Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Sunday, September 25, 2011

9.25 Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week this week. Whatcha gonna read? I’ve slowly been working my way through the 100 most challenged books of 1990-1999 and then I suppose I’ll have to start on the ones of 2000-2009 that don’t overlap.

This week I’m going to try The Color Purple, which I’ve never gotten round to reading.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

8.14 Daft or brilliant?

I’ve just done something either brilliant or really stupid. I’ve noticed when I do a search on a title in the library catalog that quite often there are multiple books by the same title and it occurred to me that it could be an interesting thing to see what different things could wind up with the same titles. Someone mentioned “Remember Me” a week or two ago in terms that made me write down the title on my “check it out” list, but I didn’t write down the author’s name. There are 12 different books titled Remember Me in the county library - I’ve ordered them all.

Friday, March 12, 2010

3.12 Oh, my


After seeing references to it sporadically over the years, I finally requested "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome from the library. Oh, my. If you need a good belly laugh, I strongly recommend this one. Three men (and a dog) going off on a boating holiday on the Thames. I'm only a little bit into it and I keep having to put it down because my sides hurt so much.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

3.4 Books

And She Knits, Too posted a book meme. Apparently The Big Read says that, on average, adults have only read six out of the following list. My total is 48, but I'm not sure that it will ever be more than that due to lack of interest in the ones I haven't. On the other hand, I have read, and certainly will continue to read, a few other things.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Over and over...
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – Over and over...
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Over and over...
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – Yes
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes
6 The Bible –Yes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - I've tried...
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I've tried...
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Yes
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – No
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Yes - the plays, not the poetry, and not all of the histories.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Yes
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Yes
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- Not yet
t21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Unfortunately
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Unfortunately
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens-Not yet
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Not yet
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Yes
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Not yet
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - Yes - we mentioned the entire Chronicles earlier, why the repeat?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - No
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Unfortunately
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Yes
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Yes, and pretty much everything else as well
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Yes
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - No
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Yes
52 Dune - Frank Herbert- Yes
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Yes
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Over and over...
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - No
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Yes
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Yes
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - Yes
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No, and don't intend to
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byatt- No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Over and over...
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - Yes
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I've tried, repeatedly. I get to the same spot and put it down...
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes - wouldn't this fall into the complete works listed above?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No


On the whole I think they could have improved the list by condensing a few things (why so many individual books by Dickens or Austen?; why Middlemarch and not Silas Marner? why the DaVinci Code and not half a dozen other bestselling nothings?) why not say "anything by..." and add a few more authors to the list?

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

7.22 reading weekly

This week's reading:

1. Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey. For a person who spent a great deal of time as a child reading (and re-reading) the Color Fairy books, the revisions dreamed up by Lackey are amusing and pleasant reading. She tackled fairy tales first in the Elemental Mages series (starting with The Fire Rose), but redid them with the 500 Kingdoms books, and I've enjoyed reading all of them.
2. One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey. The second book, ditto.
3. The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer.

Monday, July 14, 2008

7.14 reading weekly

This week's reading has involved a bunch of old favorites, with a new one that I've finished up.



1. The Golden One by Elizabeth Peters. I've been listening to Barbara Rosenblatt read through the Amelia Peabody books for some time. Audible has had many of them, but has the more recent ones only in abridged format which annoys me greatly. My guess is that the more recent ones in their long format are not a cost-effective purchase for the discount that Audible offers for their monthly membership. The library offers most of them on tape or CD and since I have discovered that I have lost my patience with anything over a 5 minute commute, having books on tape has been a godsend.

2. Wingarden by Elsie Lee. One of the books I stumbled across most recently by this author (although written in '71 - most of her books were written in the late 50s and 60s). Her books are pleasant romances, usually either nominally Regencies or set in post-WWII time frames, often with a mystery. This was a "contemporary" romance (i.e. set in the late sixties?) and had the tense race-relations of small town Virginia as the setting. Her books remind me of many of Mary Stewart's books written about the same time.

3. Chinese Nail Murders by Robert van Gulik. An old favorite.

4. The Gold Falcon by Katherine Kerr. One of the more recent books by Kerr, which I just picked up recently. I read her books when she first started writing. I went through a phase of not reading anything new fictional for a while (i.e about 10 years), and a number of writers kept on writing while I was not reading. Having gone back to reading fiction, I'm finding myself needing to catch on certain authors. Kerr is one of them.

