6 posts tagged “books”

Being one of those people completely unable to read on the bus / train / in the car / anywhere other than sitting somewhere non-moving, I'm a big fan of audiobooks. I have a 2 hour commute every day, so I manage to get through a fair few.

This week I've knocked over a few short ones that have been sitting in my playlist for a while, What Happened to Cass McBride by Gail Giles and A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris.

First up, What Happened to Cass McBride.
Author: Gail Giles
Grade: A
I have no idea why I bought this one - I hadn't read about it on any other blogs, I've never heard of the author, and the cover art doesn't particularly grab me. I guess Audible had a really good write up or something. Anyway, I adored this novel.

Told from 3 points of view, Cass the beautiful, popular queen bee; Kyle Kirby, brother of David who has recently committed suicide; and Ben, the officer investigating the case. From an audio perspective, thank god they've used 3 different narrators - it's easy to keep track of who's point of view you're in (which is important, because the linear structure is all messed up, lots of flashbacks.)

Kyle has kidnapped Cass and buried her alive - this is no spoiler, he admits to this pretty much on page 1. What keeps you listening is the why of it, and whether Ben is able to find Cass before she dies. Giles has also done some very tricky characterisation - there were times when I felt for Kyle and although I personally wouldn't kidnap and bury someone alive, I could see where he was coming from. With Cass, although I knew I should be sympathetic, even in her darkest moment you could see her manipulative personality shining through. The ending has left me wanting more, I need to spend more time searching online for some discussions. It's not a happy read, very bleak, but very thought provoking. The audio was just over 3 hours, so I was able to knock it over in one day (with some sneaky listening at work while I witnessed 160 frikin documents).

Next was the latest release from Charlaine Harris, A Touch of Dead. This one is just a compilation of previously released short stories about Sookie. I enjoyed them, but honestly, one or two of them read like bad fan fic. It was good to finally read (listen) to the story where she first finds out about her cousin's relationship with the Queen and subsequent death, because back when I read whichever book follows that short story, I thought I must have missed an entire novel along the way somewhere. The rest are just extras that don't really add anything too much, there was no Eric in any of them which was a bit of a fail in my eyes, and the one where Sookie and Amelia play investigators for an insurance company? Yea, not my favourite. I give this one a C+.

Finally, I've just started in on People of the Book. Not much to say, because I've only heard about 30 mins of it so far. What did get me straight away was it was read by an Aussie! It's always really strange to hear an Aussie accent on recorded books, and it always takes me a minute or two to actually comprehend it. So, you can read an excerpt here.

Also recently read Gene of Isis by Traci Harding (follow link for excerpt). This was another one I didn't realise was written by an Aussie until I got into it and wondered why they'd made the protagonist Australian (it doesn't happen very often!) A bit DaVinci Code with a dash of Indiana Jones, I stayed up until some ungodly hour reading this, I just couldn't put it down. This one also jumps between a couple of different points of view, that of Mia, a current day Ancient Languages expert; Ashlee, a clairvoyant from the 19th century; and Lillet, a 13th century priestess. This is the first book in a trilogy, but it stands alone just fine. I have the next 2 novels waiting to be read in my summer break. Grade: A.

Also listened to the mammoth The Forest House, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I downloaded this one because I loved Mists of Avalon when I read it for uni last year, and figured this one would probably be my kind of book too. 16 hours later (yup, 16 hours... that's a hell of a long time to listen to a story!!) I liked, and I didn't. I'm not a huge fan of the audio narrator, which made it a little difficult to listen to, but I did enjoy the story well enough.

In between all of that I've been reading about 20th century Europe, and struggling through some novels for American Literature (I'm actually yet to finish one - I'm really not enjoying them!), and doing a swedish massage course, which requires a fair bit of reading and 15 hours of logged massage. *sigh* I really can't wait for the end of semester, I'm taking the summer off to cross stitch, read stuff I want to read, and watch trashy tv!

I know I carry on about buying books all the time, but when you're given booklists that total up to over $100 each subject, adding up to at least $800 a year, you do tend to become a little obsessive.

Anyway, further to my babbling the other day, one of my books has already arrived!! I ordered it from the UK on Friday, from a site that gives free postage world-wide (The Book Depository), and it is already here... is that efficient or what?? Ordering from them was still half the price of anywhere in Oz too...

Happy happy happy!

I've been doing my textbook buying for next semester. It's still 3 weeks away, but if I want to order any from overseas, I figure it's better to order them at least this far in advance to make sure I well and truly have them in time for the start of the class.

