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This week is shaping up to be crazy busy: last night I went out with a group of people I'd never met to see some live improv comedy (v. funny), today my new supervisor pimped me out as a research assistant to someone in his office and I spent the day writing grant proposals and trial protocol. Tomorrow there may be a trek to the wilds of East London for more geeky games, if I have the energy for it. On Thursday I plan to take the afternoon off to go to the Museum of London. And this weekend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pogrebin and I are going to the Tate Modern, and I plan to descend like a hurricane upon the NARS counter at Selfridges and wail at the eyeshadow doubles until I manage to make a decision.
And now, a meme. I am not sure what the list is meant to signify, but it looks like a good excuse for me to have some Opinions About Books.
The books I've read are in bold.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. I have, like. No memory of what this is actually like as a book. I read it when I was fairly wee.
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR. Tolkien. I am pretty sure I'd have read this more than once by now if the movies weren't so amazingly pretty.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling. Man, I remember being giddy with anticipation for the third book to come out.
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee. Studied it in Year 9. I don't think it made a particularly strong impression, though it was the first time I'd been exposed to any American history whatsoever.
6. The Bible - I went to an Anglican school and had that brief fling with the religion, I've read chunks here and there.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. The way to read this one is all in one chunk, curled up in a big chair, with hot chocolate, snuggling into the language and mocking every single character all the way through.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell. This got knocked off my CREEPIEST EVER shelf when I read A Clockwork Orange, but it was there a long time.
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman. I enjoyed these a hell of a lot.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens.
11.Little Women - Louisa M Alcott. AND ALL THE SEQUELS. MAYBE TEN TIMES. MAYBE MORE. I was seriously into Alcott as a kid, let me tell you.
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. I read a very small amount of it once and can't remember why I put it down. I'll pick it up again eventually.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare. For a Shakespeare nut I am not very adventurous, I tend to reread my favourites over and over and then occasionally branch out.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier. Again, I read this way too long ago for me to remember more than a very little about it.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien. I remember my brother and I crammed into the same bed so that we could listen to Mum read this one aloud every night for a while <3
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks. Mmmm yes. I couldn't call it a favourite, but I was very impressed, and I want to hunt down more of his books now.
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger. I feel sorry for everyone who ever had to study this at school. Luckily I just picked it up off my own bat, read it, and then put it down with a sigh of relief.
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. One of the few books I actively wish I'd written.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot.
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald. I think I might have studied this in Year 10 Extension English, but I'm not sure, because the other thing we did was Ros+Guil and that sort of took over my brain in a hurry.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens.
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy.
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams. Another read-aloud book of my mother's. The first time I read (heard) it I thought I would die laughing.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh.
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll. Another one I reread endlessly, though I preferred Through the Looking-Glass.
30. The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame. See, now I am not sure. Did I read it, or just see the animated film? And read Toad of Toad Hall too many times? SURELY I read it.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy. Uh. I will get more than a third of the way through next time. Yes.
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens.
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. I remember I would reread The Horse and His Boy and Voyage of the Dawn Treader repeatedly, but was never as fond of the others.
34. Emma - Jane Austen. <3333 I LOVE THIS BOOK. It's a long syrupy gossipy chick-lit romp.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen. <333333333 EVEN MORE LOVE. Definitely my favourite Austen.
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis. The fact that I love Turkish Delight always made me sad that I couldn't try the delicious drink that the Witch gives Edmund. Uh. Well done there, tiny Fahye. Excellent grasping of the wrong end of the moral stick.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini.
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres. I was in the wrong mood for this when I read it, and too young -- I think I'd like it a hell of a lot more now.
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. Bleh.
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne. Yes! With the awesome illustrations and complete lack of Disneyfication.
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell. Also studied in Year 9. We watched a movie about Peter and Alexandra. Actually we did a lot of stuff that was actually History, in my particular Year 9 English class.
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Hey, it was fun at the time.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I DON'T EVEN KNOW. WHY DOES EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK HAVE THE SAME NAME. I really liked bits of it and was confused for the rest of it.
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving.
45. The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins.
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery. I wasn't nearly as into these books as I was into the Alcott books, but I still liked them.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood. I need to reread this one.
49. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding. ALSO ON CREEPY SHELF. Although I do think Golding is a fantastic writer.
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan.
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel. I did really like this, but not enough that I am a hurry to reread.
