A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spartk
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina
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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spartk
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina
My list so far -
1. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. 6.5/10 It was a good book, but I've forgotten what I wanted to say about it. Really should take notes.
2. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett. 9/10 Funny, tragic, endearing. Cannot imagine why people find it boring.
3. The Bostonians - Henry James 7/10 This was a really good reading experience. James is a genius!
4. A Room With a View - E M Forster (re-read) 6/10 I love E M forster, and this was a good book, though Howard's End and Passage to India were better.
5. Intruder in the Dust - William Faulkner. 7/10 Faulkner writes a murder mystery!:hurray: And it's a good one. I felt it was a bit repetitive and could have been cut down to an even shorter novel, or I'd have given it a higher rating.
6. Major Barbara - George Bernard Shaw (re-read). 8/10 Shaw at his argumentative best.
7. Bridget Jones Edge of Reason - Helen Fielding. 6/10 Like its predecessor, an engaging, entertaining fun read. :)
Uh oh, I see I've given Forster's novel and Bridget Jones the same rating. Stupid ratings...I never seem to get them right!
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
The sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but everything before that was exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
The Damned United by David Peace - A football novel based upon real people and events in the football league in 1970s England written in a stream of consciousness style with intercut flashbacks.
Snuff Terry Pratchett - Commander Vimes brings Goblin equality to the country.
Pure - An engineer from Normandy is commissioned by a French Minister to dig out and remove the bones and bodies hat have built up and begun affecting the air in the cemetery of Les Innocents in 18th century Paris. (The site of modern day Les Halles).
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossmann. Grossman's epic, banned after it was written, has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace. I would agree that the novel, which spans the months during and after the fight for Stalingrad in WW2, is a brilliant depiction the life of soldiers, commisars, civilians, old Bolsheviks, Nazi commanders, prisoners and scientists. It details the lives, loves, characters, thoughts, flaws and pressures of living under Stalin's regime.
Completed:
1 Marco Polo & Rustichello da Pisa The Travels of Marco Polo
2 John Keats - a few selected poems including first pass of To Autumn -will take a few more passes to fully absorb.
Works in progress:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - August 1914-The Red Wheel at page 560 about 240 to go.
Plutarch Plutarch's Lives currently on Numa Pompilius
Emil Miller - A Tangled Web Chapter 5
Fashion Beast - Alan Moore
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly (again, but this is the first time I picked up on the idea that Frankenstein is gay so it was a new experience for me)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I shot the albatross!)
Manfred - Lord Byron
Some Wordsworth
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience - William Blake
Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
A Tangled Web, Emil Miller
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
Imagine all the things you might pick on if you read it for a third time!Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
It'll probably be completely different! It's so strange reading things a few years after you've read them the first time, when your personality and awareness is different. I remember reading it when I was a teenager and I had a bit of a crush on the doctor, but this time I found him selfish and self-deluded and couldn't stand him.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
The other day I was reading some of my old posts on the forum, and noticed that I said I couldn't stand Daniel Defoe. Now I'm writing an MA thesis on Daniel Defoe, I don't know what happened.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
Jeez, the last time I was here you were working on a genetics degree, no?Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
1. I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother... -Edited by Michel Foucault
2. The Birth of the Clinic- Michel Foucault
I can't wait to finish Vanity Fair so I can move on to another novel... Pretty sure I've been working on it for two years now :s Pitiful.
He got his microbiology degree, Pip is the total package.Quote:
Originally Posted by *Classic*Charm*
If by that you mean someone who has spent far too much time in school, haha.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
But, yes, I got my microbiology degree 4 years ago, I then managed to get a BA over that time period (semi part-time, and fulltime at the end), and now am doing my MA at McGill because the fellowship they offered me made it essentially free. I'm waiting to hear from SSHRC to find out if I'll have funding for next year, which would be nice.
That's wicked. Congrats!Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Love this! I'll never forget those verses:Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
"Why lookst thou so?"
With my crossbow
I shot the albatross
Wow! Hope you're not becoming affected by all of the above.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
The Damned United by David Peace - A football novel based upon real people and events in the football league in 1970s England written in a stream of consciousness style with intercut flashbacks.
Snuff Terry Pratchett - Commander Vimes brings Goblin equality to the country.
