You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.

And you, dear reader?

Post from: She Reads Books

No Arguments Here

On your nightstand now:

This must be divided into categories, actually. There are too many.

Current & upcoming for school: Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf; Ulysses, by James Joyce; Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe; Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih.

Purchased today: Jpod, by Douglas Coupland; The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, by Robertson Davies; Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett; England, England, by Julian Barnes; Jeeves in the Offing, by P G Wodehouse; Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte; Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K Jerome; Indescretions of Archie, by P G Wodehouse; Too Busy Not to Pray, by Bill Hybels; The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly; The Bromeliad, by Terry Pratchett.

Upcoming for Review: Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick; The Map Thief, by Heather Terrell; Stalin’s Children, by Owen Matthews; Game Widow, by Wendy Kays; To Catch the Lightning, by Alan Cheuse; probably several more that I’ve forgotten about.

Book you’ve “faked” reading:

I’ve never read Paradise Lost, despite being required to do so for a course in second year. And despite successfully writing about it at great length on an exam, come to think of it.

I was able to get away with this because our prof was very old and quite lovely to talk to, but his preferred method of lecture was to read his favourite passages aloud and then explain the rest of the book to us. I skipped reading The Faerie Queene for the same reason (and also because it’s dead boring).

Book you’ve bought for the cover:

Most of them, actually. Why? How do you choose books?

Favourite book when you were a child:

Lots of them. See here for details. A stand-out still-favourite is Suzanne Martel’s The King’s Daughter.

Book that changed your life:

In terms of non-fiction, I would list the Bible, first and foremost — also Canada: A Protrait in Letters by Charlotte Gray, and various things by Pierre Berton. Did you know that Canadian history is cool and interesting? I sure didn’t . . . until I read the aforementioned texts.

Top five favourite authors:

Oh dear. This is probably the hardest question on this whole list — how can anyone limit themselves to just five? I don’t know. But with the caveat that this list is alway subject to change, I’ll pick five for this moment: Jane Austen, Terry Pratchett, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Laurence, and Joseph Heller.

Books you recommend as regeneration when people say, “I’m bored by almost all contemporary American writers”:

Easy! Start reading Canadian authors! I mean, duh.

Book you can’t believe that everyone has not read and loved:

Occasionally I run into people who have read Pride and Prejudice and haven’t loved it. And it always makes me go “Whuuuuaaa?” because that is one of my favouritest favourite books ever. Same goes for Lord of the Rings, and Ulysses. Frankly, I think that people just get intimidated by books over a certain size — which is a great pity, because there are some huge and fantastic books out there.

Book you are an “evangelist” for:

Yellowknife, by Steve Zipp, is a pretty strong contender for the best book I’ve read this year. My review is here; I do encourage everyone to at least check it out (you can read the first chapter online). It is an excellent book. Plus, Steve is really nice.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Your mom! Ooh!! Burn!!!

Actually, I can’t think of any. I like reading books the second time — I notice a lot more of the little details that can just slip by when I’m focussed on the plot.

Post from: She Reads Books

Shelf-Awareness Reading Questionnaire

You’re Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you’ve really heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Post from: She Reads Books

Glad We’ve Got This Sorted Out

Six Random Things About Myself:

1. You know how people can roll their tongues? I can do that. I can also roll my tongue upside-down (like an inverted ‘u’). What you have to do is brace the sides of your tongue against your bottom teeth, and then pop the top up. Go on, try it.

2. I love teacups. I love how delicate they are, and how fun to drink tea out of, and all the different patterns. I don’t have a large collection — okay, so far I only have three — but they’re the first thing I look at after books whenever I’m in an antique shop or suchlike.

3. As far as I am able to remember, I more or less taught myself to read, with Garfield cartoons of all things. I used to sit in the sun-porch and page through them. I’m not sure when looking turned to reading, but somewhere along the way it did. (Isn’t it amazing that people learn to read, when you think about it? All these weird shapes suddenly turn into things with meaning — and then the whole world opens up.)

4. I have written two and a half rather awful novels, thanks to NaNoWriMo, which I discovered in my last year of high school. I think that some bits may have had their moments, but taken corporately, gosh they’re bad. But it was a good experience: I met lots of cool people who also submitted themselves to that particular flavour of insanity, and got to write a lot as well. And perhaps some of the better bits may be salvaged to other projects.

5. I have a thing for stationery and journals. Especially journals. I love looking at the covers, I love cracking them open for the first time. I love seeing rows and rows of them in the shop, and picking out that special one to take home. And I love filling them — but only for a while. Usually I only get about a quarter of the way through, or less, before it goes on the shelf and I wonder about getting a new one. I’m just a user, I guess.

