Oh, I love books. I love writing and grammar and language; prose and poetry and precision, for all that I also adore rambling metaphorical dissertations in ambiguity!
Bwahahahaaaa…
I won it in the blogoversary giveaway at Leftover Reveries. How cool is Lissa, giving presents on her own birthday! Do you think she’s a Hobbit? Isn’t that a hobbitish tradition? I love it! Give her a hello from a grateful Thornie, huh?
Peace, out!
So here’s the deal: MizB at Should Be Reading would have us: Teaser Tuesdays
Grab your current read Let the book fall open to a random page Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
There is only one VERY IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER: Nospoilers!
Mine for this week is:
“For a second I think I don’t need her help, I can defend myself, but that’s not true. The only time I ever defend myself is in my imagination and by then it’s usually way too late.” p. 26
This is from Maybe a Miracle by Brian Strause.
If you love books and reading half as much as I do, why not join me on Shelfari?
I found this list over at A Gentleman’s Domain (and he is; Nicholas- a true gentleman), and it looked like fun. He says “the BBC, or whoever is in charge of this sort of thing at the BBC, reckon that most people (maybe they meant British people, as opposed to people in the English speaking word. Anyway, I am eligible in either case) will have read only six of them.”
That’s kinda trippy, I think. I’ll put the ones I’ve read in green, since the bold style doesn’t really show too well on this template.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen So long ago. I read lots of Austin around 12 or 13 years old.
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien I was just telling Nicholas that I first read and fell in love with this at 11 or 12 years old. I’ve read it over and over again in the (many) years since. It’s like returning home for me…
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Another fav since forever.
6 The Bible – I have read most, if not all of this. You know the old saying “keep your friends close- your enemies closer” LOL
7 Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell I was terribly impressed with this when I read it. I still am. I think I was between 12 and 14. I wasn’t near as impressed with Animal farm back then. I think I was a bit young for the politics.
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens My fave Dickens book.
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott I LOVED this book as a young girl! Jo was my hero!
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Pretty much all of it. :-)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk )I’m almost sure I’ve read this- a bell is clanging away in my head but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it’s about!
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger Another one I read young (11 or 12) , and was mightily impressed with. Of course, I understood it better on subsequent readings.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell Read this in my 20′s because I thought I should. Eh… whatever.
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald I was so unimpressed with the movie, that it took me awhile to get around to this, although I loved FSF. I was so pleasantly surprised when I finally read it!
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (I believe I’ve read all of Dickens’. I loved him growing up)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy It was hell, but I did it. Not that it didn’t have its redeeming moments, but it was hella long and super boring at times.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams I loved this when it first was published. Lately I’ve been thinking I should read it again, since it seems to have come back ’round as a fad. Haha.
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky I was too young when I read this one, too. Still, it made a strong impression.
28 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck I love Steinbeck, still. And although I loved this one, Of Mice and Men was always my fav.
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy Hehe. I picked this up about 10 years ago, thinking I hadn’t read it then remembered it vividly from when I was a teen.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis I actually didn’t get around to these until I was in my 20′s. Loved them.
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 Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding This is a simply incredible book! I read this first when I was 11 or 12, and then again and again. I tried to get my 14 year old nephew to read it last year, but he just wasn’t into it. He had trouble with it not being relevant to today as he understands it, which was so sad.
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 As much as I liked this book, I love the movie even more. Emma Thompson…Alan Rickman! Yummy! it’s one of my comfort movies. I watch it when I’m sick or if I need to cry.
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens Perhaps my least fav Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Another great book first read at 11 or 12 and loved and reread ever since!
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 There it is!
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov Of course, although it pisses me off now.
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’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville Don’t laugh. I just reread this about 2 months ago. I love it. “They call me Ishmael…”Hehe
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 Inferno – Dante
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
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Another that hs bells ringing)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Read a lot of Holmes mysteries as a kid.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery Oh! I read and loved this when I was 16 years old!
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Bank
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams I loved this. And Plague Dogs, and Shardik and Maia
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
Before you buy a companion parrot please understand that only 10% of your bird is pretty. The other 90% is noisy, messy, moody, jealous and downright painful at times. Before you spend big bucks on that 10% pretty, make sure you understand the 90% you get for free!!
