudice and will have a post up soon with some thoughts, not necessarily on the book, but on the enduring impact and legacy of Jane Austen or something like that anyway. Our next theme is Spy and I have a couple of ideas of what I am going to read.

I'm watching

You may recall that last weekend I went to the movies and saw the latest Bridget Jones movie. While I knew that I had watched the first one, I had no recollection of the second and third films at all, so this week I sat and watched the first 3 movies. If I had to rate the four movies I would say that the first and last movies are the best, followed by the third one and then the second one was the least entertaining!

The French Film Festival has just started and I am a little bit gutted that I am going to be away for most of it as there are quite a few movies that I wanted to see showing. I did go to the movies by myself on Friday night to see Jane Austen Wrecked My Life which was a lot of fun. It is about a woman who wants to be an author, but can't seem to finish any of her stories. Her friend sends a few chapters off and she gets accepted into a Jane Austen residency writers retreat in England. It is a fun movie!

Here's the trailer

Life



After book club I went to see the Yayoi Susama exhibition for the second time. The second half of the exhibition is so much fun, full of immersion rooms, polka dots, pumpkins with polka dots. It's a lot of fun. You can see a couple of photos from the first time I went here, and then below are some from my most recent visit.

Posts from the last week


Top Ten Tuesday: Author sisters
Blog Tour: If You Could See Me Now by Samantha Tonge
Weekend Cooking: The Jam Maker by Mary-Lou Stephens
Historical Fiction Reading Challenge - February stats




I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date and Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz

This week....

 

I'm reading

Last week I finished There are Rivers in The Sky by Elif Shafak. What an amazing author she is! There was so much in the book that I wanted to note down so I could remember it! I loved The Island of Missing Trees when I read it a couple of years ago and this one is right up there.

I them read Widows Waive the Rules by Julia Jarman for review which will be up on Wednesday. It's set on a cruise ship. Let's just say, I hope our cruise in March is a little less dramatic!

I am now reading Midnight in Paris by Gillian Harvey, who is pretty much an auto-read for me these days! This book is a bit different from her usual ones but it is really good so far! My review for this one will be up this week too!

The theme for my read on a theme bookclub this month is 25. I have chosen to listen to the audiobook of The Truth by Terry Pratchett. It was published in the year 2000, so is 25 years old, and is the 25th book in the Discworld series. This one has a different narrator to the one that does Hogfather, which is the book that I have listened to in the lead up for Christmas for the last 4 years at least.

I made an impulsive decision to join a chapter a day readalong for War and Peace. Now I have to come up with some kind of system to make sure that I read a chapter everyday!


I'm watching


Not a lot!

Life


Robert is now back at work, and I am starting to turn my thinking towards trying to find a new job! I could get used to this easy life, although there are some days when I feel a bit lonely, especially on the days that Robert goes into the office. We don't sit and talk all day when he is working, but I can hear his voice in the background while he is on calls. For the most part though, I really enjoy not being stressed, and doing bits and pieces here and there, reading, blogging, etc.  I do miss the structure of working though.

 
I did go and see Dear Evan Hansen with a couple of friends. I really enjoyed it, and found it very powerful and moving! I am now listening to the soundtrack on repeat. I am doing this thing this year where I am creating a Spotify playlist for anything musical we do during the year, so I need to pick a couple of songs to go on my playlist, but I can't decide which one. Each concert we go to we will pick a song or two and slowly build the story of our musical year!

Posts from the last week


Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated New Books Releasing in the First Half of 2025
Blog Tour: A Love Like No Other by Kate Frost
Silos, Sculptures, Scenery and so much more - The Silos

Weekend Cooking: Best of 2024

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge Statistics for December and the whole year!





I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date and Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz

Top Ten Tuesday: The Classics edition

 

 

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is Favorite Heroines (or heroes, if you prefer!) but I am going to go off topic this week...again. I am currently listening to Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, so I thought that I would share classics I have read. I know that I should have read many more, but oh well. No guilt allowed right!

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - Listening to this now!

Les Miserable by Victor Hugo - What a massive undertaking this was!