Pure - An engineer from Normandy is commissioned by a French Minister to dig out and remove the bones and bodies that have built up and begun affecting the air in the cemetery of Les Innocents in 18th century Paris. (The site of modern day Les Halles).
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossmann. Grossman's epic, banned after it was written, has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace. I would agree that the novel, which spans the months during and after the fight for Stalingrad in WW2, is a brilliant depiction the life of soldiers, commisars, civilians, old Bolsheviks, Nazi commanders, prisoners and scientists. It details the lives, loves, characters, thoughts, flaws and pressures of living under Stalin's regime.
No Country For Old Men by Cormac Mccarthy. A bleak, violent but philosophical novel that challenges the effectiveness of the cowboy/ American icon of the self sufficient, capable and honourable man. The psychopath Chigurh survives the course of the novel with his bleak, nihilistic belief in predestination.
Haha, I'll absorb them all and become a nature-worshipping naturalistic rake or something. Since I've started my long poetry phase I do have a lot more cool phrases. That reminds me that I also read The Goblin Market, so now whevever I see someone scary looking in the city I've thought "we must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruit; who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots?"Quote:
Originally Posted by prendrelemick
I remember our english teacher reading us Goblin Market long ago - She read it really well and it made quite an impression, but haven't thought about it since then until I saw your post, Juniper. Just read it again, and to me now it doesn't seem that suitable for children! :sosp:
The Prophecy by S J Parris. 7/10
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. 6/10
The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus 7/10
The Persians by Aeschylus. 7/10
The Widows Secret by Brian Thompson. 7/10 (Book club choice)
Prometheus Bound. by Aeschylus
The Lost World. by Arthur Conan Doyle. 7/10
King John. By Shakespeare
The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf.
Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna. 7/10
Engleby. by Sebastian Faulks. 8/10
......
8. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf. 7/10 I really liked Mrs Dalloway, but reading this was mostly a chore! :sleep: The first part was boring boring boring...middle - sudden shock and surprise and all became haunting and beautiful...then again boring boring boring till - whew...the End.Quote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
Quote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
I know, I know, It put me off VW for years.
Hi prendrelemick! Did you read anything by VW after that? I'm thinking of giving her a nice long break!
1. Marco Polo & Rustichello da Pisa The Travels of Marco PoloQuote:
Originally Posted by Gilliatt Gurgle
2. John Keats - a few selected poems including first pass of To Autumn -will take a few more passes to fully absorb.
3. Emil Miller - A Tangled Web
I gave her a long break too, about 15 years. Then I read Orlando - and Liked it a lot. So I read The Voyage Out, which was OKQuote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
I thought the sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but found everything before that to be exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
3. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My impression is that Dickens had a lot he wanted to say in this novel and, at only 288 pages, he had a very short amount of time in which to say it. The result was that the characters were placed efficiently into appropriate archetpyes, but they were not given the time to be fleshed out. David Copperfield shows how well he could write characters. Logic is telling me I should stick to reading his longer books if I want a really engaging plot and cast of characters.
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
I thought the sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but found everything before that to be exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
3. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My impression is that Dickens had a lot he wanted to say in this novel and, at only 288 pages, he had a very short amount of time in which to say it. The result was that the characters were placed efficiently into appropriate archetpyes, but they were not given the time to be fleshed out. David Copperfield shows how well he could write characters. Logic is telling me I should stick to reading his longer books if I want a really engaging plot and cast of characters.
4. Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex Difference by Cordelia Fine
In some passages, this book blew my mind and challenged my perceptions in the extreme, and I'm a feminist. Logically, everyone should read this book; even the best of us has a level of subconscious sexism within, and this book makes the reader confront theirs head-on. Scientific thoroughness may be interpreted as repetitiveness by some readers, as she painstakingly tests her arguments from all possible angles, often guiding us to the same conclusions multiple times within a chapter. For me, an unwanted effect of this book is to disempower the individual. For instance, she exposes the futility of gender-neutral parenting, and it's very disheartening to read. Yet she concludes happily that, unbelievably (scarcasm), genes are not defining, and hormones are not gospel! I blame the whole mess on capitalism.
9. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. 10/10 Wow! :shocked: Absolutely mind blowing! One of the best books I've ever read.Quote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
I thought the sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but found everything before that to be exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
3. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My impression is that Dickens had a lot he wanted to say in this novel and, at only 288 pages, he had a very short amount of time in which to say it. The result was that the characters were placed efficiently into appropriate archetpyes, but they were not given the time to be fleshed out. David Copperfield shows how well he could write characters. Logic is telling me I should stick to reading his longer books if I want a really engaging plot and cast of characters.
4. Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex Difference by Cordelia Fine
In some passages, this book blew my mind and challenged my perceptions in the extreme, and I'm a feminist. Logically, everyone should read this book; even the best of us has a level of subconscious sexism within, and this book makes the reader confront theirs head-on. Scientific thoroughness may be interpreted as repetitiveness by some readers, as she painstakingly tests her arguments from all possible angles, often guiding us to the same conclusions multiple times within a chapter. For me, an unwanted effect of this book is to disempower the individual. For instance, she exposes the futility of gender-neutral parenting, and it's very disheartening to read. Yet she concludes happily that, unbelievably (scarcasm), genes are not defining, and hormones are not gospel! I blame the whole mess on capitalism.
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I liked the first part more than the long middle section. The conflicts with his family, the struggle for indentity in school, the clash of faiths, and colonialism are all very current themes. The middle section was, to me, an overwritten, tiresome slog. We know Pi survives because he wrote the account; there is no tension or suspense. Instead, Yann asks us to finish his book under the assumption that we, as readers, are unenlightened atheists who need to reach the end of his book to find hope and faith in our cold, rational lives. Yann Martel is one of those religious people who cannot tolerate or understand people who have no faith. It's a childrens's book. One good thing it would do is flush out all the anthropomorphic mush filling kids' heads as a result of too much children's television.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spartk
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
In the Red Room by Paul Bowles (short story) That man can write the most disconcerting, yet fascinating stuff.
Dana Gioia, Pity the Beautiful. 7/10 These are metrical poems by someone who writes this sort of thing well. I'm still trying to make sense out of the title.
Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh, 8/10 Of all the characters, I liked the portrayal of Ishtar the best.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap, 8/10 These are poems about her divorce.
Gerald Stern, In Beauty Bright, 7/10 These rambling poems seemed to cast a spell on me. The title, however, makes no sense in terms of what is inside the book.
Leon Lederman, Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, 8/10 Lederman presents a view of the conservation laws of physics using symmetry.
The Damned United by David Peace - A football novel based upon real people and events in the football league in 1970s England written in a stream of consciousness style with intercut flashbacks.
Snuff Terry Pratchett - Commander Vimes brings Goblin equality to the country.
Pure - An engineer from Normandy is commissioned by a French Minister to dig out and remove the bones and bodies that have built up and begun affecting the air in the cemetery of Les Innocents in 18th century Paris. (The site of modern day Les Halles).
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossmann. Grossman's epic, banned after it was written, has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace. I would agree that the novel, which spans the months during and after the fight for Stalingrad in WW2, is a brilliant depiction the life of soldiers, commisars, civilians, old Bolsheviks, Nazi commanders, prisoners and scientists. It details the lives, loves, characters, thoughts, flaws and pressures of living under Stalin's regime.
No Country For Old Men by Cormac Mcarthy. A bleak, violent but philosophical novel that challenges the effectiveness of the cowboy/ American icon of the self sufficient, capable and honourable man. The psychopath Chigurh survives the course of the novel with his bleak, nihilistic belief in predestination.
All The Pretty Horses by Cormac Mcarthy. Not as bleak as No Country, or Blood Meridian, but full of brilliant landscape evocations of Mexico with a ripping story. I've never ridden a horse, and I am unlikely to, (though you might be fooled into thinking I had with my bandy legs), but I enjoyed this almost mystical celebration of horses and their relation to people.
3. Of Human Bondage is one of those books that improves after you've read it, when you start reflecting on how it moved you. Even though his prose style wasn't especially beautiful, the characters were sincerely drawn.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lykren
4. A Passage to India was a very interesting book, and slightly better written than Of Human Bondage. I enjoyed hearing about Mrs. Moore's perspective on the events. I think the mystical overtones he gives in his presentation of her are somehow the key to this novel. If there is such a thing as a key to a novel.
5. Ivanhoe felt like a typical adventure book, which doesn't really interest me, and I didn't care for the writing. At all.
