I received this book as a gift for my 21st birthday.
I have owned this book for over two decades.
And have never read it.
That is nuts.
Especially since it is such a slim volume. Especially since I am very interested in, and invested in, feminist literature, and the plight of female writers through history, and the places at which those two things all too occasionally intersect.
This is such an important work. Such an accessible, yet profound, rumination on the erasure of women and their words from the historical record. About the lack of opportunities for greatness offered to those without means — and about Jane Austen and how she allegedly has less genius than Emily Brontë. (Which: no. Sorry, Virginia, but no. NO.)
That one small disagreement aside, most everything else Woolf posits herein about what it takes for a woman to turn to her art — £500 a year and a room of her own — as she addresses a group of aspiring female scholars and authors, and reflects on the significant lack of such independence throughout feminine history, resonates so deeply with me that it is like she is putting into words ideas that I hold but have never understood. And she did it almost a hundred years ago.
Such a remarkable book, told in the chattiest of prose and sporadic flight of fancy, but with an underlying current of anger and frustration — not always underlying; sometimes she is flat-out furious, and says so — A Room of One’s Own is an absolute must-read. I am only sorry it took me so long.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 10: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
GENRE: Non-Fiction, Feminism, Literary Criticism
PUBLISHED: 1929
TIME ON THE TBR: 22 years!
PURCHASED FROM: It was a gift.
KEEP: Definitely.
I honestly thought I had read The Art of War. I was sure I must have! Then I saw it in a stately hardcover edition when I was at a Barnes and Noble back in 2005 — you know how they have that series, reprinting classics you should have read, sometimes offered at 3 for the price of 2? So I bought The Art of War, because I distinctly recall flicking through pages and thinking, nope, never read it. Just read lots of quotes from it, over the years. 
The name Neil Gaiman on a book is entirely irresistible to me. I have read most of his novels, several of them more than once (Neverwhere is a particular favourite), and much of his comic book work as well (The Books of Magic is a particular favourite). But I had somehow missed this time-displaced Marvel superhero romp until a couple of years ago, when I happened up on the trade paperback at a garage sale. 
You know when you buy an ebook and love it, so you buy a hard copy to place proudly on your shelves? That’s what I did with Under Falling Skies, Kate McLeod’s first Scout Shannon novel of science fiction horrorness. Peopled with intriguing characters — all of them, incidentally and yet you don’t even notice it for ages, women — and giving us a survival story told from the perspective of our plucky teen heroine, Scout.
When Viggo Mortensen signed on to star in an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, you can bet I was interested. The returned king himself, there is something compelling about Mortensen — and his role choices: A History of Violence is notable — and the fact that The Road was post-apocalyptic as well… well, of course that film made it to the top of my watch list, and it had barely begun production yet.
I read my first Atwood back in 2010, at the urging of my friend Kate — it was, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale. Since then I have woven my steady way through her book list, finding favourites (Oryx and Crake! How good is Oryx and Crake?) and a couple that were rather difficult to get through (The Blind Assassin, for one). But one Atwood novel I never somehow got around to reading was one I already owned long before Kate set me on the path to Gilead: The Penelopiad.
I have no idea why it has taken me so long to read this book. I loved Troost’s first quirky travel tome, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, which saw him and his then-girlfriend Sylvia spend two years on the small island of Kiribati, coming hilariously to grips with a whole new way of life and becoming one of the locals. Why, then, has their time in Vanuatu and Fiji lain unread so long on my shelf? Well, no, that’s not true. Not unread. Partially read. I got a few chapters in, I picked it up to read more multiple times, but then just kept… not getting very far.
This is a very recent release, comparatively speaking to the rest of my TBR books, but in all honesty it has been something I have wanted to read since it was first announced some years ago. Indeed, since Geonn — full disclosure: I know him! — first mooted the possibility of this book on his social media, I was always going to read it. And not just because I know him. In fact, this book immediately landed on my Must Read list because not only did I really enjoy his previous SG-1 novel, Two Roads, but this book was going to be an adventure centered on Vala and Sam, and I love those women.
I bought this book back in 2009 when it was announced that Peter Jackson was planning to helm a film adaptation of this award-winning YA steampunk novel… and then promptly forgot about it. This is weird, because I am an avowed adherent of Jackson’s adaptations (a marathon of The Lord of the Rings extended editions is, at the very least, an annual event at my house), and also YA steampunk is very much in my, if you will forgive the pun, wheelhouse.
In preparation for clearing this book from my TBR pile, I have been re-reading Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series across the last couple of weeks. Although Black Coffee was originally published in 1998, I had never heard of it nor seen it listed in any Poirot bibliography until I found it in a second hand bookshop a couple of years back, as it is an adaptation — by Australian novelist Charles Osborne — of a 1930 play, the first penned by Christie.