15 posts tagged “books”
( I am exceeding my rule of one post a day, but I can't believe I missed this! Doh.)
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list
in your own blog 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 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To
Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four -
George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip 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 The Complete works of Shakespeare (Tried, and failed. Maybe its time to try again.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian
Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time
Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind -
Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
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
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth
Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield –
Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
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 Meaney - 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
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
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
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’s 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
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
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid
Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine
de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
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
Is Hamlet not included in the complete works of Shakespeare?
How, then, should we live?
I started reading this book the night before. I took it to work yesterday. I returned home and burrowed into the couch, staying up all night, giving up another 'Movies and Mental Illness' event at the hospital to finish the last chapter.
Mason Ambrose, a philosophy graduate student withdraws his final dissertation on moral grounds. Fittingly, he is then hired as a morality teacher for the teenaged Londa, living on the Isla de Sangre, who has a blank slate for a conscience. Soon he discovers that he has not been told the truth about the accident that rendered Londa amnesiac, and it leads to series of startling discoveries.
Mason starts working on thought experiments with Londa, and they are surprisingly successful. Successful enough that after her molecular geneticist mother's death, Londa embarks on an idiosyncratic social justice project, driving her erstwhile concience into despair.
In the words of an Amazon reviewer, it is 'crazy but wildly entertaining mad hatter intellectual joyride of a book.' Highly recommended for students of biology, philosophy, genetics, biotechnology, and all those who love a good read.
NYT review
People are sometimes easily overlooked. The holes they leave behind when they aren't there any more are far harder to miss.
Such home truths are interspersed in the narrative, which follows the war between the Fey and the rest of humanity [loosely speaking, since it includes goblins, dwarves, and other friendly anomalies]. Our feckless protagonist stumbles through his life, slaying dragons [I sat on it!!] , rescuing damsels, and generally being a hero.
The book also attempts to answers some burning questions [as posted by Steve S on the Amazon review]--
"1. Can you take it with you? Yes, merely setup an account at the Bank of the Dead and deposit, making sure you burn cash and deposit slips thoroughly.
2. Is your company car really the bosses sister? Yes.
3. Does life ever produce happy endings? Nah."
Since our library ran out of Terry Pratchett, I'm not complaining.
The Encyclopedia of Life is being released on Thursday! Joy to the world!
As a child, I was obsessed with books in general and encyclopedias in particular. While we never owned one, I spent hours in the school library pouring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica, looking at everything and nothing. With time, the opportunities to read encyclopedias (even dictionaries) with no specific purpose became less. It was a big loss.
Now, scientists are writing the Book of All Species, an online compendium of one page descriptions of every species ever known to mankind. Thats 1.8 million species in all. They are starting slow, with 30,000 species to begin with, but plan to expand as feedback comes in. In its final form, users will be able to manipulate how much information they want to look at, categorize it by special interests, and use it for research.
I can't wait.
Link to the NYT article.
I hate 15-minute downtown parking. It gives me barely enough time to rush inside, drop my books off at Returns, run down through the fiction section pulling off books at random, check them out and return back to the car. After all these years, I still refuse to make a list of books to be read, going simply by interesting looking titles/cover blurbs. To read all those blurbs, I need more time, parking people!
Blurb for Paradise Postponed-- Imagine a novel by Trollope seasoned by a smidgen of Nabokov, and you'll have some notion of the joys...
I ask you, how could I resist? They even used the word notion, which is my favorite word in the whole world.
Diana Gabaldon is a great story-teller. She's mostly classified as a romance writer, and certainly her website does nothing to dispel the notion (including the cheesy portrait of Claire..I always imagined her to be more solid, earthier..more like DG herself.) But the richness of her stories, the details, the whimsy, the history, makes them so much more than just romances. That she crosses over into the sci-fi/fantasy genre with time-travel only makes it better.
I first bought ' The Fiery Cross' on my solo flight back to India for my sis-in-law's wedding, going simply by the fact that it was the maximum number of pages for my buck. The next three days passed by in a blur, as I traveled through continents, suffered jetlag, and hosted a wedding, all while being Completely immersed in the novel. It was a delightful, exciting, amazing story. Even the sex was good.
Today I found these two books in the 'new' section of the library. Yay.
I had been resisting.
Then I looked at Amazon, just for fun, really.
56 reviews. 55 five-star. 1 four-star. The things they said, oh.
What the heck. I bought it.
Along with the tripod.
Someone take my credit card away.