6. Henry VI, I, II, and III were much more exciting than Ivanhoe!
7. King John is not one of my favorite history plays, and neither is
8. Henry V. Too bad Falstaff had to die!
9. Cymbeline was an interesting play with some beautiful passages, but I found myself slightly irritated by the wandering plot. Not my favorite of the Romances.
Coming up next: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. Then the Greek playwrights! Looking forward to those.
10. N-W by Zadie Smith - 3/10
I liked White Teeth and On Beauty but this, her latest novel, was disappointing. She's lost none of her talent for writing, but she's evidently tried to experiment with form or something here, and it ends up being pointless and lackluster. Of course, that may be because it doesn't have much substance to start with, rather than the experimenting. I feel I've wasted my time.
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
I thought the sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but found everything before that to be exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
3. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My impression is that Dickens had a lot he wanted to say in this novel and, at only 288 pages, he had a very short amount of time in which to say it. The result was that the characters were placed efficiently into appropriate archetpyes, but they were not given the time to be fleshed out. David Copperfield shows how well he could write characters. Logic is telling me I should stick to reading his longer books if I want a really engaging plot and cast of characters.
4. Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex Difference by Cordelia Fine
In some passages, this book blew my mind and challenged my perceptions in the extreme, and I'm a feminist. Logically, everyone should read this book; even the best of us has a level of subconscious sexism within, and this book makes the reader confront theirs head-on. Scientific thoroughness may be interpreted as repetitiveness by some readers, as she painstakingly tests her arguments from all possible angles, often guiding us to the same conclusions multiple times within a chapter. For me, an unwanted effect of this book is to disempower the individual. For instance, she exposes the futility of gender-neutral parenting, and it's very disheartening to read. Yet she concludes happily that, unbelievably (scarcasm), genes are not defining, and hormones are not gospel! I blame the whole mess on capitalism.
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I liked the first part more than the long middle section. The conflicts with his family, the struggle for indentity in school, the clash of faiths, and colonialism are all very current themes. The middle section was, to me, an overwritten, tiresome slog. We know Pi survives because he wrote the account; there is no tension or suspense. Instead, Yann asks us to finish his book under the assumption that we, as readers, are unenlightened atheists who need to reach the end of his book to find hope and faith in our cold, rational lives. Yann Martel is one of those religious people who cannot tolerate or understand people who have no faith. It's a childrens's book. One good thing it would do is flush out all the anthropomorphic mush filling kids' heads as a result of too much children's television.
6. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
I'm not going to rate books, but if I feel compelled to make comments on them I will do so.
1. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
I thought the sentimental melodrama of the third part was a chore to read, but found everything before that to be exceptional.
2. How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Unintelligent analyses from someone with a very juvenile sense of the world. Generalisations heaped upon generalisations. No suprise as dumb books sell big. She is arrogant enough to cast aspersions on feminist academics in the introduction, before commencing four hundred pages of crass ranting. A large part of her analytic strategy is to judge the value of all female activity on whether men do them too, underlined at the end of the book when she declares, 'I just want to be one of the guys, but with really good hair'. As for the comedy, her main technique was to use hyperbolic similes that had the sophistication of a child. I might have found some passages funny had I read the book, but listening to it in audio format made it seem like a bad stand-up routine.
3. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
My impression is that Dickens had a lot he wanted to say in this novel and, at only 288 pages, he had a very short amount of time in which to say it. The result was that the characters were placed efficiently into appropriate archetpyes, but they were not given the time to be fleshed out. David Copperfield shows how well he could write characters. Logic is telling me I should stick to reading his longer books if I want a really engaging plot and cast of characters.
4. Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex Difference by Cordelia Fine
In some passages, this book blew my mind and challenged my perceptions in the extreme, and I'm a feminist. Logically, everyone should read this book; even the best of us has a level of subconscious sexism within, and this book makes the reader confront theirs head-on. Scientific thoroughness may be interpreted as repetitiveness by some readers, as she painstakingly tests her arguments from all possible angles, often guiding us to the same conclusions multiple times within a chapter. For me, an unwanted effect of this book is to disempower the individual. For instance, she exposes the futility of gender-neutral parenting, and it's very disheartening to read. Yet she concludes happily that, unbelievably (scarcasm), genes are not defining, and hormones are not gospel! I blame the whole mess on capitalism.
