23 posts tagged “books”

I read a lot of books, but then I go through these lists and realise how many I haven't read... I need to get reading!

Taken from writebrained

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own weblog / journal so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Attwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ranson
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishigury
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

48/100  I fail :P

Each year I start a list of books in a word file.  I fell behind posting them last year, but I won't weigh you down with all of them.  Needless to say, I was disappointed in the amount I read because of school taking over my life.  Hopefully that won't happen this year (I did have a better head start at the beginning of last year before heading back into school though...)  Anyway, a book I finished a few days ago...

Alexandra: The Last Tsarina

Carolly Erickson

Book # 23

Saving Fish from Drowning: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Amy Tan

Book Title: Saving Fish from Drowning

Author: Amy Tan
Genre: Fiction
# of pages: 474
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: B-
Short description/summary of the book: [from Amazon]

The title of the book is derived from the practice of Myanmar fishermen who "scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving the fish from drowning. Unfortunately... the fish do not recover," This kind of magical thinking or hypocrisy or mystical attitude or sheer stupidity is a fair metaphor for the entire book. It may be read as a satire, a political statement, a picaresque tale with several "picaros" or simply a story about a tour gone wrong.

Bibi Chen, San Francisco socialite and art vendor to the stars, plans to lead a trip for 12 friends: "My friends, those lovers of art, most of them rich, intelligent, and spoiled, would spend a week in China and arrive in Burma on Christmas Day." Unfortunately, Bibi dies, in very strange circumstances, before the tour begins. After wrangling about it, the group decides to go after all. The leader they choose is indecisive and epileptic, a dangerous combo. Bibi goes along as the disembodied voice-over.

Once in Myanmar, finally, they are noticed by a group of Karen tribesmen who decide that Rupert, the 15-year-old son of a bamboo grower is, in fact, Younger White Brother, or The Lord of the Nats. He can do card tricks and is carrying a Stephen King paperback. These are adjudged to be signs of his deity and ability to save them from marauding soldiers. The group is "kidnapped," although they think they are setting out for a Christmas Day surprise, and taken deep into the jungle where they languish, develop malaria, learn to eat slimy things and wait to be rescued. Nats are "believed to be the spirits of nature--the lake, the trees, the mountains, the snakes and birds. They were numberless ... They were everywhere, as were bad luck and the need to find reasons for it." Philosophy or cynicism? This elusive point of view is found throughout the novel--a bald statement is made and then Tan pulls her punches as if she is unwilling to make a statement that might set a more serious tone.

There are some goofy parts about Harry, the member of the group who is left behind, and his encounter with two newswomen from Global News Network, some slapstick sex scenes and a great deal of dog-loving dialogue. These all contribute to a novel that is silly but not really funny, could have an occasionally serious theme which suddenly disappears, and is about a group of stereotypical characters that it's hard to care about.

My Thoughts:

Would you believe that this is my first Amy Tan book?  I never thought her books even sounded interesting (mother daughter relationship in a Chinese-American family?  -_-), but this one sounded great and interesting and was, all in all, an enjoyable read.  Thanks for the book Lady Jane!

Hard to say what I thought about this book.  It held more weight when I thought it was based on a true story, however, reading through an interview, she said that the Note to the Reader at the beginning was, alas, fictional.  It starts off somber, with the funeral of the dead narrator, which continues to inject a dark humour into the book.  When I was reading it, the story line was going along, but there was always this foreboding, even when nothing was really going wrong, since you knew something was going to happen, and also, when the omnipotent narrator would often say ‘If only they knew what was going to happen.’  All this darkness overshadowing the entire story, storm clouds waiting to burst, expect the worst.  And it brought back a very unsettling feeling of the idea of going somewhere on an innocent vacation and having something happen and never coming back (a distinctly real worry my stay in China invoked in me).  When thinking back, perhaps this feeling the book tried to bring about was just a little too strong, maybe she pushed it a little too much, because, in the end, it didn’t really seem to amount to much.  The characters, who were at first interesting, sort of became static.  It was interesting, when their journey started, to see how they interacted with each other, a common feeling of being put into situations were you become ‘family’ to people you don’t really know.  It was interesting to get into the minds of the characters through the narrator, though somewhat bizarre.  I really did enjoy the descriptions of the travel and the country (and the parts of China that I had been too!), but the expectations I had at the beginning of the book for darkness and mystery and despair were unfulfilled.  The darkness was, at best, dark humour, which was usually out of place; the mystery was, really, no mystery at all; the situation they found themselves in was, really, not that bad (not enough for all the damning comments and all those, ‘Dun dun DUUUNNN’ moments, I could almost hear that in my head) and the emotions seemed 2 dimensional.   You had a hard time, at the end, identifying with the situation and the characters, it just stopped seeming real.