6. I can, haltingly, play the Rubber Ducky song from Sesame Street on the piano.

Rules: Link to the person that tagged you, post the rules somewhere in your meme, write the six random things, tag six people in your post, let the tagees know they’ve been chosen by leaving a comment on their blog, let the tagger know your entry is posted.

Tagged: Honestly, I don’t have any idea who’s done this or not. If you’d like to, consider yourself tagged!

Two challenges:

Because everyone needs more reasons to read (well … not really) I’ve decided to join two more challenges! It looks like I’ll be finishing the 100+ Books Challenge within the next two or three months, and so I’m eager to find something new.

First: A Daring Book Challenge

The idea of this one is to read either one book from each category, or nine books from the list entire, or several complete series from the list, or all of the books! I haven’t picked my books yet — there are LOTS — but I’m excited for this challenge. There are a lot of excellent books on the list, and many I’ve never heard of.

Second: Book Awards II

This is a somewhat less hefty challenge, where the goal is to read ten award-winning books in ten months. Easy-peasy! Again, I haven’t chosen my books yet, but I will try to do so (for both) in the next few days and will update my “Challenges” page accordingly.

And if you’ve read this far, and don’t know about it already, be sure to take a look at my giveaway — open until June 3!

Post from: She Reads Books

Six Things and Two Challenges

At any rate, the list below is of the top 106 books tagged as “unread” on LibraryThing.

The rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
*Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion [so! boring!]
*Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote [read the first 200 pages...]
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway [started once, started twice, and then finally I just pretended to read it]
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha [started, put down, never picked up]
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales [I've read a number of them, but not all of it]
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles [a favourite]
Oliver Twist
*Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune [booooooooring -- but I finished it]
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter [holy cow, Hawthorne is prosy]
*Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
*Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye [hated it]
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
*The Three Musketeers [another longtime favourite]

In unrelated news, I’m now watching Stardust for the third time in a week and a half. It’s just so good!

Post from: She Reads Books

Top 106 Books on LibraryThing

Besides Pride and Prejudice, anyway. That’s just a given.

Austen, Jane
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Colfer, Eoin
Davies, Robertson
Eliot, George
Fforde, Jasper
George, Elizabeth
Heinlein, Robert A.
I
Jonson, Ben
Kay, Guy Gavriel
Lewis, C. S.
Moon, Elizabeth
Nesbit, Edith
O
Pratchett, Terry
Queen, Ellery
Rutherfurd, Edward
Sayers, Dorothy L.
Tolkein, J. R. R.
U
V
Wodehouse, P. G.
X
Yancy, Philip
Zelazny, Roger

I couldn’t fill a couple of letters. Anybody have recommendations for authors to read whose surnames start with I, O, U, V, and X? That reads like a mediocre scrabble hand — although I note that one could make “vox” for 13 points before any multipliers.

I note also that my list runs fairly heavily to fantasy, science fiction, and mystery writers.  I’m not surprised; I think it would have been that way even if I had made other choices (since some letters have an abundance of authors to their credit).

Has anyone else done this? Drop a comment and I’ll come visit.

Post from: She Reads Books

From A to Z

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7.The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

52/100 isn’t bad. And now I have a reading list!

Post from: She Reads Books

Meme: 100 Books

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
There are many. Mostly romances, especially that strange brand of “inspiring” Christian romance novels. In my experience, those are almost inevitably bad. I often shy away from reading books just because they’re popular; I’ve never read anything by Dan Brown, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, or Danielle Steel. (This doesn’t apply in every case. I have read all of the Harry Potter books).

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
Oh, my stars. I think that I would have afternoon tea with Mrs. ‘Arris of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, by Paul Gallico. We would drink strong tea, water the geraniums, put a few bob down on the horse races, and have a good gossip. For a night of clubbing, I would choose the inimitable Mr. Darcy from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. We would stay for five minutes, grouse a bit about the crowd, and then go find something better to do. Lastly, I’d choose to have Jasper Fforde‘s version of Miss Havisham for gunfights, drag races, and/or book sales.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Oh. My. Word. I had to read a fair chunk of it in second year; never is far too soon to read the entirety.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?
I’ve never read Paradise Lost, although I was supposed to have done so, and even wrote an essay about it on a mid-term exam (successfully). Sometimes, depending on the prof, it’s enough to just listen hard in lecture and you don’t have to read the books. Not that I would advocate such lazy behaviour. Ahem.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?
I always forget that I haven’t read Mansfield Park — because why wouldn’t I have read Mansfield Park? Whenever someone in my acquaintance reads it, I get all “Oh yes, that one’s funny. They put on a play, which was of course very scandalous at the time.” But I haven’t read it.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Adviser to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)
I’d start with children’s classics (The Phantom Tollbooth, Anne of Green Gables and series, Little House on the Prairie and series, The Neverending Story, etc). After that, a brief detour through YA before moving on to hallmarks of Western Literature. From the classics, I’d move my VIP to non-Western works, followed by modern stuff. (And by “classics” I don’t just mean the DWEM literary sort of stuff, but also classic science fiction, classic fantasy, classic mystery….)