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
I liked the first part more than the long middle section. The conflicts with his family, the struggle for indentity in school, the clash of faiths, and colonialism are all very current themes. The middle section was, to me, an overwritten, tiresome slog. We know Pi survives because he wrote the account; there is no tension or suspense. Instead, Yann asks us to finish his book under the assumption that we, as readers, are unenlightened atheists who need to reach the end of his book to find hope and faith in our cold, rational lives. Yann Martel is one of those religious people who cannot tolerate or understand people who have no faith. It's a childrens's book. One good thing it would do is flush out all the anthropomorphic mush filling kids' heads as a result of too much children's television.
6. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
7. And Justice for Some by Wendy Murphy
The Prophecy by S J Parris. 7/10
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. 6/10
The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus 7/10
The Persians by Aeschylus. 7/10
The Widows Secret by Brian Thompson. 7/10 (Book club choice)
Prometheus Bound. by Aeschylus
The Lost World. by Arthur Conan Doyle. 7/10
King John. By Shakespeare
The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf.
Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna. 7/10
Engleby. by Sebastian Faulks. 8/10
Penny Falls. By Mark Bastable. 8/10
Interesting and well written. A very unusual story of brotherly relationships and obligations. At his best when he makes us laugh.
Fashion Beast - Alan Moore
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly (again, but this is the first time I picked up on the idea that Frankenstein is gay so it was a new experience for me)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I shot the albatross!)
Manfred - Lord Byron
Some Wordsworth
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience - William Blake
Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
__________________________________________________ ______________________________________
The entire A Song of Ice and Fire series again. I think I have a problem.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. That Cheshire, he's a solid cat.
“Excuse me sir,” Alice enquires, “could you tell me which road to take?”
Wisely the cat asks, “Where are you going?”
Somewhat dismayed, Alice responds, “Oh, I don’t know where I’m going sir.”
“Well,” replied the cat, “if you don’t know where you are going, it really doesn’t matter which road you take.”
10. Coriolanus is my least-favorite Shakespeare.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lykren
11. Julius Caesar wasn't extremely interesting. I don't actually remember much of it, though. I guess that's not a positive sign, really.
12. Romeo and Juliet was fantastic, much better than what I remembered from my freshman year reading. But if I need romance, I'd rather read Austen.
13. The Oresteia didn't get much a reaction from me one or the way or the other. I suppose it was intriguing, had some lovely language in it. I suspect a second pass later on might do the trick.
14. The Theban plays were better, I felt. Oedipus the King really took irony to the max, and Antigone was great. Oedipus the Colonus was a little confusing for me though.
15. Medea was the best of the Greek lot. She's really a three-dimensional character.
16. Lysistrata. Didn't like my translation much. Other than that, funny.
and, currently reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
The Prophecy by S J Parris. 7/10
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. 6/10
The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus 7/10
The Persians by Aeschylus. 7/10
The Widows Secret by Brian Thompson. 7/10 (Book club choice)
Prometheus Bound. by Aeschylus
The Lost World. by Arthur Conan Doyle. 7/10
King John. By Shakespeare
The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf.
Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna. 7/10
Engleby. by Sebastian Faulks. 8/10
Penny Falls. By Mark Bastable. 8/10
Interesting and well written. A very unusual story of brotherly relationships and obligations. At his best when he makes us laugh
The Epic of Gilgamesh 7/10
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack:
25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories.
Arthur C. Clarke, Nancy Kress, George Zebrowski, Neal Asher, Pamela Sargent, Philip K. Dick, Mary A. Turzillo, C.M. Kornbluth, Samuel R. Delany
A couple of stories I'd read before, a couple of good ones and some that weren't up to much .6/10
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spartk
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
In the Red Room by Paul Bowles (short story) That man can write the most disconcerting, yet fascinating stuff.
Shooting an Elephant George Orwell If this man had written the phone book I would read it. My favorites were "How the Poor Die" and "Such, Such Were the Joys," and "A Hanging," followed by "The Prevention of Literature," "Charles Dickens," "Politics v. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels," "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," "Reflections on Gandhi." I would hope it goes without saying that of course I love "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language." The former is on of my very favorite essays ever.
Lost Paradise Cees Nooteboom This is a short novel, but one I keep returning to in my thoughts. I recommend it.