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - I read this last year for Cook the Books and thoroughly enjoyed it!

East of Eden by John Steinbeck -   There's several books on this list that I read thanks to Oprah's book club!

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald - I read this back in high school and then read it again 10 years ago.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - This was another Oprah read. I did end up going on to read and enjoy a number of his books.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen  - Still the only Austen I have ever read - Shocking I know!

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - I read this after reading Mr Pip!

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell - I did think about putting up the cover of the DVD of the BBC series as the picture here (hello Richard Armitage) but I restrained myself!

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I really enjoyed this! Another Oprah read!

What's your favourite classic?

Six Degrees of Separation: Sorrow and Bliss to War and Peace

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz. 

 

This month's starting book is Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.

Sometimes when I am putting these posts together it is a somewhat random connection which jumps to mind. Other times there is an overriding theme  which jumps to mind. This month it is a very simple theme! I am sure you will be able to pick it.

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

Music and Silence by Rose Tremain

Once and Always by Judith McNaught

Shadows and Light by Anne Bishop

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

My theme was opposites! 

Next month the starting point is Wintering by Katherine May

Six Degrees of Separation: From Redhead by the Side of the Road to One Hundred Years of Solitude

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

I missed last months Six Degrees which was a shame, but I am back this month with a list that contains at least one tenuous link! See if you can spot it.

The starting point this month is Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler, an author who I have  never read, although I am sure I should have! I did think about doing books with red in the title but I have a feeling I have done that before, if not in Six Degrees, definitely in a Top Ten Tuesday post, so I took a different direction.

The Secret of the Mansion by Julie Campbell (Trixie Belden mysteries book 1) - My first thought related to the word redhead and that kind of inevitably lead to me to think about my first red headed book crush - Jim from the Trixie Belden books!

Voyager by Diana Gabaldon - Jim was not my only red headed literary crush. There was also James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser from the Outlander series. This book, the third in the main series, is probably my favourite. Maybe it is something about a variation of the name James, and not the redhead, but I don't think so.

The Red Scarf/Under a Blood Red Sky by Kate Furnivall - When I checked my handy dandy spreadsheet which list the books I have read since  2004, the author directly above Diana Gabaldon alphabetically is Kate Furnival. I kept on thinking about the red scarf as the link too. This book is set in 1930s Russia, specifically in a Siberian prison camp.

The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte - Also set in Russia, but this time during WWII, this was one of my favourite books from last year

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - An obvious connection here, from a book where most of the action takes place at Tolstoy's house  to a book written by the man.

One Hundred  Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez- I originally read Anna Karenina as part of Oprah's Book Club back in the 90s.  This was the first book that I ever  read with the book club! I am not sure I would've read either without my fellow readers and the fun that we had in the forums. I am still online friends with a lot of those people now!

Did you spot the very tenuous link?

Next month the starting point is Phosphorence by Julia Baird, which is going to be interesting to find a connection to. Better get my thinking cap on early for that one!

Classics Circuit- War and Peace

When I signed up for the latest Classics Circuit Tour, I knew I was being ambitious. The tour theme is White Nights on the Neva: Imperial Russian Literature, and I had nominated that I was going to read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  I was however realistic enough to realise that it was highly unlikely that I was going to be able to read the whole book, but rather that my post would be a progress report.

First though, I thought I would talk a little bit about Imperial Russian Literature. I have vague recollections of reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, or at least starting to read it, during high school, but really that was about all for my exposure until much later in life.

Ever since it started, there have been criticisms of Oprah and her book club, but for me, it was really her revamped classics book club that gave me my next intro into the world of Russian literature. Without the selection of Anna Karenina as one of the reads, I am not sure I would ever have picked Tolstoy up. Part of the reason for that is that I feel some what intimidated at the idea of reading the classics, and yet when I make the decision to actually read one, I invariably enjoy it. That was definitely true of Anna Karenina, especially as my reading of it was enhanced by the discussions that I had with the group I was involved with on the boards. I am still friends with some of those same people that I met in those discussions, and the depth and fun that we had in those discussions remains with me even now.