52. Dune - Frank Herbert. SO FUCKING GREAT.
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons.
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen. I definitely did this one for English at some point, I remember writing an essay about issues of social status in it.
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56. The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Way too melodramatic for my tastes, though I did think the premisee was awesome.
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. Very, very clever.
60. Love In The Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck.
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. Reading this was like being thrown into a swimming pool full of pink alcoholic drinks. Suuuuuch amazing prose.
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt. HELL YES. This book is a marvel. A shadowy, erudite, amoral, tangled marvel.
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold. I didn't mind it, but it was really too sentimental for my tastes.
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. I still reread this about once a year. It's so, so clever, and never stops being funny.
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie. Yeah, I was definitely silly to read this at fourteen. I loved The Enchantress of Florence SO MUCH that I am determined to read the rest of Rushdie's stuff, including this one again.
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens.
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett. Oh yes. Over and over again.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson. No memory of details. Amusing?
75. Ulysses - James Joyce.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. I really need to own a copy of this, I keep having cravings for it. LOVE.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome. I don't think I got all the way through the series, but we definitely had them all in the house.
78. Germinal - Emile Zola.
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray.
80. Possession - AS Byatt. God, I enjoyed this so much. I want Byatt's brain.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens.
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. \o/ The first half is entertaining, the second half is MIND-BLOWING.
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker. I remember being very impressed with the way Walker puts a story together. I should look up some other books of hers.
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't know how the hell Ishiguro came up with this idea, but I adored it. And I want to see the film -- Emma Thompson!
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert.
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry.
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White. I loved this fiercely as a kid, despite having a healthy Australian dislike of spiders.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom. UGH. I WANT THOSE TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE BACK. What twee, over-hyped rubbish.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. <333!
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton. The amount of Enid Blyton books I owned as a child was fucking scary.
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.
92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Uxpery. Somehow I avoided this as a child, and I only own it in French, and every time I start to patiently translate my way through it I get bored midway.
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks. Why did I read this. Why.
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. Ohhhh so many times.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl. I don't think any child who grows up on Roald Dahl will ever have a deficient imagination.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. TRIUMPH. This book is ridick. Half of it is amazing and the other half of it is Hugo going off on boring tangents about sewers. I doubt I will read it again; ths musical will always be first in my heart anyway.
DEAR SELF, READ JANE EYRE. AND BRAVE NEW WORLD. WHAT.
pogrebin and I are going to the Tate Modern, and I plan to descend like a hurricane upon the NARS counter at Selfridges and wail at the eyeshadow doubles until I manage to make a decision.And now, a meme. I am not sure what the list is meant to signify, but it looks like a good excuse for me to have some Opinions About Books.
The books I've read are in bold.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. I have, like. No memory of what this is actually like as a book. I read it when I was fairly wee.
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR. Tolkien. I am pretty sure I'd have read this more than once by now if the movies weren't so amazingly pretty.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling. Man, I remember being giddy with anticipation for the third book to come out.
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee. Studied it in Year 9. I don't think it made a particularly strong impression, though it was the first time I'd been exposed to any American history whatsoever.
6. The Bible - I went to an Anglican school and had that brief fling with the religion, I've read chunks here and there.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. The way to read this one is all in one chunk, curled up in a big chair, with hot chocolate, snuggling into the language and mocking every single character all the way through.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell. This got knocked off my CREEPIEST EVER shelf when I read A Clockwork Orange, but it was there a long time.
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman. I enjoyed these a hell of a lot.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens.
11.Little Women - Louisa M Alcott. AND ALL THE SEQUELS. MAYBE TEN TIMES. MAYBE MORE. I was seriously into Alcott as a kid, let me tell you.
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. I read a very small amount of it once and can't remember why I put it down. I'll pick it up again eventually.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare. For a Shakespeare nut I am not very adventurous, I tend to reread my favourites over and over and then occasionally branch out.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier. Again, I read this way too long ago for me to remember more than a very little about it.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien. I remember my brother and I crammed into the same bed so that we could listen to Mum read this one aloud every night for a while <3
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks. Mmmm yes. I couldn't call it a favourite, but I was very impressed, and I want to hunt down more of his books now.
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger. I feel sorry for everyone who ever had to study this at school. Luckily I just picked it up off my own bat, read it, and then put it down with a sigh of relief.
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. One of the few books I actively wish I'd written.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot.
