Although December is not one of my favorite months (too involved a story to tell you why), I do like looking through end-of-the-year lists, especially of books. One of my favorite book blogs is "Stuck in a Book". I love the fact that not one of the books listed on the blog comes from 2013. Not that there aren't good books published this last year (I'll be listing mine soon), but the list at Stuck in a Book is more personal favorites of the year. That's how I like to look at the "Best of" lists that come out at the end of the year.

I'd love to read all of the books on the list, but I decided to pick one: Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet. I've always been fascinated with people who have large book collections and this book looks like a delight.

the stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com challenge

I also decided to take up the "A Century of Books" challenge that Stuck in a Book issued to readers. The goal is to read a single book from each year of the 20th century. I'm going to try to do it in a year, but with all of the other reading interests I have it may take a little longer. So far here is my list for the years 1900 to 1010. See my complete list on the side panel "My Century of Books" page.

My Century of Books list (first decade):

1900     The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah
1901     The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud
1902     The Sport of the Gods by Paul Laurence Dunbar
1903     Ideas of Good and Evil by W.B. Yeats
1904     Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
1905     The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
1906     Botchan by Natsume Soseki
1907     Dead Love Has Chains by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
1908     Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
1909     Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
1910     Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman


Most of these titles I'll be reading in the e-book format, but a couple I already have in my library. My sources will be Gutenberg.org and OpenLibrary.org for the e-books and primarily the Iliad Bookshop for the p-books.

The wikipedia has a very nice page on events and book releases for each year of the century. It was fascinating to follow the links and read up on authors and titles. Difficult to decide which book to choose for some years, which is why there are two titles listed for 1905 and 1907.

Thanks to Stuck in a Book for the idea. Look for my reviews here of each title and we'll see if I'm up to the challenge!

Looking over my vintage paperback loot from the recent 32nd Annual Paperback Show, I found myself reading the first paragraphs of each book in succession just to get a taste of the writers style. They were surprisingly different. In fact, the one book that I bought on a whim (The Mark of Pak San Ri) with little expectation of the book being any good or not, actually turned out to have the best opening of all six books (see below)

I did cheat a bit with Nobody Dies in Paris as the picture makes more sense with the first two paragraphs (sue me). All of the books are interesting and I hope to read them in one big jag over some lazy weekend. McGivern is probably the most accomplished of the writers listed (justifiably so) with Odds Against Tomorrow being made into a fine movie with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan. I'm also intrigued with the Jack Ehrlich title (Parole) as his name keeps popping up in lists by other writers and booksellers of paperback crime.

I was also attracted to the covers of the books. All of them are colorful and striking. I love the old graphic/painted design style of fifties and sixties cover design. Something I think publishers like Penguin are getting back to (thank God). Gunman's Harvest front cover is particularly interesting with a great dramatic pose and use of muted greens and golds. Even the back cover is nicely done. The front cover painting is by Mal Thompson.

From The Mark of Pak San Ri by William Stroup
Published in 1965 by Book Company of America, #10
No cover artist listed




From Nobody Dies in Paris by Jerry Weil
Published by Signet, #1449. 1967
No cover artist listed
"The late afternoon June sunlight streamed in through the small, unwashed window of the hotel room. It found its way into the corners of the tiny room. It warmed the room. 
    There was a girl lying on the bed midst a pile of undone sheets and blankets. She was wearing green silk pajamas that were faded by too many washings. She was smoking a cigarette."



From Stop Time by Frank Conroy
Published by Dell, #8211, 1969
Cover art by James Bama

    "When we were in England I worked well. Four or five hundred words every afternoon. We lived in a small house in the countryside about twenty miles south of London. It was quiet, and because we were strangers, there were no visitors. My wife had been in bed for five months with hepatitis but stayed remarkably cheerful and spent most of her time reading. Life was good, conditions were perfect for my work"



From Gunman's Harvest by James Keene
Published by Dell, #A205, 1960
Cover artist Mal Thompson

"As ranchers went in South Texas, Jim Asher's place was small, only four thousand acres, but he liked it because he was the kind of man who held dear the things he had to work hard for. Six of his thirty-two years had gone into the place, and four years of that at a loss or barely breaking even. These last two, there had been some profit, but the scent of trouble was on the wind, a whisper in the warning venters of his mind."

front cover

back cover

From By-Line for Murder by Andrew Garve
Published by Dell, #765, 1961
Cover artist Robert Stanley

"At the wetter end of Fleet Street, close by the Crown Inn and not far from the famous Cheshire Cheese, there is a five-story, red-brick building which houses the London Morning Call, a national newspaper with a certified daily net sale of nearly two million copies. Though the paper is popular, no one has ever been known to say a good word for the building in which it is produced - a late-Victorian monstrosity of classic ugliness which an incongruous flesh-pink filling where a hole blown in the structure by a delayed-action bomb in 1941 has been repaired."



From Odds Against Tomorrow by William P. McGivern
Published by Pocket Books, #C-316, 1959
Cover artist not listed

"For what seemed like a long time he couldn't make himself cross the street and enter the hotel. he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and frowned at the revolving doors and canopied entrance, indifferent to the nighttime crowd drifting past him, his tall body as immobile as a rock in a stream. People edged around him carefully, for there was a look of tension in the set of his shoulders, and in the appraising frown that shadowed his hard even features"