Middle-Aged Woman over at Unmitigated ran a meme about books. Which got me to thinking about me and my books.
DH and I donated tons of books before we moved because we knew we weren't going to bring them all with us. So many were paperbacks, and stuff the kids did not take with them. DH even had a set of Hardy Boys that he put up on EBay. Slowly but surely we weeded through them. A few series we kept. I have, for instance, all the Diana Gabaldon "Outlander" series books. I have a copy of "Little Women" given to me by my godmother for one of my birthdays. We've owned a couple sets of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and I have a set of "Little House on the Prairie" books which DH got for me for Christmas one year. I never read it as a kid.
Probably the oldest books I own are ones owned by my great-great-great grandfather, Alexander Maitland, from Canadian publishers and dated from the 1830's.
I love this electronic age that allows me to download audiobooks online onto my Mp3 player, listen and discard. But nothing will ever replace my books.
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
My Big Read
Thought I'd list a few books that I've read that I really loved. Won't put them in any particular order as that would cause too many brain cells to explode. Most of these are books I've read more than once and a lot of them made great movies.
1. Gone with the Wind. More than once.
2. The Great Escape. Real story of massive POW escape in German Silesia during WWII. Also read more than once. Loved the movie too.
3. Huck Finn. Tom Sawyer. I loved both of them. Read more than once.
4. Little Women. Little Men. Jo's Boys. They all made me cry. Still do.
5. Random Harvest. Also made a great movie.
6. Outlander. And I won't name the other 5 books, a work in progress for author Diana Gabaldon. Who doesn't love time travel and love stories combined. One of the things that intrigued me about this was the first book started in 1946, the year my parents got married.
7. Into the Wilderness, et al by Sarah Donati. The first book which I have listed sort of starts up 30 years later than the movie Last of the Mohicans.
8. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. This series, by Lauren Willig, is about an American working on her doctorate in English History researching this gang of spies of the Napoleonic era. Also an ongoing series.
9. Knight Errant, et al by R. Garcia y Robertson. Another time traveler is swept back into the War of the Roses, meeting The Future King. I loved this series, didn't like the way it ended.
10. Mommie Dearest. The inspiration for teaching my kids to call me this. They didn't get it for many years. Their friends are horrified when they hear it. Then my children have to 'splain their mom wasn't THAT bad!
11. Every biography that I ever read. My love of biographies has been with me since grade school. Nun librarian told me I read too many of them.
12. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Also everything else he has done of a humorous nature. A little non-fiction is good for the soul. Laughter is even better.
13. Lost Horizon. Made into a movie under the name of Shangri-La. Movie just didn't do the book justice.
14. The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Also made into a movie. Donald Sutherland was superb in the role of the confederate "Capt." Marsden. Diane Lane stunning as Lucy Marsden.
15. One for the Money - Fearless Fourteen. All of the Janet Evanovich "Stephanie Plum" series. How can you not love someone who has one or two cars destroyed per book. And Grandma Mazur. I wish I had a grandma like that!
16. Fuzzy Navel. The latest in the "Jack Daniels" series by J. A. Konrath. Violent yes. Entertaining. Hell yes.
1. Gone with the Wind. More than once.
2. The Great Escape. Real story of massive POW escape in German Silesia during WWII. Also read more than once. Loved the movie too.
3. Huck Finn. Tom Sawyer. I loved both of them. Read more than once.
4. Little Women. Little Men. Jo's Boys. They all made me cry. Still do.
5. Random Harvest. Also made a great movie.
6. Outlander. And I won't name the other 5 books, a work in progress for author Diana Gabaldon. Who doesn't love time travel and love stories combined. One of the things that intrigued me about this was the first book started in 1946, the year my parents got married.
7. Into the Wilderness, et al by Sarah Donati. The first book which I have listed sort of starts up 30 years later than the movie Last of the Mohicans.
8. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. This series, by Lauren Willig, is about an American working on her doctorate in English History researching this gang of spies of the Napoleonic era. Also an ongoing series.
9. Knight Errant, et al by R. Garcia y Robertson. Another time traveler is swept back into the War of the Roses, meeting The Future King. I loved this series, didn't like the way it ended.
10. Mommie Dearest. The inspiration for teaching my kids to call me this. They didn't get it for many years. Their friends are horrified when they hear it. Then my children have to 'splain their mom wasn't THAT bad!
11. Every biography that I ever read. My love of biographies has been with me since grade school. Nun librarian told me I read too many of them.
12. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Also everything else he has done of a humorous nature. A little non-fiction is good for the soul. Laughter is even better.
13. Lost Horizon. Made into a movie under the name of Shangri-La. Movie just didn't do the book justice.
14. The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Also made into a movie. Donald Sutherland was superb in the role of the confederate "Capt." Marsden. Diane Lane stunning as Lucy Marsden.
15. One for the Money - Fearless Fourteen. All of the Janet Evanovich "Stephanie Plum" series. How can you not love someone who has one or two cars destroyed per book. And Grandma Mazur. I wish I had a grandma like that!
16. Fuzzy Navel. The latest in the "Jack Daniels" series by J. A. Konrath. Violent yes. Entertaining. Hell yes.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Big Read
* The following list is the UK list of books. For the US list, please see the NEA BigRead site.
*Thanks to Middle-Aged Woman at Unmitigated and Gathering Dust for blogarting this. I can't believe how many of these were required reading when I was in school. I'm also surprised that "Tuesdays with Morrie" wasn't on the list. Also surprised that some of these titles are new to me. Can ya tell I don't work in a library any more?
"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath
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 (Umm..this is part of the Narnia Chronicles)
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 Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I tried)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I've read something by her)
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 (I'm trying to work my way through Jane)
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 (required reading in high school)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 (Both books)
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 (All Bill Bryson stuff is hysterically funny to me)
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 (Another double-mention)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (couldn't get through this one).
*Thanks to Middle-Aged Woman at Unmitigated and Gathering Dust for blogarting this. I can't believe how many of these were required reading when I was in school. I'm also surprised that "Tuesdays with Morrie" wasn't on the list. Also surprised that some of these titles are new to me. Can ya tell I don't work in a library any more?
"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath
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 (Umm..this is part of the Narnia Chronicles)
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 Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I tried)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I've read something by her)
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 (I'm trying to work my way through Jane)
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 (required reading in high school)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 (Both books)
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 (All Bill Bryson stuff is hysterically funny to me)
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 (Another double-mention)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (couldn't get through this one).
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