Freitag, März 05, 2010

Since I'm already at it...

Yet another list of books.

I'm currently digging through all those printouts etc which I stuffed into folders years ago and which just languish there, hidden away and of no use to anyone. Among them I found this list of
"110 Books to Read". I have no idea when I printed this, or where I got the whole thing from, but I'll post it here nevertheless. Let's see how much I know from this one.
(Bold=Read it, Italics=I've heard about it, Smaller font= On my shelf and waiting to be read, Rest= I dunno)

1. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
2. I Feel Bad About My Neck: And other thoughts on being a woman (Nora Ephron)
3. The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)
4. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
5. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
6. Joie de Vivre: Simple French Style for Everyday Living (Robert Arbor)
7. Amelie: Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (The French Film Guides) (Isabelle Vanderschelden) - Only saw the movie, lots of times
8. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
9. The Hours (Michael Cunningham)
10. The Country Life (Rachel Cusk)
11. Everyday Traditions: Simple Family Rituals for Connection and Comfort (Nava Atlas)
12. Going Home to the Fifties (Bill Yenne)
13. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Susan Stewart)
14. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (Rozsika Parker)
15. Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Nina Auerbach)
16. The Future of Nostalgia (Svetlana Boym)
17. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (Judith Flanders)
18. The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978
19. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Yi-Fu Tuan)
20. The Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard)
21. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
22. The Dress Lodger (Sheri Holman)
23. The Confessions of Max Tivoli (Andrew Sean Greer)
24. Girl in Hyacinth Blue (Susan Vreeland)
25. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
26. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
27. Eat, Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)
28. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
29. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
30. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
31. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
32. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
33. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
34. A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute)
35. Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery)
36. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
37. I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
38. Conversations with God (Neale Donald Walsch)
39. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
40. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
41. The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
42. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
43. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
44. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
45. The Diary of a Nobody (George and Weedon Grossmith)
46. Flowers in the Attic (Virginia Andrews)
47. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
48. My Sister's Keeper (Jodie Picoult)
49. Magician (Raymond E. Feist)
50. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
51. The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
52. Mao's Last Dance (Li Cunxin)
53. Girl With a Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier)
54. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Jung Chang)
55. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
56. A Passage to India (EM Forster)
57. The Old Wive's Tale (Arnold Bennett)
58. Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
59. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
60. Chocolat (Joanne Harris)
61. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
62. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
63. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See)
64. I am a Cat (Natsume Soseki)
65. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Haruki Murakami)
66. Geisha, A Life (Mineko Iwasaki)
67. Geisha (Liza Dalby)
68. Autobiography of a Geisha (Sayo Masuda)
69. Matthew Flinder's Cat (Bryce Courtenay)
70. A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul)
71. The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
72. Falling Leaves (Adeline Yen Mah)
73. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (John Boyne)
74. The Other Boleyn Girl (Philippa Gregory)
75. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs)
76. Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
77. Cloudstreet (Tim Winton)
78. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
79. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
80. My Place (Sally Morgan)
81. My Brilliant Career (Miles Franklin)
82. For the Term of his Natural Life (Markus Clarke)
83. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Frederick Douglass)
84. The Constant Princess (Philippa Gregory)
85. The Rules of Survival (Nancy Werlin)
86. Hattie Big Sky (Kirby Larson)
87. Lady of Hay (Barbara Erskine)
88. Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)
89. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M Aurel)
90. My Family and Other Animals (Gerard Durrell)
91. Rose Cottage (Mary Stewart)
92. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
93. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
94. 1984 (George Orwell)
95. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
96. Remembering Babylon (David Malouf)
97. Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins)
98. Into the Woods (R R Smythe)
99. The Nanny Diaries (Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus) - I actually started reading it but couldn't stand it :P
100. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
101. The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life (Laurie Notaro)
102. Candy and Me (Hilary Liftin)
103. The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)
104. Ex Libris (Anne Fadiman)
105. Holes (Lois Sachar)
106. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
107. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
108. A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle) - This is the first in a trilogy, for some reason I've got book 2 (unread) on my shelf, I'd like to read all three though
109. Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard)
110. Watership Down (Richard Adams)

While typing this I noticed that the list can't be all that old, since some books on it only came out a few years ago. Also, I think I remember where I got this list from, but it's no help, since I don't know where that person got it from. ;)
Anyway, quite an eccentric selection.

