Wednesday, October 25, 2006

A meme from Reassigned Time:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

3. Fifth Sentence: To proceed.
4. Next 4 sentences: BOOK 1. Folio, Chapter IV. (Hump Back). - This whale is often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale.

Monday, October 23, 2006

This list was inspired by a post on A Work in Progress:

The bolded books are the ones I have read. I have put asterisks by the ones that are on my Thursday Thirteen list to read in 2007.

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert*
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

25. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope*
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad*
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
45. Ulysses - James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster *
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis - Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
55. USA - John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague - Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web - E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
68 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
90. Money - Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories - Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential - James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald
A late Thursday Thirteen to read in 2007:

Villette – Charlotte Bronte
Romola – George Eliot
Henry Esmond – Thackeray
Story of an African Farm – Olive Schreiner
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
David Copperfield – Dickens
Buddenbrooks – Mann
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
New Grub Street – Gissing
The Way We Live Now – Trollope
Pamela – Richardson
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
Tender is the Night – Fitzgerald

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Another book finished last week:
Betty Fussell, My Kitchen Wars.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Books read in 2006

17. Island of Dr. Moreau - Wells
16. War and Peace - Tolstoy
15. Three Sisters - Chekhov
14. Desiree - Selinko
13. Rebecca's Tale - Beauman
12. The False Inspector Dew - Lovesey
11. The Night Watch - Waters
10. The Leopard - di Lampedusa
9. Bleak House - Dickens
8. The Master - Toibin
7. Author! Author! - Lodge
6. The Deadly Embrace - Mrazek
5. Middlemarch - Eliot
4. The Voyage Out - Woolf
3. The Light Years - Howard
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Rowling (reread)
1. Phineas Finn - Trollope

and while there may not be as many as I would like, some few are weighty ones!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

I finally did it! I have a blog now! I have only been threatening to do this for a couple of years now. But in order to respond to a post on another blog, I must be a blogger. Therefore I am. More to follow!