Books & Tag

Last year I wrote a list of the year's books, which somehow managed to post itself on New Year's Day. It is not New Year's Day now, but, uh... Moving on! Continuing the tradition, here's the Best and Worst of 2008, and it's rather shorter than 2007's for various dull reasons.

Best:

Enemy Brothers by Constance Savery: I love this book. Love love love it. Maybe it's the fact that it's set in WWII Britain (a time and place I've been immersed in for the last few months) and written by someone who was actually there and actually experiencing it, or that it's about a large family, or the amusingness of James and Porgy. Maybe it's the way Dym and Tony's relationship is almost a picture of us and Christ--Tony is stubborn and headstrong and sure he's right, he wreaks havoc on the Inglefords, he runs away and runs away again--but Dym never gives up on him.

If you read it because I told you to you probably wouldn't like it. Lately my book recommendations tend to malfunction.

Black as Night, Waking Rose, and The Midnight Dancers by Regina Doman: All so much better than The Shadow of the Bear, in my not-very-humble-opinion, which no one agrees with really but that's ok. I managed to convince my mum to read them too, which is shocking, and even more shockingly, she liked them. (Actually she said she didn't, because they kept her from doing what work needed doing. :P) I hate to call them chick-lit or fairy tales, though they are a little of both, because that makes anything sound shallow. The themes she chooses (especially beauty vs. goodness in MD) + fairy tales + literary references + Fish = Win!

(Yes, I like Dym. I like Fish. I like Edmund. And Gen. Can't forget Gen. My lack of originality is appalling. But I remain the only one who properly appreciates Shasta.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke: Long. So? It deserved to be long. The chapter "The sky spoke to me" or some title like that remains my favourite.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis: Snarky, sarcastic, full of "oh-how-true-though-I-never-would-have-come-up-with-that" moments. The Blitz part of it is a bonus. :P

The Man Who Was Thursday & The Club of Queer Trades by--guess who?--G.K. Chesterton.


Worst:

Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz: I read the first half of this and then skimmed to the end. It's sort of the male equivalent to Twilight, i.e. constant action and explosions, mediocre writing, a main character who has no weaknesses. So long character development!

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer: Review here. I'm not a Twilight basher, exactly. It's like High School Musical: it doesn't quite deserve all the brutal reviews that it gets, but it sure doesn't deserve the ridiculous popularity either--and because of that popularity, the non-enchanted have way too much fun tearing it to shreds. Then people like me have way too much fun reading their reviews. Hehe. Anyhow, enough said about that.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: I've complained about this in enough places already so I'll restrain myself here. I halfway enjoyed the movie though. Might try East of Eden someday, as a book that was made into a movie that Delaney loves can't be so terribly bad, can it? No, it can't.

Two or three Oz books, the titles of which I can't remember, by L. Frank Baum: They had the random chaos of the Alice books without any of Alice's humour or depth, and Baum tends to talk down to the reader. All of Oz is a perfect, lovely, charming socialist society. No conflict, no suffering. I'll take House of the Scorpion or something, thanks.


I'm reading through my to-read list from last year, and laughing. Of course I read all the "fun" books that I meant to read, and ignored the classics and fearsome tomes. This year. This year shall be permeated with Dostoyevsky and Dickens and Austen and Gaskell. And of course, more Chesterton. Ha.

***

A tag, courtesy of Owan, well, sort of.

1) Look at the list and bold [embolden?] those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Put 6 stars next to the ones you are reading******

Updated rules:
5.) Ignore #3 since there's no underline button and I'm too lazy to put the HTML in
6.) Ignore #4 because I'm not reading any of them (except the Bible--and P&P which I haven't picked up since October)
7.) Therefore, asterisks now equal the books I love. Here we go.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings* - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - A grey story, with flashes of orange whenever Bertha made appearances.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Eh, maybe someday, in order to be a Well-Read Person and to have an opinion on them and all that. *shrugs*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird* - Harper Lee
6 The Bible** - Have I read it all the way through? I will by the end of this year, and I've definitely read a good chunk of it. Currently reading Isaiah and 1 John.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte - Love the title, but the book sounds like it would be good parody material. Heh.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - Ditto #4. Maybe only the first book though. Or maybe I'll never get around to it and that would not be too terrible of a tragedy.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - It was all right. Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities were better, and there are a ton of his other books that I need to get around to reading soon (Little Dorrit and Bleak House, particularly).
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Works of Shakespeare - I've read Comedy of Errors and The Tempest and will read some more...er...someday. * for The Tempest. * for the Bard on the Beach production this summer, too.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger - Started it but couldn't stand the writing and language. Next!
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 - I can't remember if I've read this or not. Obviously time for a reread. C.S. Lewis and Rachel Durham both liked it!
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - If only to atone for the fact that I read an abridged version when I was nine.
33 Chronicles of Narnia* - C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe* - C.S. Lewis - You repeat yourself, O List.
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 - Is on my shelf
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 Maddening Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - No thank you! I weep for the world of Canadian literature.
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 - *sigh* I guess I should read that someday...
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
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
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 - E.B. 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 - Brilliant.

27/100? I need to work on this.