Every now and again I think I should reread Anna Karenina, but it hasn't happened yet. I guess I could have chosen to read that book for this tour, but I thought I would take the opportunity to try something new. I knew that I could enjoy reading Tolstoy. The question was really would I enjoy War and Peace as much as I enjoyed reading AK.

The first big question is which translation to read. Given that I had enjoyed the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of AK, my first thought was to continue with them, but it is fare to say that when you ask that question, people are passionate about which translation you should choose!

In the end I went with the tried and tested, for me at least, and chose the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.I originally borrowed it from the library, but I quickly realised that possibly wasn't the smartest thing as there was no way I would be able to get the book read in the four weeks allotted so then I ended up buying a copy.

My reading started off quite well really, but the sad truth is that I have stalled a bit in my reading of War and Peace. I was making good progress with it for the first 10 days or so, but since then other books have gotten in the way. At this point I am on page 228 of 1215 pages of story and so have read through the first Part of the novel, plus a bit more. There are lots more pages of notes and appendices which I haven't included there, but I will work through them.

So after all that intro, what are my thoughts on the book itself? As I was I am surprised how much I am enjoying it. Yes, it is a challenge, but there are reasons why certain books stand the test of time, and that is because for the most part they are good reads.

So far it seems to me that there are two voices in this novel. The first is of the ladies and gents of the upper society, as they come to the realisation that there is definitely going to be war. There is the political discussion, the manipulating to try and get sons into influential positions where they may well be safer as well. There is the gossip about the manipulations and manipulators, about the ill mannered, about love affairs and those young men who are either not going to war or who are partying extremely hard on the eve of going to war. All of these happen in the shadow of the impending death of Count Bezukhov, the father of one of the main characters, Pierre, who is the count's illegitimate son.

The other strand is with the soldiers, particularly with Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky who has signed up to be an aide-de-camp to an important general. The narrative here is gritty and realistic.

The thing that constantly surprises me as I read though, is that the text can move from an in depth discussion about the tactics of war, to a very funny scene like the one where the soldiers have marched for miles, are told to get dressed in full dress uniform for parade, only to then be told that their leaders wanted them to look bedraggled, and vice versa, to then moving to the socialite world where people are trying to protect their cut of the inheritance and back again.

In a recent Teaser Tuesday post, I shared a brief passage on how Tolstoy described this novel:

It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.

For this reader, despite what it is not, according to the author at least, it is an adventure. I don't really know what to expect next. It could be details of a big battle, it may be more social shenanigans, it may be funny anecdotes, or it could be none of those things.

 It may be slow going for me to continue on my adventure, but continue I will, and I really hope to be able to make some significant progress on it soon.

TSS: Footnotes

Have I mentioned lately that I am reading War and Peace at the moment? I may have done once or twice mainly because I am pretty pleased with myself for giving this a go!  I am not surprised that I am enjoying it, because I know that I liked Anna Karenina, but it still took a while to get to the point of wanting to read the next Tolstoy novel.

One of the things that I have been thinking about whilst reading it is the use of notes related to the text. Just recently I was also reading Mort by Terry Pratchett, who is a contemporary author who loves to use footnotes in his Discworld novels, as does another favourite novelist of mine, Jasper Fforde. Now to put Tolstoy, Pratchett and Fforde in the same post may seem like a bit of a stretch, but I am going to do it anyway.

In classics the use of notes, whether they be footnotes, or notes that are at the back of the book (what are they called when they are at the back of the book anyway?), is very prevalent. A lot of the time they are there to explain contextual points that the original audience would have already been familiar with and would have understood but that for the modern reader have been lost in the sands of time.

Today's post really is a question about how people read footnotes/annotations. I tend to put the bookmark at the page where the relevant notes for this section are so that I can easily flick back and forward and I read the note as soon as I see it mentioned the number annotating that there is a note in the text. Is this what other readers do as well, or do you read to the end of the paragraph and then go back and read the notes?

Do you prefer your notes to be at the back of the book or to be at the bottom of the page? For the translation I am reading of War and Peace there wasn't really an option to put the notes at the bottom of the page, because there is quite a lot of the text that was originally written in French, and a little bit of German, and it has been left as French and German in the translation, and therefore at the bottom of the page there is the English translation.