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald. I think I might have studied this in Year 10 Extension English, but I'm not sure, because the other thing we did was Ros+Guil and that sort of took over my brain in a hurry.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens.
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy.
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams. Another read-aloud book of my mother's. The first time I read (heard) it I thought I would die laughing.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh.
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll. Another one I reread endlessly, though I preferred Through the Looking-Glass.
30. The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame. See, now I am not sure. Did I read it, or just see the animated film? And read Toad of Toad Hall too many times? SURELY I read it.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy. Uh. I will get more than a third of the way through next time. Yes.
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens.
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. I remember I would reread The Horse and His Boy and Voyage of the Dawn Treader repeatedly, but was never as fond of the others.
34. Emma - Jane Austen. <3333 I LOVE THIS BOOK. It's a long syrupy gossipy chick-lit romp.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen. <333333333 EVEN MORE LOVE. Definitely my favourite Austen.
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis. The fact that I love Turkish Delight always made me sad that I couldn't try the delicious drink that the Witch gives Edmund. Uh. Well done there, tiny Fahye. Excellent grasping of the wrong end of the moral stick.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini.
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres. I was in the wrong mood for this when I read it, and too young -- I think I'd like it a hell of a lot more now.
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. Bleh.
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne. Yes! With the awesome illustrations and complete lack of Disneyfication.
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell. Also studied in Year 9. We watched a movie about Peter and Alexandra. Actually we did a lot of stuff that was actually History, in my particular Year 9 English class.
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Hey, it was fun at the time.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I DON'T EVEN KNOW. WHY DOES EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK HAVE THE SAME NAME. I really liked bits of it and was confused for the rest of it.
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving.
45. The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins.
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery. I wasn't nearly as into these books as I was into the Alcott books, but I still liked them.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood. I need to reread this one.
49. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding. ALSO ON CREEPY SHELF. Although I do think Golding is a fantastic writer.
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan.
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel. I did really like this, but not enough that I am a hurry to reread.
52. Dune - Frank Herbert. SO FUCKING GREAT.
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons.
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen. I definitely did this one for English at some point, I remember writing an essay about issues of social status in it.
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56. The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Way too melodramatic for my tastes, though I did think the premisee was awesome.
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. Very, very clever.
60. Love In The Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck.
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. Reading this was like being thrown into a swimming pool full of pink alcoholic drinks. Suuuuuch amazing prose.
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt. HELL YES. This book is a marvel. A shadowy, erudite, amoral, tangled marvel.
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold. I didn't mind it, but it was really too sentimental for my tastes.
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. I still reread this about once a year. It's so, so clever, and never stops being funny.
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie. Yeah, I was definitely silly to read this at fourteen. I loved The Enchantress of Florence SO MUCH that I am determined to read the rest of Rushdie's stuff, including this one again.
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens.
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett. Oh yes. Over and over again.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson. No memory of details. Amusing?
75. Ulysses - James Joyce.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. I really need to own a copy of this, I keep having cravings for it. LOVE.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome. I don't think I got all the way through the series, but we definitely had them all in the house.
78. Germinal - Emile Zola.
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray.
80. Possession - AS Byatt. God, I enjoyed this so much. I want Byatt's brain.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens.
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. \o/ The first half is entertaining, the second half is MIND-BLOWING.
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker. I remember being very impressed with the way Walker puts a story together. I should look up some other books of hers.
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro. I don't know how the hell Ishiguro came up with this idea, but I adored it. And I want to see the film -- Emma Thompson!
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert.
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry.
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White. I loved this fiercely as a kid, despite having a healthy Australian dislike of spiders.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom. UGH. I WANT THOSE TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE BACK. What twee, over-hyped rubbish.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. <333!
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton. The amount of Enid Blyton books I owned as a child was fucking scary.
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.
92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Uxpery. Somehow I avoided this as a child, and I only own it in French, and every time I start to patiently translate my way through it I get bored midway.
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks. Why did I read this. Why.
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. Ohhhh so many times.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl. I don't think any child who grows up on Roald Dahl will ever have a deficient imagination.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. TRIUMPH. This book is ridick. Half of it is amazing and the other half of it is Hugo going off on boring tangents about sewers. I doubt I will read it again; ths musical will always be first in my heart anyway.
DEAR SELF, READ JANE EYRE. AND BRAVE NEW WORLD. WHAT.
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Oooh, you should read Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It's a children's book, and it's probably one of his best.