JANET O'KANE

That's my Kindle in the fetching turquoise stripey case

I wrote earlier in the year about my decision to take part in the Eclectic Reader Challenge and the reasons behind this. Several months have passed and I admit I haven’t made huge inroads into my list of titles. Which is peculiar, because I always have a book on the go. In fact, all I seem to have done is change the list a bit, and not in a making-it-easier way. It now looks like this.

Genre	Title
Literary
Crime/mystery	The Murder Wall (Mari Hannah)
Romantic	Me Before You (JoJo Moyes)
Historical
YA	Deathwatch (Nicola Morgan) and Pure (Julianna Baggott)
Fantasy	A Game of Thrones (George RR Martin) or The Passage (Justin Cronin)
Science Fiction	Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Philip K Dick)
Non-fiction	Bluestockings (Jane Robinson)
Horror
Thriller/suspense	The Odessa File (Frederick Forsyth)
Classic	Great Expectations (Dickens)
My favourite genre

I have already written about some of my initial choices, but here’s how I filled in most of the gaps.

A Twitter friend, Rebecca Bradley, recommended Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You as an excellent example of a modern romantic novel, and the Amazon reviews back this up. This is a genre I never knowingly read, but at least I’m consistent: I don’t watch romantic movies either.

I thought I was on firm ground when I chose Deathwatch by Nicola Morgan as my YA read (a genre which didn’t exist when I was growing up). I’m an admirer of Nicola’s no-nonsense approach to getting published, and it was she who persuaded me to sign up for Twitter. However, when I was deciding whether to read the Berwick Book Group’s April choice, Pure by Andrew Miller, I came across a book of the same name by Julianna Baggott which sounded much more tempting than Miller's. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where many of those who survived ‘the Detonation’ have to live with whatever they were touching at that moment fused to them, be it a toy, a chair or even another person. Those images alone made me load this book on to my Kindle. So I'll be reading two YA novels.

What is it about fantasy novels that they have to be so huge? Here again I have two candidates, but I doubt I’ll be able to manage them both this year. A Game of Thrones (780 pages) was chosen because my husband loves the TV serialisation and I thought I might persuade him to put down his WW2 non-fiction and read it after me. Then I saw a review of The Passage (765 pages) and it sounded too interesting to ignore. I might have to resort to eenie-meenie-minee-mo.

The recent rumpus about TV reviewer AA Gill being mean to Professor Mary Beard helped me make my non-fiction choice. I read a profile of her which said she used to parody the image of female intellectuals by wearing blue stockings. This reminded me that I had bought myself Bluestockings, which explored the fight for women to get a university education back in the days when ‘doctors warned that if women studied too hard their wombs would wither and die’. I was especially pleased to have chosen this book: as I took it down from the shelf a £20 note fell out, a Christmas gift from an aunt.

Finally, I’ve plumped for The Odessa File to fill the thriller slot, in honour of Frederick Forsyth’s appearance at this year’s CrimeFest in May. I have never read any of his work before, although I’m a big fan of some of the film adaptations. It’s not often I watch a film and read the book afterwards, so this will be doubly interesting.

So that leaves literary, historical and horror fiction, and this is where YOU come in. If you have any favourites in those genres, please let me know in the comments below or tweet me @JanetOkane (I’ve come to realise that unfortunately some folk have problems leaving comments on Blogger blogs).

I promise to make my reading selections based on your recommendations!