Monday, July 07, 2008

7.7 reading weekly

This week I've started a bunch of books, and I've read the last two chapters of a bunch of books - not much has been read from start to finish.

1. Venetia by Georgette Heyer - I started at the last three chapters, then read the middle, then read the beginning and the last four chapters. I suppose that's one way of reading a book.
2. The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey - yes I know, this was on last week's list. I read it again.

Not much else to add - I should have about 7 books on next week's list if I actually finish all the ones I'm in the middle of. I'm not sure why I'm having so much trouble with book monogamy, but there you go.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

6.30 reading weekly

This week's reading was a wild swerve away from last week's. While I am slowly making my way through Sea of Sorrows by Michelle West, I certainly have not been a one book woman this week.

1. Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart
2. The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
3. Madam Will You Talk by Mary Stewart
4. Wingarden by Elsie Lee
5. The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer

Old favorites, one and all. And a new book:

6. The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey

This is a new entry in her Five Hundred Kingdoms series; a set of fairy tales retold with a charming twist to the basic concept. In her introduction to this book, Ms. Lackey references Dorothy Sayers comment that mystery books are where the reader can know that the good will prevail and the evil get their comeuppance. This, of course, not always true in the modern mystery, but it is most of the time. The modern fantasy and the modern romance novels also fall into this category.
There are those who point out that this attitude sets up unreasonable expectations in the minds of the impressionable, that life will always be perfect. While this may be true for some people, I think that an grim insistence on complete realism in one's reading is a mistake. A little escapism is good for the soul, once in a while.
This is not to say that I don't enjoy reading books that are a bit grittier at times, and I have moved past the stage (long since) where I was deeply crushed by any book that didn't have a happy ending. I do certainly appreciate stories that allow all genders to be equally competant at solving problems, and Ms. Lackey's books fit that bill as well.

Monday, June 23, 2008

6.23 reading weekly

This week's reading has been confined to two books:

1. The Broken Crown by Michelle West
2. The Uncrowned King by Michelle West

I bought these when they first came out, some number of years ago. I enjoyed them very much but got a little frustrated with the slow pace of the story - the first book centers around character A, the second around character B. The overall story is forwarded in each book, but when the third book came out, centered for the most part around character C, I gave up and decided to wait for the entire series. I now have the entire series in my hands and am slowly working my way through the books. I'm into book 3 and remembering just why I gave up reading the series the first time.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

6.17 reading weekly

This week, I dipped into and out of the Bujold books again, and I've started reading the Sun Sword series by Michelle West but haven't finished any of them.

I did start and finish the three books out (so far) by Michelle (West) Sagara.
1. Cast in Shadow
2. Cast in Courtlight
3. Cast in Secret

According to her website, there will be at least two more. They're convoluted and interesting, set in a curious world. She has a nice knack to revealing information about her world without being particularly didactic or stop-the-story-let-me-explain-this-to-you.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

5.28 reading weekly

Last week, what with my class winding down and not working yet, I indulged myself in some new books. I read a bunch of Bujold when they first started coming out, then stopped reading science fiction for a while, then got lost trying to figure out which of the Miles Vorkosigan stories were in which order, and gave up on the problem. (One of the best consequences of the internet in my opinion is the ability to find lists of series', in order of publication.)

I was scanning the shelves at the local shop for recommendations for S, who has inherited much of my taste in books, and happened across Bujold again, in fantasy this time. I don't think he's quite ready for her, but in another couple of years...

1. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
3. The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold
5. The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

6. A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, just because.

Monday, May 19, 2008

5.19 Reading weekly

This week has been a mix of new books and old.

S has been bugging me for a new set of books to read. I had started to give him the Wizard books by Stasheff, but couldn't find the first book in the series. So I gave him the Flinx books, starting with The Tar-Aiym Krang. I have the first four books in the series, but apparently there are a bunch more nowadays (I suppose I'll have to look into that).

Having gotten the books out and seeing them laying around the house, I picked them up and started.

