Seven Books, Seven Days

7 Books, 7 Days 

(Buying that is, not reading, I don't have that much time on my hands)

1. Then We Came to the End / 2. Perfume the Story of a Murderer / 3. Haunted / 4. Kill Your Friends / 5. The Hunger Games / 6. Real World / 7. Junky

Last week I decided I was going to vastly improve my reading list and buy 7 very different books over 7 days.  

After assembling my previous reading list, which you can see here, I have realized that I've become somewhat lazy with my choice of books.  Years ago I used to spend time searching through all the weird and wonderful different genres, trolling through amazon recommended reads, but now, I tend to stick to the same old authors, and have become a little bit too dependent on the old chick lit.  Yes, there is no denying, I now love what I would have cringed at in my teenage years, but chick lit really does float my boat as it were.

However, change is good, it's nice to branch out and find something new, so this is what I'm aiming for with my 7 books in 7 days.

Each day I have decided to try and find a book that is completely new to me, something a bit out of the ordinary, different genres, different authors.  Once again using Amazon's recommended reads (oh how I do love this feature), and from having a nosey at other blogs I think I've picked myself a good little selection, all of which I can't wait to read and review!

So lets have a little looksie at what these are all about!

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

'How we hated our coffee mugs! And our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, all the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned to cloying reminders of time served ...' Welcome to the world of Joshua Ferris' dazzlingly acute, brilliantly original, agonizingly funny novel. The dotcom bubble has just burst on an advertising agency on Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Employees shuffle slowly up the steps towards the revolving doors, afraid of what is waiting to greet them inside their cubicles ..."Then We Came to the End" is about how we spend our days and too many of our nights. It is about being away from friends and family, about sharing a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers we call colleagues. It is about sitting all morning next to someone you deliberately cross the road to avoid at lunchtime. Joshua Ferris' fabulous novel is the story of your life, and mine. It is the story of our times.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

'In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent . . .'

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter. They are told by the people who have all answered an ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of 'real life' that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

Meet Steven Stelfox.

London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine, searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.

But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cut throat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

First in the ground-breaking HUNGER GAMES trilogy. Set in a dark vision of the near future, a terrifying reality TV show is taking place. Twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to appear in a live event called The Hunger Games. There is only one rule: kill or be killed. When sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen steps forward to take her younger sister's place in the games, she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature.

Real World by Natsuo Kirino

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi; brainy Terauchi; Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused; and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behaviour remain a secret from those around her.

Then Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. But when he disappears (taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

Junky by William S Burroughs

A shocking exposé of the desperate subculture surrounding heroin addiction, William S. Burroughs' Junky is edited with an introduction by Oliver Harris in Penguin Modern Classics.

Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. Nurtured into being by fellow Beat Generation guru Allen Ginsberg,Junky is a cult classic that has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author's original text word for word.

Let me know if you plan on doing your own 7 books in 7 days, or if you have any of your own recommended reads for me.  Leave them in the comments below, I will check them all out!

I'll be doing my book reviews on these in the upcoming weeks, so keep a beady eye out.

p.s. I edit all my pics with PicMonkey.

Ciao,