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
That’s hard to choose. I would probably go with either Russian, French, or Spanish. Of those three, probably Russian, because it would be nice to have perfect reading comprehension without the slough of learning a new alphabet.

A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
Most definitely, Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings. LotR I read yearly already. P&P gets read a fair piece more than that.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
Well — this is hard to answer because I am so very, very new to book blogging. Four-posts new. No readers new. But I think that I hope to gain many things, mostly new avenues for blathering on about books, new internet-friends, and many new books to read.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
My dream library is quite spacious, taking up perhaps an entire wing of the (dream) house. It’s all done up in dark walnut panels, with at least one fireplace, overstuffed chairs, and a cat. It’s not dingy or over-dim, though, as there are enormous windows which may be opened to let in the breeze when the weather is fine. Since this is a dream library, the weather is nearly always fine — Spring-in-England fine — but occasionally there is a right good thunderstorm. The shelves are very tall, and the books are arranged therein (thereon?) with a completely esoteric filing system that will make sense to only me. Lots of them will be hardbacks, but my very favourites will also be in softcover as they’re easier to travel with. No books will be bound with cloth, because that gives me the heeblie-jeeblies. I’ll have read almost everything in the library. There will always be a to-be-read pile stacked beside the comfiest armchair. There would be one of those old-fashioned globes, probably near a window so that it can be dramatically illuminated from time to time. Such wall-space as is not filled with books will be taken up by old portraits of benevolent-looking ancestors of the generic sort. At least a half-dozen books throughout the library would be hollowed out so that I could store secret things in them. And one of the shelves would swing out from the wall when the right brick in the fireplace was pushed, revealing a washroom, kitchenette, fold-down bed, and computer station — so that I’d never have to leave.

Post from: She Reads Books

Eva’s Meme

1) Grab yourself three books:

a) The Light Fantastic (Pratchett)
b) English Renaissance Drama (Ed. Bevington)
c) Middlemarch (Eliot)

2) Turn to the following pages: page 100 of book 1, page 200 of book 2, and page 300 of book 3.

Done!

3) Grab the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences on each page and repost them.

a) “Shouldn’t we help?”
“I’m sure we’d only get in the way,” said Rincewind hurriedly. “You know what it’s like to have people looking over your shoulder when you’re busy.”

b) “Theridamas, my friend, take here my hand,
Which is as much as if I swore by heaven
And called the gods to witness of my vow:
Thus shall my heart be still combined with thine
Until our bodies turn to elements
And both our souls aspire celestial thrones.
Techelles and Casane, welcome him.”
“Welcome, renowned Persian, to us all!”

c) Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study, according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistance it might never have begun. But she had succeeded in making it a matter of course that she should take her place at an early hour in the library and have work either of reading aloud or copying assigned her. The work had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon had adopted an immediate intention: there was to be a new parergon, a small monograph on some lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries whereby certain assertations of Warburton’s could be corrected.

4) Mash them into one text.

Rincewind and Mr. Casaubon sat under an apple tree, contemplating the problem of Dorothea’s continued insistence on being near her husband while he worked, and on aiding him if possible. Casaubon was trying to prepare a monograph impeaching another scholar’s ideas, but Dorothea was constantly getting in his way. Suddenly, up strode Warburton, the very man whose scholarship Mr. Casaubon had just been preparing to publicly question.

“Theridamas, my friend, take here my hand,” boomed Warburton, thrusting his hand out in a genial fashion, “Which is as much as if I swore by heaven, and called the gods to witness to my vow!”

“I beg your pardon?” said Rincewind.

Mr. Casaubon peered up at Warburton. “My friend,” he remarked, “I fear that the summer sun, in conjunction with the study of those fascinating Egyptian mysteries on which you write, has addled you in the mind.”

Warburton paid him no heed. He sat down next to the two men.

“Techelles! Casane! Welcome him!”

“Welcome who?” asked Rincewind.

“No matter,” said Mr. Casaubon, “the fit will surely leave him shortly. He becomes mad when he studies with too great vigour.”

“I shall welcome the renowned Persian,” beamed Warburton, “and shall my heart be joined with thine until our bodies turn to elements, and both our souls aspire to celestial thrones!”

Warburton stood up, espying someone walking in the distance. “There he is,” he cried. “I must go and make him welcome!” He ran off.

“I fear he is going to accost that stranger,” remarked Casaubon. “Shouldn’t we help?”

“I’m sure we’d only get in the way,” said Rincewind hurriedly. “You know what it’s like to have people looking over your shoulder when you’re busy.”

The End.

Post from: She Reads Books

Meme: Book Mash