So how do Pratchett and Fforde fit into this discussion? Both of the authors like to have what I think of as almost asides in the footnotes. Some times in Pratchett's case they could be notes that go off on a tangent or just a funny comment.

I have often wondered how audiobooks deal with the footnotes. Is it different for the contemporary novelist than it is for the classics?

So, on this cool wintery Sunday (for me at least), let's talk footnotes.

Teaser Tuesday: War and Peace by Tolstoy

At the moment I am reading three books. One is For the King by Catherine Delors which I teased from last week. One of the others is Mort by Terry Pratchett which I quoted from quite extensively over the weekend, and that leaves War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

I thought I would quote from the book itself, but then I am going to also quote from the introductory notes as well, because I thought there was a very interesting passage there. So I am only about half way through Part 1 at the moment, and I wanted to quote from a section I have read already, so here is my quote from page 60:

Pierre arrived just before dinner and sat awkwardly in the middle of the drawing room, in the first armchair he happened upon, getting in everyone's way. The countess wanted to get him to talk, but he looked around naively through his spectacles, as if searching for someone, and gave monosyllabic answers to all the countess's questions. He was an inconvenience and was the only one not to notice it. The majority of the guests, knowing his story with the bear, looked curiously at this big, fat, and placid man, wondering how such a clumsy and shy fellow could perform such a stunt with a policeman.

The two sentences I wanted to share from the Introduction come from page xiii. It is part of an article that Tolstoy wrote that was originally published in the Russian Archive magazine in 1868 entitled A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace, and is a response to the question "What is War and Peace?"

It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.

I love that second sentence - War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. I wonder how many authors can say that these days.

There's every chance that you might see more teasers from this book over the next few weeks.

Teaser Tuesday is host by Miz B at Should Be Reading. Head on over to find out all about it, and how to join in!

TSS/Currently Reading: Book Pricing or Why I love the Book Depository

One of the truths about being a book lover in Australia is that books here are expensive, so I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison of the price for a specific book. This post is also doubling up as a Currently Reading post, because I did actually start reading this book on Friday. Yes, I am 2% of the way through War and Peace by Tolstoy! I signed up for the Classics Circuit (White Nights on the Neva: Imperial Russian Literature tour)and my post is due on 15 July 2010, although I was very clear when signing up that it was more likely to be a progress post rather than a review as such.

Originally I borrowed the book from the library, but then I realised that there was no way I would be able to get through it and read other books as well, so I decided to buy it.

So my comparison basis for this exercise was that it was the same translator, and I was only looking at the paperback copy of the novel. All the sources are also the online stores, I haven't actually moved from my chair to do this comparison. The cover on the left is the US cover and the one on the right is the UK cover. All prices are in Australian dollars, and were based on the exchange rate the day that I did the comparisons (so may have changed a little since then).

Book Depository UK $17.01 (free postage)
Book Depository US $23.84 (free postage)

Borders Australia (US version) $30.95 (free postage)
Borders Australia (UK version) $23.95 (free postage)
Dymocks (UK Version) $29.95 (plus $6.50 postage)
Angus and Robertson (US Version) $40.95 (plus $6.00 postage)
Amazon.com $16.03 (plus $11.94 postage)


One other thing that probably needs to be taken into consideration is that fact that ordering online means that you can't have that instant gratification. There are still days when I will go to the book store and buy a book, but generally I will either get it from the library or I will order it from overseas.The shipping cost for Amazon was for Standard International Shipping (averages 18-32 days), but there are faster shipping options available but they cost more. In my experience I generally get orders from the UK Book Depository within a week or so of ordering.

The final factor is that often there are books that I see mentioned around blogs that I really want to read, that just never make it into the stores here, so by buying from overseas means that I get access to a lot of those books.

It seems ridiculous really that it costs me significantly more to buy from an Australian bookstore than it does to buy a book from the UK or the US, but that's the way it has consistently proven to be for this Australian book buyer. I would love to be supporting Aussie business, but when the prices are not really even competitive it is hard to do that.