So, all this dark and foreboding and, in the end, (hope I don’t spoil anyone), everything turned out fine, no one died, was hurt, had a bad experience, and everyone lived happily ever after.

I don’t know if I would be as damning as the reviews on Amazon, I really did enjoy this book and some of the characters while reading it, but it sort of fell apart at the end.

It did, however, remind me what I always disliked about those tourist groups we would run across, damn Americans, lol.
Currently reading : School books :P  Machiavelli, textbooks, etc.

~Nikki
(Amazon Store

 Book # 22

Watership Down: A Novel

Richard Adams

Book Title: Watership Down

Author: Richard Adams 
Genre: Fiction
# of pages: 475
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: A+++
Short description/summary of the book: (Amazon)

The story is about a band of rabbits---Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, Dandelion, and Bluebell---who set off from their comfy holes to find a new rabbit warren on the plains of Watership Down. They leave their original warren because Fiver (a small, brooding rabbit with 'The Sight') has a vision of it being destroyed. Not surprisingly, soon after they leave, they find out that the warren HAD been destroyed by big hrududil (tractors) that dug up the ground and killed all those who remained behind.

The trials and tribulations of Hazel and his band of rogue rabbits carries the story along at a leisurely pace, not rushing to get the story out, giving rabbit history and mythology a few well-deserved pages, too.

After Hazel and his fellow bunnies set up their new warren on Watership Down, though, they find that they have a serious problem: no does (females)! Without does, their new warren is doomed to failure, so they set about trying to locate some breeding stock. But what they encounter is a terrible warren known as Efrafa run by the overbearing and callous General Woundwort. The battle between Watership Down and Efrafa is terrible and exciting reading, even for adults.

My Thoughts:

I hadn’t read this book in, it has to be about 10 years.  It was my favourite book for AGES and I finally decided that it was time to read it again.   The name had popped up recently (a few times) and I just couldn’t resist.  I RARELY reread books.  Very, very rarely.  But I have to say, either this book is just that amazing, or it was so long ago I don’t really remember it well enough, but I never got tired of it.  And thing is, I did remember it while I was rereading it and it still never got old or boring.  I loved it just as much as the first time on a totally different level.  It was really interesting to read it now, with all the knowledge and life lessons I have gained in the ten years since reading it the first time.  Even though it is about talking rabbits, I would never consider this a children's book.   The themes and adventures can be slightly disturbing at times (yet unobtrusively), and it really has a depth that you would never think this type of book could contain.  I adore it.  It is back (and will never fall off again) of my favourite book of all times list.

Currently reading :  Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan

Watership Down on Amazon

Book # 20

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance

George MacDonald

Book Title: Phantastes : A Faerie Romance

Author: George McDonald
Genre: Fantasy
# of pages: 320
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: B
Short description/summary of the book: Amazon.com  (from people always more eloquent than myself)

This is an enchanting work of high fantasy, lyrical in its composition, spiritual in its nature, and enlightening in its effect on the careful reader. As the subtitle says, Phantastes is a Faerie Romance For Men and Women. The Fairy Land in which Anodos, the narrator, ventures is not the fairy land of youth's innocent dreams; rather, it is an otherworldly plane full of great beauty and terrible ugliness, impish little fairies and horrible, teasing goblins, nurturing spirits and malevolent entities. Anodos' discovery of a fairy inside his deceased father's old desk leads to his unplanned journey into this world of wonder. Interestingly, upon entering Fairy Land, Anodos leaves the beaten path and makes his way through the woods all on his own. He meets a diverse cast of characters along the way, reckoning with dark beings who threaten his spiritual well-being while also finding great and needed comfort at crucial times from nurturing maternal forces. His own shadow takes on perhaps the most malevolent influence of all the beings he deals with. He often finds himself compelled to sing, and his songs are powerful enough to free a beautiful White Lady from inside a statue; he remains infatuated with this lady for a long time, trying desperately to find her; his love for her, he comes to realize, comes in large part from his feelings of having been the one to free her, and an important point the author seems to be suggesting is that the love of a giver is much more pure than the love of a benefactor.

