Another list

Because I’m a sucker for lists. Apparently, the BBC think most people have read only 6 books from this list. I think I can beat that. Bolding the ones I’ve read, as usual. Two oddities I noticed: You have Complete works of Shakespeare AND Hamlet, and you have The Chronicles of Narnia AND The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Huh? Read one get one free?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
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
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip 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 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, a lot, anyway)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
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
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
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
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – 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 Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransom
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 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

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

shafferI could have sworn I had blogged this already, but I must have dreamt it.

This book is a bit of a gem. I’m sure I’m not the first to say so. I picked it up in London this summer, with a title like that I was hardly likely to pass it up.

Epistolary novels are delightful when they work and excessively tiresome when they don’t. Luckily, this is an example of an epistolary novel that works.

I laughed and I cried, both quite literally, it doesn’t get much better. How it’s all going to end becomes obvious quite early on, but that’s part of the charm. This is a feelgood book of the highest order. Better than chicken soup.

Mary Ann Shaffer sadly died in 2008, so no hope for more gems from her, unfortunately.

Summarising again

Really, where does the time go? Recent (well, since may…) reads in no particular order (and probably missing a few):

The series that will no longer be named. All in a row. Lovely. I am still pretty happy with the ending, but noticed a few minor inconsistencies along the way this time.

Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings by Greg Gutfeld. Abysmal. Didn’t finish it. I’ll be writing more about it at some point, because, really! But, you know, take this as a warning to stay WELL away.

Packaging Girlhood. Quite illuminating. Meant to write more on this, too. Ah well.

Consumer Kids. Followed naturally. Very informative on how kids are not only inundated with ads, but used to advertise to friends and provide market research, quite frequently unknowingly. Should probably be read by every parent.

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith. Perfection, as usual.

This Charming Man by Marian Keyes. Keyes back on great form and with a serious theme this time, which she excels at treating.

The Brontes Went to Woolworth by Rachel Ferguson. Reread because I had to take it down to copy out one of my favourite quotes ever:

A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, «Do you like reading?» which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread – absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation.

Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer. As usual Archer spins a pretty – and gripping – tale. However, knowing how it all ends spoiled it a bit for me. Not that I know all that much about Mount Everest climbs and such, but I do know a little, and the prologue reveals what I didn’t. I suppose part of it is knowing it doesn’t end in «they lived happily ever after», which I’m a sucker for and which Archer frequently delivers with aplomb. Still, exceedingly readable.

And that made me realise I’ve forgotten to note reading A Prisoner of Birth, also by Archer, which was REALLY good, just what the doctor ordered, and Archer – to me – at his best. I happen to love courtroom dramas, too, so this had pretty much everything. No idea when I read it, though, so I popped it in here… Probably shortly after the paperback was issued, but I’m not sure.

The Thirteenth Tale – Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield was passed on to me from my mother, who thought I’d like it. And I did, sort of. After all it’s hard not to like a story where books are so much the be all and end all.

It’s a hard book to put down, and the tale was gripping enough, but once I had read the last page I was left feeling somewhat unsatisfied. Though the plot is clever and the booklore abundant I missed some sort of deeper connection with the story. None of the characters really stayed with me past the last page, and they shoukd have.

Anyway, here’s one of the passages on reading to which I cried «Oh, sister!» (well, not really, but I certainly felt recognition):

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings – Greg Gutfeld

I bought Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings by Greg Gutfeld in London in July, partly because, well «A Miserable Yank Finds Happiness in the UK» appealed to me as an anglophile, partly because I like books about Britain, and partly because it says

«A Bill Bryson for the noughties» – Daily Mirror

on the front. I guess I should have known not to trust a quote from the Daily Mirror. Shame on me.

Well, I can tell you, a Bill Bryson he ain’t.

AND, and I can’t believe the first time I ever feel the need to say this in a blog post it’s for a review of a «travel book» on Britain: Trigger warning. Really.

I have an admission to make, I didn’t finish the book. I almost stopped reading at around page 20 and kept going partly because I was horribly fascinated and partly because I thought «someone really ought to point a few things out as regards this book». I made it to page 138 out of 239 before finally giving in.

The blurb on the back starts out cheerily «Battered sausages. Warm beer. Earl Grey tea in chipped mug. Morris dancers. Pub dogs. Car boot sales.» Which sounded good to me. I wish they’d added «Misogynist jokes» to the list, and I might have known to stay clear.

I would need to reread the first 20 or so pages to find the first place where my inner editor went «Strike this!», but the first instance that compelled me to mark the page for future reference was this:

Why do girls with backpacks always seem so tempting? I think it’s because if a week goes by and nobody has heard from them, it’s OK. (p. 22)

You what?

WHAT?

And so it went on. And on. Be wiser than me, don’t try to read this book.

