3 posts tagged “reading”
The local library is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. It is housed in a beautiful old building that used to be the courthouse, and then the post office, before being turned into the public library. There are several great pictures online, but none that are free. I really should go out with the camera one of these days. I did. Couldn't get a good shot because of the rain and the traffic, but here it is.
So of course they challenge us to read a hundred books a year, in exchange for a Gold Library Card.
I'm not sure if it comes with any privileges attached, or if its just made of gold foil.
I want it. Badly.
January was a good month for reading books.
Do you think I can rescue March?
So right after vowing that I would go to the library armed with a book list comprised of my Vox neighbors' book recommendations and NYT reviews, I went back to picking random books off the shelves. The resolution lasted all of one visit, which is just as well. How else would I have discovered this?
The best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is a collection of stories and other odds and ends picked from the zine by editors Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. I've read the introduction and the first two stories so far, and I want to dig out all the zines from somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading them.
From the introduction by Dan Chaon, about the writers:
They are gathered over there by the fire, sharpening sticks and muttering amongst themselves. I imagine that they are headed off into the forest to hunt the wild hind called literature, and that they will return near dawn with the creature's severed head held aloft, singing at the top of their lungs.
From Travels with the Snow Queen, by Kelly Link:
You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.
Ladies. Has it ever occured to you that fairy tales aren't easy on the feet?
This story is followed by Scotch: An Essay into a Drink, which is exactly what it claims to be, an essay on Scotch replete with recipes and movie recommendations, followed by an apology for the chocolate stains on the book.
Grandmother is calm; a porcelain miniature.
The parrots ferry her across the room
strung from their feathered breasts.
- David Findlay, Unrecognizable.
And just like that, all my weekend plans have changed. I'll be buried in the carpet with this collection, and hopefully there will be some chocolate in the future. Have a great weekend. :)
( 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?
