Tag: Books

I’ve been destroying books lately. They are great for plane rides, and great for taking your mind off of things. However, I always find myself more depressed than when I started. Something about holing yourself up for days at a time in a fantasy land that isn’t particularly helpful.

I need to remember to throw in more non-fiction every now and again.

I started two new fantasy series at the same time.

George RR Martin’s – A Game of Thrones (A Song of Fire and Ice)

and

Patrick Rothfuss – Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles)

I like them both. I like almost all books though.

I also just recently polished off 20,00 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne is a grand chronicler / cataloger. That means there  are whole pages you can just skip. Oh, he’s still listing types of fish in the Indian Ocean three pages later? Next, Next, Next, oh the story starts again. Overall though – great book worth reading.  You can see the influence his work in the late 1800s has on modern science fiction. To me that’s fascinating.

Read 20,000 leagues under the sea and then pick up a copy of Michael Chrichton’s Sphere. Makes me want to re-read sphere. I’ve been through that book something like 4 times by now. Great read.

I finished the Dune series, and the Sword of Truth series.

I have a kindle and I was looking for something to read. I downloaded the Sword of Shannarra series. I am extremely disappointed. Not that it is a bad series, but it just doesn’t live up to Sword of Truth or Dune at all in terms of quality and interest. It doesn’t grab the reader by the balls and say “READ ME TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT”.

It seems predictable. Maybe others have copied from him, maybe he’s copied from others, but I just get the feeling that I’ve read it before.

It’s three books and I’m on the first one now. Since I paid for it I’ll read it and add it to my collection, hoping it gets better towards the end.

Any recommendations for a good (completed) fiction series? Like I told Kurt and Brendan, I like my authors dead. This way I don’t have to wait for the rest of the series to be written. They can be alive too, that’s ok. As long as the series is done.

Yanked from my friend Jeni.

BBC believes most people will only have read SIX of these 100 books. I find that hard to believe, and can’t find a news article to back up the figure… so… anyway… how many have YOU read? Be honest!

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen ()
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (x+)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte ()
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x – reading now)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible ()
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x+)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (*)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens ()
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (x+)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all of the plays in their entirety…(same))
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier ()
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x+)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ()
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 (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy ()
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (x+)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh ()
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky ()
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
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 (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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 Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (x+)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan ()
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel ()
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (x++ loved this series)
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 (x)
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 (x)
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 (x)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens ()
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x+)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ()
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (x)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath ()
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ()
78 Germinal – Emile Zola ()
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray ()
80 Possession – AS Byatt ()
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ()
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker ()
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro ()
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert ()
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry ()
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (x)
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 (x – over analyzed in high school! (was in your class for this))
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 (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo ()

I believe I’ve got 26 in there.

I’m reading John Updike’s Rabbit Run.

It makes me think of a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a while now:

Saying the wrong thing.

Have you ever had a moment in a conversation where you knew exactly what the wrong thing to say was? The thing that would bring complete silence to the conversation, cause someone to cry, stop being friends with you, or even break up with you?

It’s like walking by the fire alarm in a hallway. You know exactly what would happen if you pulled it, but you keep walking anyway – with the alarm unpulled.

Not sure if other people have these same moments during the day. I have them constantly.

Updike’s character Rabbit makes me thing of my impulses surrounding this.

Whenever he’s in any sort of situation with girls he’ll ALWAYS say exactly the wrong thing. I’m interested to see how it turns out for him. I’m about 100 pages in now. Wish me luck.

EDIT:
That didn’t work out AT ALL for the guy. Looks like I learned an important lesson?