Knock-Offs | BOOKENDING SPRING 2020

Hi guys! For the month of April, I’ve decided to sign up to join in with Bookending. This is a quarterly event designed to help bring the bookish community together — you can find more information here. This introductory post is taking the place of my lifestyle post for this week but, I’ll be honest, there hasn’t been very much change in my life since last time, and I don’t feel like now is the time to talk sustainability when everyone is just getting by on whatever they can find. Rest assured, when life starts to return to normal for us in the UK, I’ll start talking cruelty-free makeup and vegetarian food again. The aim of Bookending is to post at least three posts in the month, using the provided prompts if you wish. I’m going to be using some of the prompts, but I might not be posting them on the correct day (sorry to the hosts!). My plan is, after this post, to be posting Bookending posts every Monday in April, so including this first post, that will make five posts in total!

Today, I am following the prompt for April 1st from Sam (FictionallySam), which is “Knock Offs”, which is creating a TBR of backlist books for the spring. I have so many backlist books on my shelves, so this is a great prompt! I already made a post about my upcoming TBR recently in my 2020 reading goals post, but I’ve made some progress through the list since then, but I’ve also had to make some changes to it due to leaving my university accommodation and having to temporarily leave some books in my uni room until I’m able to go back and pack the rest of my things. In that post I initially said I was going to read The Time Traveller by H.G. Wells until someone pointed out to me that I actually meant The Time Machine. Well, I’m a super fool, because what I actually meant was The Invisible Man. The review for that was posted on Saturday, and you can find it here. I’ve also read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (review coming Saturday!) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong (review on my bookstagram, here).

I’m not 100% how the hosts defined “spring” in the prompt, but I’m going to go for April-June. This is going to be a pretty hefty list, so strap yourselves in!

So far I’ve only read 8 of my 70 books that I wanted to have read for this year, so to get on track, I’d need to read 27 books by the end of June. Eek. So, in the spirit of being ever-hopeful and having an awful lot of time at home, I’ll pick 20 books on my shelf to put on the list, leaving some space to add in a couple of ARCs. Some are going to be the Faber 90 short stories, which I’ll mark with an * so you know which ones are super short. All the others will be novel-length or longer.

1. The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Patient X: The Case-Book of Ryunosuke Akutagawa – David Peace
3. Counternarratives – John Keene
4. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
5. The Little Friend – Donna Tartt
6. Calypso – David Sedaris
7. The Female Persuasion – Meg Wolitzer
8. (I have previously received PR products from Picador) The Confession – Jessie Burton
9. The Topeka School – Ben Lerner
10. The Inner Room – Robert Aickman*
11. Mostly Hero – Anna Burns*
12. Shanti – Vikram Chandra*
13. The Victim – PD James*
14. Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine – Thom Jones*
15. Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead – Milan Kundera*
16. Bridge of Clay – Markus Zusak
17. Everything Under – Daisy Johnson
18. The Clocks in this House All Tell Different Times – Xan Brooks
19. Authority – Jeff VanderMeer
20. Acceptance – Jeff VanderMeer

Wow that is a long list! I’ll be posting my reviews as I go along, but any books that I don’t post a full review for on my blog I will post mini-reviews for on my twitter thread of 2020 reads, and on my bookstagram. You can also follow my blog instagram if you want to be updated when I post, but you could also follow me on wordpress or twitter to keep an eye.

Thank you so much for reading and joining me for the Bookending Spring 2020 event! Let me know what your backlist looks like in the comments! Are you joining in Bookending?