Much of this story is allegorical; Anodos basically comes to know himself and to see the world more objectively as a result of his journeys. He often resorts to tears, yet he also raises his voice in song to uplift others. He discovers the power of brotherly love and the beauty that is all around, yet he cringes at the sight of the shadowy creatures that would do him ill. His journey is challenging because he naturally falls prey to feelings of pride and egotism, but his losses and sorrows eventually coalesce themselves into something of beauty, for it is these experiences that help him grow more spiritual. Much has been made of MacDonald's religious beliefs, but Phantastes to me calls forth no religion other than spiritualism and personal growth and maturity. Good and evil do not exist in Fairy Land, except in the sense that there is both good and evil in each individual spirit.

Doubtless, some will not like MacDonald's 19th-century, florid style. There is action in this novel, but it definitely takes a back seat to exposition and philosophical musings. Some will surely find Phantastes exceptionally boring, but those readers willing to follow Anodos deeply into Fairy Land will embark on an enlightening, touching read that will almost surely make them better persons for having taken the literary journey.

My Thoughts:

A really fantastic book.  If you like Tolkien or CS Lewis, I have no doubt that you will enjoy this book.  It has an older feeling than a lot of the fantasies today, it doesn’t try and be something it is not, it really goes back to the heart of the fantasy genre.  It isn’t by any means predictable or corny though.  It is the story of Anodos, fallen into a faery land and wandering around without an aim.  Adventures that he has, creatures that he sees, his own shadow that plagues him, and the search for something that he isn’t aware of yet.  There is a very strong bitter-sweet feeling to the book, it isn’t your childhood waltz through magical land, more of an allegorical soul-searching journey through the awesomely beautiful and terrifyingly dark.
Quote :

Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painful thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst, to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill.

Book # 19

The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger

Book Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Author: Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Fiction/Modern
# of pages: 536
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: A
Short description/summary of the book:

From Publishers Weekly
This highly original first novel won the largest advance San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage had ever paid, and it was money well spent. Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly, usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit, at an entirely different place 10 years earlier-or later. During one of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry's age darts back and forth according to his location in time, Clare's moves forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But such is the author's tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament [...] that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry's violinist father [...] to Clare's odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. [...] It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
My Thoughts:

I know I’m a little behind on the times and it’s shocking that someone hasn’t read this book…

I don’t read a lot of modern fiction, so I’m always a little surprised at the way it is written.  It’s always so easy to get through and the people and situations and conversations seem so familiar and real. 

The time traveling was really interesting.  Unlike many references to time-traveling, you don’t sit there wondering how it is possible, or pondering all the different theories of alternate planes and whatnot (at least I didn’t). It wasn’t too hard to wrap your head around the jumping time zones once you realised that most of it was chronologically through Clare’s life, and it was always interesting to piece together what was happening to him later in his life when he would visit when she was younger. 

I really got attached to the characters and seeing as how this turns into one of the more depressing books I’ve read, I’ll admit, I was crying at the end.

I’ll also admit that I am a snob, especially a book snob, so when I decided to read this (it was recommended to me by a few people) I was kind of embarrassed to be seen with it.  I have issues with reading books that are popular….they are usually pretty dumb (to appeal to the masses), but I have to say, that I really enjoyed the premise of this book.  I can see why it would be popular, the writing style is so smooth and easy, probably because it is modern fiction, but like I said, I’m not used to reading that.  But I’m definitely glad I wasn’t embarrassed enough to not read it at all, I really enjoyed this book.

From what I gather though, it is a hit or miss with people, but it is worth picking up to see if you like it.

