Category Archive

Only one movie this month, but what a corker – District 9

Plus my new favourite TV thing – Warehouse 13

Another quiet month for films, though if you would like to know my reaction to Let the Right One In (most suitable for RIP IV) then you should look here.

And the Lord of the Rings Extended Version DVD Marathon was completed on 31 August, but not much more to add to what I said here, here and here.

A quiet month for films, but if you would like to know what I thought about Red Cliff, you should head here.

Who was I rooting for in Monsters vs Aliens?

What did The Doctor find on Planet of the Dead?

Am I better off not Knowing?

Will I miss The Departed?

Did the Mothman Prophecies ring true?

Head here to find out….

I pinched this from Musings from the Sofa.

The Rules:

• Bold what you have read
• Italicise books started but not finished
• Strike through books hated
• Add an asterisk to books read more than once
• Underline books on your tbr list

So here goes:

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22*
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion*
• Life of Pi
• The Name of the Rose*
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs and Steel
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveller’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs Dalloway*
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (though hate is probably a bit too strong….)
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula*
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King (planning to re-read this as part of The Arthurian Challenge)
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible
• 1984
• Angels and Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse*
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Miserables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Dune*
• The Prince*
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unberable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse Five*
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon (planning to read this as part of The Arthurian Challenge)
• Oryx and Crake
• Collapse
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit*
• In Cold Blood
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Result (rough count, not validated!): books read = 38, books hated = 1, on my tbr list = 14 (though between us the Book God and I have some of the others, they’re just not on my radar at the moment) and books unfinished =  5 (and look how many of these are by Jane Austen, oh dear)

Unavoidable break in posting due to pressure of work; still trying to decide whether to work my way through the list of posts I had planned for the past month, so watch this space.

I’m feeling very guilty as I have done hardly any reading since my last post. I’ve had a bad bout of flu where all I wanted to do was sit and feel sorry for myself, and when I did get back to work I was travelling in earlier than normal, so not getting a seat on the train, so listening to podcasts instead of reading.

The Book God and I were planning to visit the cinema tomorrow but I’m seriously considering staying at home to finish the book I’ve been reading for a month. We’ll see.

In order to kick start my enthusiasm once more I’ve bought two new books – The Steep Approach to Garbadale and The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. Both very interesting – I’m a huge Iain Banks fan (love the science fiction too), so if that doesn’t work nothing will!

If I’m honest, these days most of my reading is done on my train journey to and from London, which gives me around 50 minutes a day where I can lose myself in a book.

Disaster struck yesterday, however, when my MP3 player died on me (a long story to do with corrupt disks which I just don’t want to think about) and I realised how much I needed music while reading on public transport to stop me from being distracted by other travellers and their bizarre mobile phone conversations.

This is a shock for me as I was well known as a child for not let anything short of the end of the world disturb me while I had my head in a book – perhaps it’s just age………

I hope you will join me here from time to time to find out what I’ve been reading, and possibly what I’ve been watching as well, as so many of the films and TV programmes I’m drawn to seem to be based on books that I’ve read (or mean to).

You’ll see over the coming months that I read all sorts of things from sci-fi, horror and crime fiction to sixteenth century history (a particular favourite, but more on that in the future)

I hope you’ll feel free to comment and perhaps make some recommendations!