6 posts tagged “goodread”
It took me a while to get into it. Gally (the main chickie) and her husband aren't the most likable people around, and it took a while for the whole reincarnation storyline to actually kick in properly. About 80 pages in I was really enjoying it, right up to the last 2 lines of the novel. Then I was just weirded out and finished it feeling a bit unsettled. I've had to leave it for a few days to decide if I actually liked it, all because of these last couple of lines. It's not that they ruin the novel, but they take the main ideas in a completely different direction, which would have been nice to see earlier on, rather than just throwing in the last paragraph.
It's worth the read though. Not as good at The Time Traveler's Wife, but certainly better than a lot of the trash out there. And I did like it, and will probably like it better if I read it again.
Why do I have to wait until Monday to get Breaking Dawn, when it's being released everywhere else at midnight Friday? I'm going to have to avoid the internet this weekend to avoid finding out any spoilers. GRR!!
I absolutely adore the Stephenie Meyer books, so much so that I got myself the audiobooks from Amazon.
I'm doing a stack of document formatting today, which is completely mindless, so I've been listening to Eclipse as I work. There are a few parts of this book that are just so sweet and mushy and gooey, that they make me blush. It's not that they're overly explicit or anything, I'm not quite sure why they have that effect on me, but they do.
So anyway, I'm working away, listening to a particularly sweet Bella / Edward moment, when the CEO wanders out to see how the documents are coming along. And I'm sitting there with this silly grin on my face with red cheeks. Urgh.
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've been wanting to read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights for ages, but haven't been able to justify putting aside the time to read it, with all the uni reading I have.
BUT... I discovered DailyLit today. In 145 daily installments I'll be sent little bite sized chunks of the novel, that won't take too much time out of my day, but will get me through it. This does mean, however, that I'll be in the middle of 3 books (STILL reading The Name of the Rose, and started last night on The Hound of the Baskervilles). No wonder I can't keep any of the storylines straight...
It's funny - for the last 18 months I haven't had a break at all from study. It's just been one subject after another, with maybe a weekend in between if I'm lucky. I'm at the beginning of an entire week off, between the summer study period and the first new one for the year, and I'm really feeling lost. It's so weird not having readings that need to be done, no discussion boards to keep up with, no assignments that I should be collating research for...
That being said, it is quite nice to have a bit of preparation time before the next SP. I think I mentioned earlier that I've done something a little silly, and enrolled for 3 subjects... 2 is considered a full time load, but after hearing that one of them only requires minimal work (allegedly) I thought it would be a good time to try out a web design unit I've been wanting to try forever.
I'm also doing my first level 2 unit this SP, Literature & Culture: Representations of the Medieval. It has a pretty good reading list, but haven't been able to get into the site yet to look at the full course outline.
The novels I have to tackle (and I've already read one and am halfway through 2 of the others.. I'm a bit schizophrenic like that) are:
The Mists of Avalon
This is the one I've already read, and I loved it... so much in fact that for my birthday my sister bought me the next couple in the series (not that I've gotten around to reading them yet). The movie was absolutely shocking, hopefully a comparison won't be part of the course - I don't think I could bring myself to sit through it again!!!
The Castle of Otranto
This is one of the ones I'm halfway through. I really need to put aside an afternoon and just read it, I'm finding I'm just reading the same bit over and over because I'm leaving it too long between readings... however what I've read so far I've liked.
News from Nowhere
I've read bits and pieces of this one too, but months ago when I should have been concentrating on Ancient Rome. It's not as easy a read as the others in the course, but I don't think we're going to be focusing too much on it (although I could really be way off the mark here).
The Name of the Rose
After a few false starts, I'm finally sucked right into this one. I watched about half the film (the young Christian Slater with a bald crown was a bit off-putting) and have been listening to an abridged version while dozing on the bus... so I'm up to 3 different parts of the story, but it's all weaving itself together, and making the book a better read as a result. I always seem to get to the really gory bits while eating though!!
So this will be the full on subject for the next 3 months - I'm just hoping I enjoy it as much as the last english unit I did (and considering I hated most of the novels we did last time, I'm off to a much better start!!).
I'm also really really really looking forward to the web design unit.. and not so much to the scientific communications unit, but that's the one that's allegedly really easy going.
Back to the point - a week with nothing to do... yes, getting ahead with the English novels, but I just hate the lull! I want to get into it again! I operate best when I'm under pressure... giving me this much free time is actually driving me mental.
It isn't helping that they've gotten a temp in at work over the next couple of days to help me out while I'm being 'trained' in another section of the business... the training isn't taking up very much time at all, so I'm left with hours of spare time, but with no desk or, worse, computer. Today was bad, tomorrow will be worse.
Today would have been a total write off without the invite to go to a screening of 10,000 BC. Not the greatest film ever made, but the CGI was amazing, the lead actor was very easy on the eyes (although just seeing how young he is... feeling like a dirty old woman!!), the story was bearable... there are worse ways to spend a Monday night.