18 is a pathetic number isn't it?  I just haven't been in a reading mood I guess.  Well, in an attempt to keep myself from watching Lois & Clark DVDs for a third time in one month, I made myself pick up a book.  Unfortunately I hate reading more than one book a day, which left me with quite a lot of extra time on my hands when I was done with this one since I'm a pretty speedy reader.

Book # 18
Book Title: A Venetian Affair   [A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18^th Century]

Author: Andrea Di Robilant
Genre: Non-Fiction
# of pages: 291
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best].: A
Short description/summary of the book:  [Amazon]

It's hard to imagine a more romantic real-life story than the long, forbidden love affair of the 18th-century Venetian nobleman Andrea Memmo and a half-English beauty named Giustiniana Wynne. Andrea Di Robilant's A Venetian Affair is drawn in part from a cache of letters discovered by the author's father in his ancestral palazzo on the Grand Canal. In 1753, his ancestor Andrea Memmo had been introduced to a lovely girl of uncertain station (illegitimate, although her parents later married). The Wynnes's position was precarious enough in Venice's rigid society, and Giustiniana's mother took every step to prevent the young aristocrat from corrupting her daughter. But the two lovers began to meet in secret: exchanging letters through confederates and communicating in public through an elaborate code of nods and gestures. They even came within a few days of being married before further dark revelations about Giustiniana's family put a permanent end to their hopes. Although Memmo went on to have an illustrious career in the dying Venetian Republic, it is Giustiniana's astonishing later life that really captures the reader. A Venetian Affair provides both a rich picture of the times--including cameo appearances by that scamp, Casanova--and a convincing account of an enduring passion.

My Thoughts:

I was surprised that the book was so interesting.  It surely sounded interesting, but with a non-fiction written from letters and not completely in novel form, it had the potential to be very dry.  But it most definitely wasn’t.  It went seamlessly between story, letter, historical information and background.  It was very informative and really a fun read.  I like the passion between the two lovers and how different it was from what would go on today, anyone as clingy as Giustiniana nowadays would never go over well.  It was very romantic though, and their constant correspondence and the slow change in their relationship really made you wonder how everything was going to turn out.  I’ve always loved hearing about Venice during that time period and I especially liked the circles that the two of them moved in, hearing familiar names like Casanova (a friend to both of them) was somewhat thrilling and really made me want to read a book about him.

I was disappointed with the ending, but not enough to not like the book.  It was unclear how things actually ended because correspondence between them hasn’t been found during that time period, but you could tell earlier on that their relationship had faded.  And the epilogue about what happened to both of them was mildly depressing.  I very much preferred the beginning of their story with the passions and intrigues, but isn’t that always the way with love? It lets you know that it was real.

So, synopsis, the writing style was definitely interesting, but didn’t detract, I rather liked it for a non-fiction book.  It reminded you that it was all a true story, which made the whole thing even more fascinating.  Better than historical fiction ;)

Sure, it may be a religious discussion, but when looking at the way this country is currently being run, I think it is a perfectly acceptable discussion for debates.  When religious views take over common sense when you are running a country, I think that is a good enough reason to be worried.
Perhaps they are just playing to the large voter base of religious fanatics, but either way, it is worrisome.  I can't help but think, as long as they don't believe in things like evolution, that situations like global warming and the disaster that the president doesn't believe will occur will just continue to spiral out of control because they don't believe nearly irrefutable evidence.  I really hope Democrats get out the vote in this next election, or that the Republicans have someone running who hasn't blinded themselves.
I don't remember it being like this when I was a kid.  When did it become popular in America to be so blindly religious and then try and run a country?
[Debate evolves into religious discussion]

A school in Florida wants a children's book about Cuba banned because it doesn't recount the horrors of dictatorship and communism.  Call me crazy, but would they rather their children actually read about that?
I get discouraged every time they talk about banning a book, it makes me wonder how things like that are even legal in this country.  And every time something like this happens it just makes the action more acceptable.  I'm beginning to think that eventually they just simply won't read in schools because idiot parents complain about every book that is being read.  And honestly, with the things that happen in this world, and the poor job so many parents do at controlling their kids it stuns me that people would go this far.  When the whole world becomes censored and subject to the whims of (overcompensating) parents, will we just stop educating completely?  Every time a book is censored I see kids getting more stupid and ignorant.

~Nikki