1. For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster
2. The Tar-Aiym Krang by Alan Dean Foster
3. Orphan Star by Alan Dean Foster


4. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch Definitely worth reading and I'm going to see if I can get the kids to read it too.
5. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold I've liked her science fiction books - this is fantasy, and very well crafted.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

5.12 Reading weekly

Not much reading going on here. Mostly bits and snippets.

1. Mr Darcy's Daughters by Elizabeth Aston. A light read, in the fan fic tradition. A couple of the characters are not explained very well. Amusing enough that I will probably get the next one.

That was it as far as books I read in their entirety.

I did pick up and read "the best parts" from Unnatural Death, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, and the last two stories in Lord Peter, all by Dorothy Sayers. A chance memory triggered my look at the first of that sequence, and then having read that bit, it lead to bits and pieces of the others.

Monday, May 05, 2008

5.5 reading weekly

This week has been another for the light and fluffy set:
1. Aunt Dimity's Good Deed by Nancy Atherton
2. Aunt Dimity Digs In by Nancy Atherton
3. Aunt Dimity's Christmas by Nancy Atherton - I'm sure you're seeing a pattern here. Mysteries, but of a very gentle nature. Soothing reading, but enjoyable.
4. And Less Than Kind by Roberta Gellis and Mercedes Lackey Two of my favorite authors.
5. Clouds of Witnesses by Dorothy Sayers Old favorite time again.

Not a particularly big week for reading, but what there was, was fun.

Monday, April 28, 2008

4.28 Weekly Reader

I've given up on the 50 Book Challenge this year. It just isn't where my head is. Instead, I've decided to post the weekly list of books I've finished in the past seven days, even if I've read them before. I specify "finished", because sometimes I pick up a book and it takes weeks or months to actually finish it, whereas others are picked up and finished the same day.

With that in mind, this past week's list is:
  1. Clouds of Witnesses / Dorothy Sayers / An excellent favorite
  2. Aunt Dimity's Death / Nancy Atherton / First in a series, it's a charming, easy going mystery
  3. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself / Alan Alda / A good read. Now I'll have to find Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
  4. Killing Time / Linda Howard / Quasi-SF/Romance, a good read, not my favorite of hers.
  5. Trio for the Chair / Rex Stout / I've always liked his shorts best.
And a never-gonna-finish: The Wild Baron / Catherine Coulter - I can go with the willing suspension of disbelief thing, but this one is just pushing me too far - we've had one wild swing too many and I fell off the wagon about halfway through the book.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

4.16 "Things I've learned from knitting"

I picked up a new book today. I'm on page 50, and, as per usual, my stomach muscles hurt. How does she manage to hit the funny bone so accurately?

Sunday, February 24, 2008

2.24 Librarything

I crossed the 1000 book mark in entering my personal library this weekend. I've been working on this project off and on for a bit over a year (?). I think I'm about a quarter done -give or take a few hundred books. A rough guesstimate at the number of books on the shelves, multiplied by a more exact count of the number of shelves, plus a wild-ass swipe at estimating the number of books still in boxes... K thinks we counted up 8000 books before we moved, but somehow I don't think that's right. I don't think I've had that many since I moved from MD to CA when I had about 10000.

[When I was being moved by my new company from MD to CA, they asked how much stuff I had to move. I gave them an estimate on rooms, furniture, etc, and then mentioned that they needed to know I had about 10000 books, most of them paperback. The woman I was talking to, said "uh-huh". She apparently told the moving van person "5000 books". He said "uh-huh". And came prepared to pack 1000 books. I said "uh-huh". And showed him my collection.
One of the interesting sidelights on this little thing, which I found out afterwards, was that there actually was a weight limit on how much they were willing to move without my having to pay for excess. Nobody bothered to mention this since I was a single person with about a one-bedroom apartment's worth of furniture. With my books, I came within a few hundred pounds of the limit. I did a lot of culling in the next few years, and when J and I got married I only had about 4000 left. I try to cull more often now. At the moment I'm using paperbackswap to cull with which isn't exactly reducing the total number of books in the house...]

K also pointed out that at my current rate of progress (1000 books per year) cataloging them this way will only take me somewhere between 3 and 7 more years. I told her I didn't need to hear that right now.

