reading meme

My total: 41
      Of them, 24 were for school and 23 were for myself, which I think is a pretty good balance.
      Also, though, I think Hamlet is included in the Complete Works and Lion, Witch, Wardrobe is included in the Chronicles, so I've actually read, according to the list, either 39 or something like two or three hundred. And I didn't count Lord of the Rings since I didn't finish it, or His Dark Materials, or the ones I have and haven't read yet, or the ones I claimed to have read for school and actually cliffs-noted. Because an English Major mostly teaches you how to BS.


The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety and, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (I've read one whole one and parts of the other two...)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (one of my favorite books, even with all the impenetrable Yorkshire)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (started this one and just couldn't do it. He comes across as so... condescending. If he doesn't care about his characters, why should I?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (the actual and the condensed classics)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hard13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, most of them...)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (don't remember much; it wasn't life-changing for me, apparently)
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 Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (I was supposed to...)
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 (are there still people who haven't read this? really? I read it when I was 9, and again every year until I was, like, 16)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
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 (loved it, in all it's confusing glory)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving (did not like)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (and all of the rest of the series)
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
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
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 (Parts)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (I know I had to read this at some point in the UK school system, but I don't remember if I finished it)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (one of my favs of classic kidlit)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (love me some Bill Bryson)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce               
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (on the shelf)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt (makes me want to be a full-time academic)
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 (I have this on my shelf, but I haven't read it yet)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (this was the first book with more than ten pages I ever read!)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in the Kindle)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-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

book 7: city of bones by cassandra claire

I read alot. Even before I decided to read 100 books in a year, I read all the time, and as such, it's gotten a little hard to surprise me with a book, especially with YA, which seems to generally revel in the limitations of it's age-group. Or maybe I just put up less with bad writing, since I know how it can be better now?

City of Bones surpised me. All the time, at every turn. When I wrote the notes yesterday, I was half way through; I read most of the rest before work yesterday, a little more at bedtime, and the rest these past three hours-- even for me, that's a fast read. It was because it was easy to read. It never lulled in pacing, it always took the unexpected path in plot, and it always came out differently then I thought it would, even if I'd taken the time to worry about which way it was going, which I generally didn't because it was moving so quickly and brilliantly that I wanted to keep reading, each chapter pulling me into the next one perfectly. I'm not surprpised that Cassie Claire can write well, having read alot of her fanfic, but I'm surpised that stories that feel so real and so fresh still exist in the world. It gives me faith that there's still space for me in the genre-- and this one, though classed as YA, stands well with the rest of the supernatural genre. It deals with the adult themes that kids of fifteen and seventeen have to face in a clean and honest way, it handles the weirdness of a parallel world view with grace and balance, it navigates the horror of finding out things aren't as you thought and that parents often mess things up in unexpected ways with a clarity that's refreshing, and it even manages to tacke the ideas of heaven and hell a little bit, and recast them in a postmodern framework that will make sense to kids as well as it makes sense to me. There's a little geekiness, and an in-joke or two, there's reality in the world and it's characters, and there's that juxtaposition of beauty and horror that these sorts of books need to master to really work, and that Claire has down pat. It's as bloody as a vampire novel, sweet as a coming of age book, and it's solid. It's something you could go to New York and trace the pathways of, even if the places named don't even exist-- it feels like they do. It never pulls punches; in fact, it revels in the fact that things are hard, confusing, unexpected and often unwanted and unfair, and people have to push through them, and it comes out the other side changed forever, but reassuringly intact, at least for now. It's a damned good read.

I'm starving for the next one, and I only just finished this one half an hour ago.

in-reading notes: city of bones

I've been meaning to read this book for years, since I was an LJ fan of Cassie Claire after discovering the Very Secret Diaries and her wonderful potter-fic (there's a reference in one of the chapters that made me happy that I was a fan beforehand-- see if you can catch it). I don't know why I didn't pick it up before; I think it's just because I never saw it before-- until I was at some backwater WalMart with my brother, and they happened to have a really good (and cheap) specfic YA section, featuring all three of the books. I wish I could have afforded all of them, and I was reasonably sure I'd like them, having read some of her other stuff, but I couldn't get them all and I wanted to save what little money I had just in case I didn't like it inexplicably.

Now I wish I'd been able to get them all, because now I'll have to hunt them all down (probably on Amazon, where they'll cost more, since our walmart has nothing and our B&N leaves much to be desired), because I'm really loving this book.

The characters are all interesting, teenagers in a way that feels honest and real-- and best of all, makes sense. When you're actually a teen, all your reactions seem normal and honest, and when you're older you're all, like, what the crap was I thinking?? But these kids make sense, being kids and a weird world that shouldn't make sense to people so young, and they make do with what they have. I love Clary. I want to name a daughter after her in hopes that she'd be as strong and compassionate and understanding and persistent. All their interractions are interesting to me, and I'm not sure who I want to root for as my shippy little brain looks for an OTP to ship-- which is good, because it means the book isn't predictable. I'm sad I have to go to work later; it means I'll have to stop reading.