Various bookbuying here and there

First, from a pleasant surprise gift-certificate win at Bokkilden.no:

  • Jeg vil ha lyset på! (Lille Prinsesse) – Tony Ross
  • Jeg vil ha middagen min! (Lille Prinsesse) – Tony Ross
  • Jeg vil bli… (Lille Prinsesse) – Tony Ross

For the lass, naturally, and Newborn for the husband to make up the 500 NOK.

Then from amazon, Forever Young for the lass and her grandfather (who is a Dylan-fanatic), and Packaging Girlhood for me (which is what I’m reading at the moment).

And today I walked into Øksendal to look for Karius og Baktius (we’re seeing it in the theatre in two weeks, and I thought it would be good for the lass to be familiar with the story first) and found they had a massive sale on because they are refurbishing. So I bagged:

  • Karsten må på sykehus – Anne Holt og Tor Åge Bringsværd
  • Musikantene kommer til byen – Torbjørn Egner
  • Bombadilla Brun og den udødelige makrellen – Thore Hansen (flinke mannen)
  • What I Talk about when I Talk about Running – Haruki Murakami
  • The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Flea market, Heimdal Samfunnshus

A great, big haul. We arrived shortly before they were to wrap up and it was «fill a bag for 30 kroner» (less than 3 GBP/4 USD). Well, we filled a box, with two jig-saw puzzles, a pair of wellingtons for the lass and books a-plenty, and they charged us 30 kroner for that. You didn’t hear us complaining.

Someone had cleaned out their Sci-fi/fantasy collection, so the husband stocked up on Poul Anderson and whatnot while I bagged (uhm, boxed):

  • Restoree, The Ship who Sang and Killashandra by Anne McCaffrey
  • The Ivanhoe Gambit, The Timekeeper Conspiracy and The Pimpernel Plot by Simon Hawke (are they any good? I have no clue, but with titles involving Ivanhoe and Pimpernel, how could I pass them by?)
  • Azur – Kapteinenes planet by Jon Bing (I think it’s a duplicate, in which case I’ll bookcross)
  • I klokkenes tid by Maria Gripe (I know I’ve read it several times, but I can’t remember anything about it)
  • Over to You by Roald Dahl
  • Veien til Xanadu – En reise i Marco Polos fotspor by Torbjørn Færøvik
  • Alle vi barna i Bakkebygrenda by Astrid Lindgren
  • Meer grønt er Græsset ed. by Knut Imerslund, a collection of Norwegian poetry for children
  • Milly Molly Mandy by Joyce Lankester Brisley (in Norwegian)
  • Ponnigjengen klarer alle hindre by Monica Alm (will bookcross)
  • Trylledrikken by Michael Ende (duplicate, will bookcross)
  • Hvite løgner by Dea Trier Mørch and Sara Trier (duplicate, will bookcross)

Until I Find You – John Irving

I brought Until I Find You by John Irving along to The Gambia in February, despite being in the middle of Aubrey/Maturin. I thought it would be a good idea to bring a book I could leave behind. Which it would have been, of course, if I’d had more time to read so that I had actually finished it, or if it had been uninteresting enough to dump half-finished. I didn’t and it wasn’t, so it came back home again, and having (finally) finished O’Brian last week I picked up Irving again.

I have some issues with Irving. This is only the second Irving I have actually managed to finish (the first being A Widow for One Year), and it’s a question of circumstance rather than of them being essentially different to the ones I tried and failed with. In both cases I have brought them along for travel reading, so that in both cases there haven’t been all that many other options beckoning me. This is to Irving’s benefit, because I find his novels really slow to start with. In the case of A Widow for One Year I positively disliked the first part, getting more interested once Ruth-as-adult entered the scene, and it wasn’t until two-thirds of the way through that it acquired the can’t-put-it-down-quality of a really good read. Until I Find You similarly drags at the beginning, and though I found Jack and Alice more interesting all the way through, I probably wouldn’t have persisted if I hadn’t already read A Widow for One Year and known Irving to be a slow starter (unlike the Vienna trip, I did bring other books to The Gambia, so I had a choice).

That said, once the pace picks up after a twist in the tale, it really picks up, and I resented having to put the book down for any reason throughout the last 200 or so pages. I felt a little let down by the ending when I read it, but only a little, and it’s growing on me.

Terra Incognita – Sarah Wheeler

A bookcrossing copy:

The book is pretty good, and I did enjoy it, but it didn’t quite hit home. I think one reason is I simply don’t understand the obsessive fascination with Antarctica which Sara Wheeler certainly seems to share with a lot of people, and she doesn’t really help me understand it either. I’m not suggesting she should have explained better, as I’m pretty sure it’s not something one can explain, like a phobia, obsession is hardly rational, but I do wish she’d made me feel it. Without that the book is a bit too long, too dry, dare I say too cold?