My fiber books (most of them) are here.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

2.16B Book Review

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

Ok, it's a depressing subject. The Black Death.
This is a book that I've picked up and put down several times, before winding my way to the end. It provided me with a great number of bits of information I hadn't really realized, not having studied this particular part of European history closely before. (Most of my reading has been about pre-1200 times.) The parallels that can be drawn about the economic state of Europe at that time and our current times are somewhat distressing.
The book is quite interesting. I'm sure that some of his conclusions are being (or were) hotly debated by persons whose conclusions he was refuting, but the subject isn't such that I'm really planning on delving into the ifs and ands in depth.

His references to the cultural effects of the Black Death on the arts and the fiber world are some that I'm going to see if I can track down. The book has increased my understanding of the literature of the time and I'm sure some of his insights will help me with the art of the time.

Well worth reading.

(Just in case anyone is wondering: The 50 book challenge, as I have interpreted it, is to read 50 books in a year, books that I have not read before. [I read many more books in a year than 50, but I am trying to expand my horizons beyond the books on my shelf that I read and re-read.] It's halfway through February and I'm now at 2 finished books. I think I'm falling behind this year.)

Monday, January 21, 2008

1.21 Another fabric book

A second book my mom forwarded to me, this one is of less sentimental interest to me. I'm not interested enough in playing with fabric to want to spend the time it takes to do batik. It strikes me as being too fiddly. (And don't bother pointing out the fiddly stuff that I do spend time on - I'm interested in it, so it doesn't seem fiddly. It's one of those things that makes each person's hobbies incomprehensible to others.)
batik book

I am interested in batik enough to want to read the book, though, before I'm positive that it will need to find a new home.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

1.19 Divesting oneself of things

Getting the clutter out of my house is a common theme on my wishlist. With four packrats in the house, it's a problem. When we got married, my husband still had every piece of clothing he had had since high school, mostly because, many years later, they all still fit. How can you get rid of things that still fit? (Never mind the fact that he's never going to wear orange polyester double knit again.) I'm not just pointing the finger at him - I'm just as bad, just not about clothing. I hate spending money on something I've already spent money on once before. If I may ever want to use it again, I want to keep it. Never mind the fact that we've now spent three times as much money in moving it twice between times of using it.

We've been working on divesting ourselves of things we don't need. However, unfortunately (fortunately?) other members of our family are going through similar divestiture attempts. My mother is taking a serious look at the items she thinks she will no longer use, and ridding the house of them. Things that she thinks we (her three offspring) may want to use, she's sending to us. When what she's sending me is something I want, how can I turn it down?

<fabric dyeing book
This is one of a stack of books she has recently sent me, and of all the books it's the one I want to keep the most. I had a copy of this book two moves ago, and either it is somewhere in a box I haven't opened yet (which I can't quite believe) or it disappeared somewhere along the way. By the time I missed it, it was out of print.
I miss the old Compuserve fibercrafts forum. There were several nice things about that forum that I've not found duplicated anywhere else, although the blogosphere comes the closest. Once of the things I miss is that other related fiber crafts were just a click away from the ones I followed, and there were volunteers who pruned the chat lists, not by telling people to stay on topic, or, worse, letting them babble unrestrained, but by moving the thread into Unraveling Threads, a chat section where eventually everybody got dumped for offtopic content. There was only one Unraveling Threads, so if you followed threads there, eventually you wound up meeting people who only hung out in sections other than your own.
I am not a quilter, but I met a bunch of quilters there - I'm not a fabric dyer, except that after a while I dabbled in it, trying the things other people were chatting about. (I wasn't a spinner either, only suddenly I was and things have never been the same.)
One of the things I dabbled in was baggie dyeing with fabric. There were a number of recipes floating around just then for low water immersion dyeing of fabric; right about the time we were playing with it, this book came out. It was sort of a cross between several of the recipes and the instructions were pretty clear. I'm not a fabric dyer nor a quilter, so I played with it for a while and then set it aside, not bothering to keep the recipes because I had the book. And then I didn't have the book and the Fibercrafts forum dissolved, killed off by the growing email lists, and I moved on into spinning and knitting from the embroidery which had led me into the C'serve forum to start with.
But now I have the book again. And it's going on my shelf, not yet to be passed on to someone else.