Anyway, not sure if I've mentioned this site before, but Booko is an Aussie site that searches all the online bookstores for you, calculates the postage, puts it all in Aussie dollars, and gives you a comparison list. If you're buying a few books, you add them to your 'cart' and it automatically excludes any sites that don't have all the books, and again gives you a listing of the totals.

Surprisingly (or maybe not...) it's still cheaper in most cases to buy books from overseas. I split my order between two stores, Better World Books and The Book Depository. Better World books has a stack of fantastic aims and programs, plus their shipping is a flat AU$6ish per book. The Book Depository has free shipping worldwide. Yup, free. This is where it kills Amazon US, which WOULD come out on top every time were it not for their ridiculously expensive shipping. The Aussie stores and sites were just ridiculously expensive full stop. So I've gotten myself $350 worth of books this afternoon for $120, including the shipping. Go me.

And with that... it is home time.

This is one I've been meaning to do for a while too, over on my fellow web design student's blog sorrowfulunfounded.

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they’ve printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own weblog / journal so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.”

 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – read fair chunks of it. Love early old testament, especially the conflicting Genesis accounts.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I’ve read probably about 8 or 9. I really enjoy Shakespeare, I WILL read them all!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger I own this, it’s sitting in my bookcase waiting for me to have a holiday and time to read
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald another one that I picked up on sale at some point and haven’t had time to read
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll I want to give this one another read, it’s been years!
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy Another one picked up on sale that is yet to be read!!
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis Have read a couple of them, have the audiobooks of all of them, just haven’t had time to listen!!
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. 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
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel I really didn’t enjoy this one… probably needs a reread, because everyone else seems to love it
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
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
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon I have my mum’s copy of this sitting on the bookshelf…
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Yet another that I own and haven’t had time to read.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
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
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
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 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
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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I’ve read a fair few of these, not the entire collection, but a few
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton I loved these as a kid
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks Urg, this book REALLY disturbed me. Way too much animal cruelty… when I think of this book, I think of ‘toe jam’
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Read 29 / 100.

 Not a bad effort! I don’t like the lumping together of series of books, but I’m not going too badly!

PS I have no idea what's going on with the formatting, but I'm feeling way too lazy to do anything about it right now.

I tend to order my textbooks from Amazon, because it (ridiculously) is cheaper for me to buy them from the US, pay the exchange rate and cop the exchange charge, AND pay postage, than to buy them here.

Anyway, I ordered a stack of books for next semester the other day, as well as one that is 'supplementary' reading for my English unit, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur.

Now, because it's only supplementary reading, I didn't pay much attention to which version I bought, it really isn't something I need to read for the course, but the lecturer had spoken about it, and I wanted to read.

So it arrives today, I get all excited about a weekend of lazy reading, open it up to have a flick.... and it's in Middle English!!

I had to study some Middle English last year, so it isn't the end of the world, but it isn't exactly what I'd call leisurely reading!

So my break came and went, and I didn't get to read nearly as much as I wanted to. But there's a holiday coming up in the next month or so, so got some books during the sales that I want to have read by April.

Top of the list....

The God Delusion

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

This is one that I've been wanting to read for ages - was so tempted to start it last night, but had a stack of uni reading to get through (and then got sidetracked by Guitar Hero...)

I find philosophy and theology fascinating, and am minoring in Religious Studies at uni. I was bought up Catholic (not strict by any means, but went to the Catholic school and went to church growing up) and am not really at all religious anymore, but can't seem to read enough on the subject. I can lose myself for hours on the Religious Tolerance site, and find cults particularly interesting. I've even been tempted to attend Hill$ong, purely because I've heard and read so much about it (I'm holding back on this one because they bombard you with junkmail forever once you go).

levin-peopleglashouse.jpg

I read Tanya Levin's People in Glass Houses late last year. Growing up in the area near Hillsong, I admittedly do struggle to see it as more than a money-hungry cult. I found this book extremely interesting, and it really opened my eyes as to how easily people get drawn into these sort of things.

I actually worked with a girl once who struggled to make friends, and was considering joining Hillsong for the social aspect. There are family friends who have turned around and joined (and later left), not to mention one who was sent to their Mercy Ministries 'retreat' because she didn't fit in with their ideals.

There's an interesting listen here and a great read here ... get down to the bottom bit where they've included quotes from Bobbie Houston's Kingdom Women Love Sex  DVD boxset. It's horrendous some of the crap that comes out of this woman's mouth. I'd buy it for a listen if I didn't know that the cash was going towards her next porsche.