Half way point

Can you believe I’m half-way through? Where have the last six months gone? I’ve settled into my new job, seen my brand new niece, celebrated countless people’s birthdays (including my own) and managed to read more than twenty-six books on top of that. Pretty cool.

Here are five things I’ve learned in the past six months:

1. There are TV or film adaptations for a lot of books. A lot. I haven’t got exact figures, but I’d estimate that about 60% of the books I’ve read so far will be adapted, have been adapted or, in the case of Dickens, have been adapted so many times that people read it with a certain adapation in mind. For me it was the Muppets.

2. I’m not very good at pacing myself. Every single week I tell myself that I will start reading on the Monday and leave myself with the weekend free, and every single week I read ten pages in the week and end up reading hundreds of pages on Sunday. Poor Mr Charming, our only day off together and I spend it reading. I will get better!

3. The length of the book does not dictate the time needed to read it. Just as in the old adage “Never judge a book by its cover”, I have also found that you cannot judge the time needed to read a book based on number of pages. At barely two hundred pages, Dorian Gray took me pretty much the whole week to read, and I made a good attempt at mid week reading too. Marian Keyes, a whopper at seven hundred pages, took me an afternoon, basically. Font size and depth of message counts for a lot, in that case.

4. Books are all about people. Even when it’s a lack of people (The Life of Pi) it’s about people. Even when you think there are no people in it (Buffalo Gals) and only animals, they are anthropomorphic animals.

5. Author names, first and second, seem to cluster around certain letters of the alphabet so I’d have hundreds of choices for ‘S’ but only one for ‘L’, for example. I suppose this is just like ordinary, non writer people names, but it does make the book challenge difficult!

So now I have the easier six months – weekly by author surname. This is where you lovely people come in.

I need suggestions for authors whose second names begin with the letter D onwards. I thought of Charles Dickens, but I read him for C so I’d like something different. I can read poetry, plays, non-fiction and so on, books I’ve read and books I haven’t – the only stipulation is that the surnames are in alphabetical order from Jane Austen. I would like it if I didn’t read the same author twice this year, and it would also be nice if the books weren’t too long/heavy i.e. Les Miserables or Vikram Seth’s tomes, which are all about a thousand pages long.

Thanks in advance!