Joanna Campbell

We’re back in Joanna Campbell’s wonderful world of thoroughbred horse racing, this time, Thoroughbred [Vollblut] series edition. If you want to find out more about the series and have a laugh at the spin-off prequel series’ titles, go check out Part 1 here. If you read it, you already know that sometimes titles in this series might fool even the most experienced horse novel reader by being totally ambiguous. We had the example of Ashleigh’s Promise where Promise does not refer to a promise but to a horse by that name. In the Thoroughbred series, however, we have several different types of ambiguity. So, let’s play a little game. In the following, there’s always one title out of place. It’s basically a guessing game since you won’t be able to determine the true meaning without reading the blurb or being already familiar with the series …

Joanna Campbell’s world of thoroughbred racing is one of my horse novel favourites. Both the Ashleigh [Aileen] as well as the Thoroughbred [Vollblut] series (and its specials) have a special place in my heart. They’re the reason I started working on my English skills: I was way to curious to wait till the German publisher translated the books, I just had to know what was going to happen. There was a great fan page back in the days with profiles of the horses, characters, authors and tonnes and tonnes of trivia (since the books were later on written by a rotating panel of authors, the mistakes, character transformations, et al. were numerous). I spent hours translating it all. I also became so mesmerised by the world of American thoroughbred racing that I wrote my A-level research paper on the Sport of the Kings. So far, I read all 15 Ashleigh novels, 1 of the 4 special editions and 38 of the 72 Thoroughbred novels, although I own considerably more …

When I was younger, my grandpa read lots and lots of books to me: Erich Kästner, Otfried Preußler, Wilhelm Busch, Janosch, Paul Maar (basically all German children’s classics except for Michael Ende – I’ve never read a single one of his books), and Astrid Lindgren. Although there’s one or two I’d enjoy reading again, I’ve forgotten all about them. Seriously, I just had to consult Goodreads to come up with a list of children’s books that were read to me. I’m sure I loved them all very much – after all, they made me fall in love with the written word, – but they just don’t feel like “my” books, because I never read them myself …

Last year, I had exactly ten books on my first read favourites 2013 shelf this time around. This year, however, there are only five. Therefore, I included my five favourite four star novels as well …

The last 2013 additions to my library. It’s a colourful mixture of long awaited novels, beautiful covers, unusual genres, hyped series, and some horse novels (well, it’s me, after all) …

Ahem, this is even worse than last month. First, we have the non-bookfair newbies (the bookfair newbies are below) …

Da fallen mir ganz spontan vier Reihen ein: eine war einfach nur schlecht, zwei eigentlich schon abgeschlossen, und bei der letzten gab es mehr als genug Gründe, aufzuhören …