Ooh, A Book Meme!

Via the excellent Whiskers, a book meme from The Big Read. The idea is:

Bold the names of books you’ve read;
Italicize the ones you want to read;
Underline the ones you liked, and strike through the ones you didn’t;
Share!

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 (I’ve read about 10 plays, unless you count all 7 times I was assigned Hamlet)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’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 Hitchhiker’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 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-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 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’ 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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
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

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Well, That IS A Relief… :-)

Apparently the Templars will be too busy suing the Pope to be involved in any world-enveloping conspiracies for a while!

(I remember the first time I read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and first learned something about Templar history. I’d barely heard of them, and it was fascinating. Now everybody and her brother, especially if her brother is a novelist in the Dan Brown mold, is writing their own less interesting version of “A Templar, an Illuminatus and a Rosicrucian walk into a bar…” Even my beloved Carnivàle got into the act a few years ago. Yeesh.)

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Blackguards!

So far I’d been loving the Sherlock Holmes box set I got for Christmas (now with more power to recognize guest stars– Robert Addie from Robin of Sherwood among them!).  I also appreciated the attempt, at least, to stick to the stories as God and Conan Doyle intended them; I love Basil Rathbone to death, but Holmes has no business fighting Nazis.

It was with great annoyance, then, that I discovered the show’s Powers That Be had conflated two tales late in the series’s run and joined “The Mazarin Stone” and “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” in unholy matrimony.  And in doing so, removed one of my favorite Holmes moments ever from the latter story: Watson is wounded by a villain with a revolver.

…my friend’s wiry arms were around me and he was leading me to a chair.
“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!”
It was worth a wound–it was worth many wounds–to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.  The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking.  For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as a great brain.  All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation. (“The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Arthur Conan Doyle)

Even with little romance (your fanfic mileage may vary), it’s one of the best love scenes I’ve ever read. Jeremy Brett could have acted the living hell out of that, too.

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“Spooky Book” Is Right.

I may have mentioned that my religious-leaning relatives gave me a horror novel for Christmas. And the aforementioned spook story (the Pocket Books edition of J.G. Passarella’s Wither) may well be the worst-proofread book I’ve ever seen that didn’t have Andrew Greeley’s name on it somewhere.

I am on page 27. So far:

  1. “Freshman” has been used as a plural.
  2. The outside of a car has been referred to as a “chassy.”
  3. “PhD,” no periods, in two places, which made me glad the character who was trying to get one didn’t make it.  Also, anybody know of any non-fictional tiny colleges with a nice doctoral program?
  4. “DefCon One” has been used as the mild end of the scale.  I am a (sort of) mild-mannered English major and even I know that’s wrong.

Also, there’s supposed to be something going on with nightmares and witches returning from the dead.  Could it be my relatives gave me this not for any ideological reason, or lack thereof, but for practice?

Update 12/31: And now, on page 117, “staff infection.”  I’m going to go whimper now.

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