Favourites

Here are the rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. They don't have to be the greatest books you've ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird - the best book ever written. No contest
   
2. A Hat Full of Sky - the ending is so high on life that it makes me feel woosy just thinking about it
   
3. Twilight - Repeat *The Cullens are not real* but Oh how I wish they were.
   
4. The Time Traveller's Wife - Cry!! Did I?!!!! Awash, baby, awash.
   
5. Sun Horse, Moon Horse - My first historical fic. I was hooked aged 8
   
6. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis, Aslan... nuff said.
   
7. The Brother's Lionheart - First fantasy novel. I think I was 7
   
8. Jane Eyre - A classic. Romance, a sturdy heroine and Timothy Dalton showing Mr "fancypants" Darcy how it's done.
   
9. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets - You mean there are other women poets apart from Sylvia Plath?
   
10. The Moon in the Water - My second historical fic and read so many times I can't think straight.
    
11. The Sunne in Splendour - Edward the Fourth, wot a bastard.
    
12. Clan of the Cave Bear series - Sheer bloody awesomeness.
    
13. Rape of the Fair Country - Incitement to racial hatred, probably. But it should be required reading in Welsh schools.
    
14. Duncton Wood - Moles in an allegory of Christianity. You have to read it to get it.
    
15. The Fionavar Chronicles - A more readable and infinitely sexier rendition of LOTR. Okay, it doesn't have Boromir or Aragorn but a little mental substitution goes a long way.
    

Astonishingly heavy on fantasy novels with a smidge of historical fiction. One poetry book...only one *hangs head in shame* but Paradise Lost and Dante refuse to stay with me even though I love them so...

A Book Thingy

Lifted from Kitchen Witch, I thought I had done one of these but apparently I have deleted it. I am a bit embarrassed at how few of these I have heard of let alone read. I regret to say that I will not be changing my reading habits any time soon though.

CODE:
I've read it
I started but didn't finish it
Not my thing :(
Intend to read it someday*
Never heard of it ?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell :(
Anna Karenina :(
Crime and Punishment :(
One Hundred Years of Solitude ?
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose :( - enjoyed the film though
Don Quixote * maybe
Moby Dick
Ulysses :( Dubliners was bad enough
Madame Bovary:(
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Tale of Two Cities :(
The Brothers Karamazov :(
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ? Sounds a barrel of laughs tho
War and Peace :(
Vanity Fair every page was agony
The Time Traveler’s Wife *
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin ?
The Kite Runner* (maybe)
Mrs. Dalloway ? I think I've heard of it but I could be imagining it
Great Expectations arrrrrgh!
American Gods ?
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ? Wuh?
Atlas Shrugged ?
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books?
Memoirs of a Geisha* I like to think I will read this, but I probably won't
Middlesex ? I mean I've heard of the county but a book?....
Quicksilver ? This is getting a bit embarrassing now
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West ? but it sounds good...
The Canterbury Tales amazingly fabulous
The Historian ?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man :(
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead?
Foucault’s Pendulum?
Middlemarch dire, Silas Marner was a thousand times better
Frankenstein :(
The Count of Monte Cristo :( Another one that I would like to read but know I probably won't
Dracula :(
A Clockwork Orange :(
Anansi Boys?
The Once and Future King wonderful story
The Grapes of Wrath - my English professor made me read this at gunpoint. Foul.
The Poisonwood Bible *
1984 :( - I am allergic to Orwell
Angels & Demons? Sounds good though, but I bet you it probably isn't.
The Inferno - this was astonishingly good, really, I could not put it down, which was a shame as it weighed a flipping tonne!
The Satanic Verses :(
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray :( which is odd because I like Oscar Wilde's stories very much
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest :( - I would rather watch I Am Legend
To the Lighthouse - Is that Virginia Woolf? No thank you
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Hardy at his most depressing and that is saying something
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels :(
Les Misérables :(
The Corrections ?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ?
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune pretentious poo, at least the film had style
The Prince * If this is Machiavelli then I would like to give it a go, but try ordering Machiavelli from Resolven library...
The Sound and the Fury?
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir :( Lord, no
The God of Small Things? - At first I thought, what is Terry Pratchett doing on this list? Then I realised - he wrote Small Gods (which is excellent by the way)
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present? Sorry
Cryptonomicon? Never heard of it but it sounds great!
Neverwhere?
A Confederacy of Dunces?
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners - dull, why is this a classic? It completely passed me by.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being :(
Beloved?
Slaughterhouse-Five :(
The Scarlet Letter?
Eats, Shoots & Leaves* Just what every pedant needs..
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake ?
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed?
Cloud Atlas?
The Confusion ?
Lolita :(
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye - can't remember a thing about it though...weird
On the Road - never seen so many swear words on one page - and I've read some pretty pungent stuff let me tell you
The Hunchback of Notre Dame :( but enjoyed the film very much
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything :(
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :(
The Aeneid :(
Watership Down - excellent
Gravity’s Rainbow ?
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood?
White Teeth ?
Treasure Island :(
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers :(

Soooo...that's me. How about you?

Bedtime Stories

Not a good day for Lucifer really...

It has been a long held ambition of mine to read Paradise Lost. I own a teeny little copy, published before the war, with miniscule print and tissue thin paper. I bought it in a charity store, just because I loved the feel of the book and the crackly smell of the leather binding. I never read it, not only because of said tiny print, but because the poetry is pretty stiff going too.
However
Sitting there in Borders this morning I picked up a copy. Roughly the size of an atlas with terrific etching style illustrations. And it just spoke to me Read me aloud, it said. Don't keep me locked in the confines of a skull. Make a noise.
So I did.
Just in case you are wondering, I did not stand on a chair and declaim it or anything, I just read it quite softly to V who lounged back in his comfy chair, sipping his hot chocolate and humoured me. And do you know? There is something truly wonderful about this poem when it is read out loud. It rolls off the tongue in a flood of polysyllables, the cadence, the sheer flipping beauty of it! And so we floated for a while on a sea of words. There must have been something about it because when it was time to go he said "Do you want that?"
(Like I'd turn down the offer of a book)
"You can read it to me some more if you like."
That's this months bedtime stories sorted out...