I'm now one year and four months into the challenge and have read 27 of my books. They probably haven't been the toughest books on my list--and I know some of the driest are left--but I have read several books that I've put off for years. I loved The Poisonwood Bible, The Book Thief, The Remains of the Day, and The Shadow of the Wind. I appreciated Anna Karenina, although I can't say that I completely enjoyed it. I was bored by A Year in Provence and struggled with 100 Years of Solitude, although that may have been because I was sick. Last year was a slow reading year for me because I bought an old fixer-upper and planned and hosted a wedding for my daughter. This summer I hope to tackle a few of the weightier tomes on my list while I sit by the pool.
My list is here.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Lindy's Reading List
Some of these books have been stuck on my bookshelf for ages, and some are ones I am desperate to read, as always I am sure I have missed books and the list will grow ever longer with time.
1. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
2. Regeneration – Pat Barker
3. The Eye in the Door – Pat Barker
4. A Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
5. Villette – Charlotte Bronte
6. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
7. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
8. Possession – A.S.Byatt
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M Cain
10. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carre
11. The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
12. Girl with the Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
13. An Autobiography – Agatha Christie
14. The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate
15. The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
16. Going Solo – Roald Dahl
17. Nothing is Safe – E.M.Delafield
18. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
19. Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens
20. The Old Curiousity Shop – Charles Dickens
21. The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens
22. Middlemarch – George Eliot
23. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
24. Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks
25. Human Traces – Sebastian Faulks
26. Faulks on Fiction – Sebastian Faulks
27. Snobs – Julian Fellowes
28. The History of Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
29. The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
30. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safron Foer
32. Fall of Giants – Ken Follett
33. Howards End – E.M. Forster
34. A Room With A View – E.M.Forster
35. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
36. The Six Wives of Henry VIII – Antonia Fraser
37. Must You Go? – Antonia Fraser
38. The Forsyte Saga – John Galsworthy
39. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
40. Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves
41. Fallen Skies – Philippa Gregory
42. The Lady of the Rivers – Philippa Gregory
43. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
44. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
45. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
46. The Go-Between – L.P Hartley
47. Young Romantics – Daisy Hay
48. Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill
49. The Man in the Picture – Susan Hill
50. The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst
51. The Iliad – Homer
52. The Expendable Man – Dorothy. B. Hughes
53. Birthday Letters – Ted Hughes
54. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
55. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
56. When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro
57. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
58. The Report – Jessica Frances Kane
59. Little Boy Lost – Margahrita Laski
60. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H.Lawrence
61. Women in Love – D.H.Lawrence
62. Small Island – Andrea Levy
63. Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
64. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
65. Pure – Andrew Miller
66. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
67. Wigs on the Green – Nancy Mitford
68. The Blessing – Nancy Mitford
69. Madresfield – Jane Mulvagh
70. Starter For Ten – David Nicholls
71. The Understudy – David Nicholls
72. Byron in Love – Edna O’Brien
73. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
74. 1984 – George Orwell
75. Decline of the English Murder – George Orwell
76. Half of the Human Race – Anthony Quinn
77. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
78. Midnight’s Children – Salmon Rushdie
79. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton – Elizabeth Speller
80. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
81. Vanity Fair – William M Thackery
82. The Hobbit – J.R.R.Tolkien
83. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
84. Jane Austen – Claire Tomalin
85. Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin
86. Thomas Hardy – Claire Tomlain
87.The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters
88. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
89. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
90. Mary Boleyn – Alison Weir
91. The Lady in the Tower – Alison Weir
92. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
93. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
94. Greenbanks – Dorothy Whipple
95. They Were Sisters – Dorothy Whipple
96. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
97. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
98. The Kenneth Williams Diaries – Kenneth Williams
99. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh
100. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
As well as posting updates on here I will be writing about my reading progress on my word press blog www.lindylit.wordpress.com
I'm looking forward to hearing how everyone else is getting on with this challenge
Lindy
1. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
2. Regeneration – Pat Barker
3. The Eye in the Door – Pat Barker
4. A Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
5. Villette – Charlotte Bronte
6. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
7. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
8. Possession – A.S.Byatt
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M Cain
10. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John le Carre
11. The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
12. Girl with the Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
13. An Autobiography – Agatha Christie
14. The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate
15. The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
16. Going Solo – Roald Dahl
17. Nothing is Safe – E.M.Delafield
18. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
19. Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens
20. The Old Curiousity Shop – Charles Dickens
21. The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens
22. Middlemarch – George Eliot
23. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
24. Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks
25. Human Traces – Sebastian Faulks
26. Faulks on Fiction – Sebastian Faulks
27. Snobs – Julian Fellowes
28. The History of Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
29. The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
30. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safron Foer
32. Fall of Giants – Ken Follett
33. Howards End – E.M. Forster
34. A Room With A View – E.M.Forster
35. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
36. The Six Wives of Henry VIII – Antonia Fraser
37. Must You Go? – Antonia Fraser
38. The Forsyte Saga – John Galsworthy
39. North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
40. Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves
41. Fallen Skies – Philippa Gregory
42. The Lady of the Rivers – Philippa Gregory
43. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
44. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
45. The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
46. The Go-Between – L.P Hartley
47. Young Romantics – Daisy Hay
48. Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill
49. The Man in the Picture – Susan Hill
50. The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst
51. The Iliad – Homer
52. The Expendable Man – Dorothy. B. Hughes
53. Birthday Letters – Ted Hughes
54. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
55. Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
56. When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro
57. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
58. The Report – Jessica Frances Kane
59. Little Boy Lost – Margahrita Laski
60. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H.Lawrence
61. Women in Love – D.H.Lawrence
62. Small Island – Andrea Levy
63. Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
64. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier
65. Pure – Andrew Miller
66. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
67. Wigs on the Green – Nancy Mitford
68. The Blessing – Nancy Mitford
69. Madresfield – Jane Mulvagh
70. Starter For Ten – David Nicholls
71. The Understudy – David Nicholls
72. Byron in Love – Edna O’Brien
73. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
74. 1984 – George Orwell
75. Decline of the English Murder – George Orwell
76. Half of the Human Race – Anthony Quinn
77. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
78. Midnight’s Children – Salmon Rushdie
79. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton – Elizabeth Speller
80. Perfume – Patrick Suskind
81. Vanity Fair – William M Thackery
82. The Hobbit – J.R.R.Tolkien
83. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
84. Jane Austen – Claire Tomalin
85. Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin
86. Thomas Hardy – Claire Tomlain
87.The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters
88. Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
89. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
90. Mary Boleyn – Alison Weir
91. The Lady in the Tower – Alison Weir
92. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
93. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
94. Greenbanks – Dorothy Whipple
95. They Were Sisters – Dorothy Whipple
96. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
97. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
98. The Kenneth Williams Diaries – Kenneth Williams
99. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh
100. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
As well as posting updates on here I will be writing about my reading progress on my word press blog www.lindylit.wordpress.com
I'm looking forward to hearing how everyone else is getting on with this challenge
Lindy
Monday, April 2, 2012
Dubliners Competition
Dublin: One City, One Book is an award-winning initiative, which encourages everyone to read a book connected with the capital city of Ireland during the month of April every year.
This year is the "Dubliners" by James Joyce, so to mark this event I thought that I would give a prize of the 'One City, One Book' O'Brien edition of the book "Dubliners" (see right) along with some nice goodies to EACH person who posts a review of the "Dubliners" or other works of Joyce this month?
This is open till 30th April.
Any takers??
Anyhoo happy Reading and looking forward to the reviews :)
Emily
For more info on Dublin: one city, one book see website: http://www.dublinonecityonebook.ie/
This year is the "Dubliners" by James Joyce, so to mark this event I thought that I would give a prize of the 'One City, One Book' O'Brien edition of the book "Dubliners" (see right) along with some nice goodies to EACH person who posts a review of the "Dubliners" or other works of Joyce this month?
This is open till 30th April.
Any takers??
Anyhoo happy Reading and looking forward to the reviews :)
Emily
For more info on Dublin: one city, one book see website: http://www.dublinonecityonebook.ie/
Sunday, April 1, 2012
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
My first book completed for Fill in the Gaps! Yay!
My thoughts:
This is probably not going to be very long because, frankly, I don't know quite what to write. How to review a book that I liked and found very interesting, yet still gave me a headache every time I read it and has still left me scratching my head? I'm not sure. House of Leaves is literally a labyrinth. Yes, there is an entire chapter that is actually a labyrinth...on the page. What can I say? The book is really an enigma. I still don't know what the truth is, or who was actually telling the story, and this would normally piss me off. But ironically, it just made me more intrigued. Even though I finished the book, I'm still going to look over it more and I found a helpful page on Mark Danielewski's blog. The page is Exploration Z and it's The Idiot's Guide to House of Leaves. I'm going to explore this page and see if it can help me figure a few things out. I know that this review has not really given much insight into if the book is good or not and I apologize for that. Let me just say again...I liked it (4 stars on Goodreads), it's confusing, it gets the reader thinking (I think that's where the headache comes from). Okay, now I'm getting a headache writing this review. ;O)
About the book:
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
My thoughts:
This is probably not going to be very long because, frankly, I don't know quite what to write. How to review a book that I liked and found very interesting, yet still gave me a headache every time I read it and has still left me scratching my head? I'm not sure. House of Leaves is literally a labyrinth. Yes, there is an entire chapter that is actually a labyrinth...on the page. What can I say? The book is really an enigma. I still don't know what the truth is, or who was actually telling the story, and this would normally piss me off. But ironically, it just made me more intrigued. Even though I finished the book, I'm still going to look over it more and I found a helpful page on Mark Danielewski's blog. The page is Exploration Z and it's The Idiot's Guide to House of Leaves. I'm going to explore this page and see if it can help me figure a few things out. I know that this review has not really given much insight into if the book is good or not and I apologize for that. Let me just say again...I liked it (4 stars on Goodreads), it's confusing, it gets the reader thinking (I think that's where the headache comes from). Okay, now I'm getting a headache writing this review. ;O)
About the book:
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
