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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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If you ever have a Monday morning free (because that's when the museum is!), you should try the Courtauld Gallery! It has a legitimately amazing permanent collection and mouthwatering next exhibition if you'll be around Londres in Feb. Also, the museum gift shop is very reasonably priced and interestingly stocked. (So naturally I spent more money there than anywhere else.)
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I want to hear about your brief affair with religion!
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I actually have something like a normal workweek at the moment, so Monday mornings aren't free, but the website says it's open every day? Just free admission on Mondays. So! I will see what I can do, this is technically my last free weekend in London.
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Wellll, I started going to a youth group at a nearby church, where I made some great friends and got to sing HEAPS OF SONGS, and I sort of went along with the Jesus stuff so I could keep on with the friends and the singing. I got baptised and confirmed and all this stuff, because I am an overachiever in all my hobbies, but after three years I decided that not even the music was worth the growing feeling of hypocrisy. The end! (It was one of those completely laid back, friendly, cheerful churches where the atmosphere has nothing to do with judgement and everything to do with joy. A nice place to hang out! But...the Jesus stuff. Sigh.)
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I don't own it in English :(
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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.