Lists of books

Read, Might Read, Won't Read

I'm a sucker for lists and found these on someone's blog. I've sorted them to make the list fit me, rather than me fit the list. So I deleted almost all the ones I hadn't read and sorted others into lists, adding books I felt were missing from the original list!

Thoroughly enjoyed (no particular order and for a variety of reasons)

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

His Dark Materials series - Philip Pullman
The Life of Pi-Yann Martel

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien (before the movies!!)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Narnia series C.S. Lewis - don't know how many times I've read this

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Dune (the whole series - Frank Herbert
Dragon series - Anne McCaffrey
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
A Fine Balance, Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry
Jazz, - Toni Morrison
The reader - Bernand Shlink
The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A Wizard of Earthsea series - Ursula K. LeGuin
The Dark is Rising series - Susan Cooper
Little Women series - Louisa May Alcott
Mother tongue - Bill Bryson - nice dip-into book
The Stone Diaries, Larry's Party, Unless - Carol Shields
Ann Patchett
Possession - A.S. Byatt

There are so many more to put in here - often the names blur, unless I see them to jolt my memory. Should go and look on my bookshelf, but haven't...

Never finished
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Accordion Crimes - E. Annie Proulx
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyesvki

Books/movies/TV
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--Douglas Adams - don't think I've read it but enjoyed the TV series and the more recent movie

Ho-hum/yawn

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

A prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - He is random, in my opinion. Most recently was Widow for a year - again OK.

Must read again sometime (dim dark reading in the past)

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

1984 - George Orwell

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene - definitely need to revisit Graham Greene

Continuum from OK - Good

All the Harry Potter books - J. K. Rowling - and yes I will read the next one and see the movie

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

On Beauty, White Teeth - Zadie Smith

The Moor's Last Sigh - Salman Rushdie

Small Island - Andrea Levy

Disgrace - JM Coetzee

Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Mistress of Spices - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Taft Ann Patchett

Must get round to reading

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Schriver

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Time Traveller's Wife

This has been our latest bookclub read, and probably doesn't measure up to some of the books that we've read over the years in terms of quality.

However, I really enjoyed the underlying love story, and found the time travel mechanism worked for me. I have talked to several people who felt that it was terribly confusing - and I did have to concentrate fiercely on the ages given for Henry and Clare at the beginning of each chapter. I thought the two voices worked successfully and that the aging process also worked, given that there was lots of jumping to and fro - maybe it was so confused that I didn't notice particularly! Friendships set up, especially Henry's friends, were quite real. Clare's less so. Alba's embraces time travelling because she has Henry (and herself) to support her and teach her about it, whereas Henry fears it more.

Nicely worked out plot overall, although I thought the final visit of Henry to Clare (aged 81) was a bit hohum. However, I liked the final denouement in terms of how Henry finally dies - vivid and distressing! I also liked the situation of the novel in NOW time, but the fact that it went back twenty-thirty years probably made it work well for middle age readers...like me!

Great read - found it difficult to put down. And it came along just when I was thinking that I would like a book that I wanted to read in one sitting rather than digest slowly.