What does this tell me?
First, that I know a lot more books than I have actually read. Only to be expected, I think.
Second, that there are loads of intriguing books out there that I would love to read. I've been trying to accept the fact that I'll never be able to read everything I'd like to read over the last few months, so I know...I know.
Third...I'm still far too intrigued by lists like this one. ;)

Do you have lists like this one? Or are there other books you'd highly recommend? (Highly enough so that a girl swamped with Bookcrossing books would be able to squeeze them in?) Please share!

Recently read

I finished "Howl's Moving Castle" yesterday, and I immensely enjoyed it. I bought it several years back, right after seeing the Miyazaki movie, but of course it languished in several bookshelves until now. (Except, of course, my boyfriend read it immediately.)

Well, the day after starting to read it I just HAD to rewatch the movie, to see how it tied in with the beginning of the book. It's so lovely when things are slightly different in the movie, and reading the book alongside to figure them out.
The second half of the movie then wildly differs from what happens in the book, probably because the "foreign world" of Wales would have been too weird for a Japanese film. ;) I liked it though, it was a good specimen of "people from a different world experiencing ours". It wasn't overdone, and had some nice touches, like Sophie thinking its an issue of life and death with the computer games.

For some reason, my boyfriend didn't like the ending of the book either (we both had some problems with the rather sudden ending of the movie, even though at least I should be used to it by now when watching animes), but I loved it. Everything is nicely solved, again without being overdone or overexplained, and I was completely happy.

I absolutely loved the way Sophie's magic worked, because you had to keep your eyes open to notice it. Great work.
And I like the style of writing...nothing is overdone, or overexplained, you have to keep thinking. Also, it somehow jumps along like a little girl with her skipping rope. It's always upbeat and funny and fresh and enjoyable. Never ever boring - really, there are no boring bits in this book. I wish I could write like that.

I think our (me and my boyfriend's) joint favourite character has to be Calcifer. He's beyond cute in the movie, and very funny in the book as well.

By the way, my cover looks like this - really lovely. And so fitting!

Mittwoch, März 03, 2010

An ancient meme

I just found this meme somewhere in a blog post 4 years old. I think I did it once before, but decided to do it again to check out the difference. The idea of this meme is to mark all the items read as bold, and then add four recently read books at the bottom. So here goes:

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams

The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) – J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) – J.K. Rowling

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) – J.K. Rowling
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter 5) – J.K. Rowling

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Book 1) – J.K. Rowling

Neuromancer – William Gibson
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) – J.K. Rowling
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
American Gods – Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game (The Ender Saga) – Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert

I think this is looking pretty good! A few of the unread books are standing on my shelf waiting to be read, and as for the rest...well, some day. :)

As for four books I recently read:

  • Howl's Moving Castle (Dianne Wynne Jones) - I'm reading this one right now, I've got about half of it done. It's great! (I had to watch the movie again yesterday just for the fun of it.)
  • At the Mountains of Madness (H.P. Lovecraft) - This was fun, reading a classic of horror literature (I suppose that's what it is). It was quite silly as well, and still I was a little scared reading it. Great suspense.
  • The Debutante Divorceé (Plum Sykes) - Absolutely not what I usually read, but a friend gave it to me to register for Bookcrossing, and I was slightly depressed and couldn't sleep...the only right time for absolutely mindless stuff like this.
  • The Scar (China Miéville) - I love this author. He writes great fantasy with beautiful and intriguing language, and he has the most amazing kind of ideas. My favourite of his so far has to be UN LUN DUN though. Can't breat that one (he illustrated it himself!).
So that's it for now. If you're interested, you're tagged. ;)