39 Books: Introducing a blog series

In 1985, I read two books. The following year I read a lot more, and it was then I began to keep a list of each book I finished. I've kept the list ever since. In this blog series I will choose one book from each of the 39 years and write whatever occurs to me and post whatever I've written each morning for 39 days.

However, I will constrain the choice to an author or book I have not written about before, first as a means of returning to the golden age of regular short-form blogging and second in the hope of coaxing the unexpected into the open. The latter has always been my ideal for literary blogging: to say something interesting in an interesting way. There will be straightforward reviews, incidental and possibly irrelevant tangents, anecdotes personal and impersonal, and, inevitably given the time limit, superficial observations, and each of these together in various permutations.

39 Books is an inadvertent tribute to Microdisney's LP 39 Minutes and indirectly to Microdisney's singer and songwriter Cathal Coughlan, whose death in 2022 came as such a blow. In late 1984 I heard the band's Peel Session which included my favourite song, Horse Overboard, a time that marks the beginning of a new life, which has now passed.