HoL Book Club | Part 1 – My Musings, Just in time for World Book Day…

Tags

book challenge, book club, ergodic literature, HoL, house of leaves, hypertext, japan, Jorge Luis Borges, mark z danielewski, readalong

It is March 1st – which means I get to mark World Book Day from a busy cafe in a shopping mall, after having travelled 40 minutes (there and back) to work only to find out it is a ‘snow day’ and therefore the site is shut.

I am currently drowning the last embers of my rage in my chai latte and top it off with a blueberry muffin, which quite frankly, I think I bloody well deserve after battling with Storm Emma’s offering on my car this morning. But hey-ho, can’t complain. I get to sit across the way from a Scouse handyman who is commiserating about his personal life to his mate and just eavesdrop (because that is what reader/writers do – we are very Parisian in that fashion).

This is the perfect time and place to write another blog post. Go me.

So, WBD is celebrated all day by reading books, talking about books, writing about books, and that is exactly what this is. MZD, the prodigal author of House of Leaves, began his online book club which looks at one section of this massive genre-defying tome at a time, and we all get to basically go nuts over inferring the shit out of it.

My observations so far of the group talk on the House of Leaves FB Book Club Page  is as follows:

• Every person has a different edition (full colour, black and white mostly) which means people are now sharing pictures of the inner sleeve that others do not have. There is a lot of camaraderie going on! And I have unearthed some pretty neat connections I never had the chance of learning about 10 years ago, because of the limitations on internet chat rooms and forums (remember those? Yeah, still miss ’em).
• It is all one MASSIVE GEEK PARTY! I mean, there is one lady who literally got paranoid over a splodge of blue ink on the title page (if you know the book, blue is a significant colour. All references to the HOUSE are in blue.) It was reading into stuff, gone mad. I have come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as too much interpretation, and that can ruin a beautiful thing like HoL. Turns out, MZD even gets exasperated at how deeply and seriously some people may lose themselves in HoL.
• The conversations are attracting not only the academically minded, but also complete newbies who are entering the horrific alchemy of the novel and realising that YES, this book CAN give you nightmares. A word of warning to those beginning it: make sure you read it during the day, not in your house, and you have someone around to have a light-hearted conversation afterwards. DO NOT READ AT NIGHT. You have been warned. I have personally experienced the horrors of that.
• It can be a bit confusing, but that is the nature of the novel and the way ideas unspool from it. When you have a piece of work that has been constructed like a daisy-chain from other pieces of literature and literature that doesn’t even exist, but is given the illusion it is a credible piece of evidence, then people begin to echo that in their own surmisings. It is completely a meta-experience. We are the book, the book is us. Simple as.

What ‘Genre’ is House of Leaves?

This is my second read through of HoL, which means I’ll be approaching it from a completely different perspective. When I first read it, I didn’t really get what I was experiencing. Yes, it was a very unique experience as the book is laid out differently from other texts. It is a story about a labyrinth, that grows in a house in Ash Tree Lane, and the text is labyrinthine to mimic that.

A labyrinth, as everyone knows, is designed to throw you off, make you lose your bearings, your sense of ‘self’, induce a sense of panic etc until you ‘work’ to find out the exit. This is what I mean by the ‘structure’ of the book mimicking the content of the book:

The text will not obey the laws of literature as we know it. Text will flow backwards, go sideways, be cut off, slide down the page, even be ‘caged’ in a box, which here is symbolising how one of the characters feels as he crawls through one of the ever shifting spaces in the labyrinth.

As for what ergodic means:

“The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users.”

It also needs to be something that requires the reader to interact with the text, (which the book club members are doing, they are digging up meanings, joining up the dots, making new connections and using the ‘interface’ that MZD created.) This book does not come with a manual on how to read it – you need to figure out what is needed to crack it:

“In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.”

So basically moving your eyes from right to left is not going to get you anywhere with HoL.

Apart from this, HoL is grossly intertextual – to the point where we can say that it doesn’t stay anchored to any one ideology, theme or genre. It passes fluently and fluidly from one to the next at will. In fact, you have control over what those connections are. The suggestions are there, only you have to make the links (if you wish).

So, let’s introduce ourselves to the notion of HYPERTEXT:

Hypertext fiction is characterized by networked nodes of text making up a fictional story. There are often several options in each node that directs where the reader can go next. Unlike traditional fiction, the reader is not constrained by reading the fiction from start to end, depending on the choices they make. In this sense, it is similar to an encyclopaedia, with the reader reading a node and then choosing a link to follow.

HoL, despite proclaiming itself to be a ‘novel’ is actually more of a manual of sorts, an academic paper, that gets lost in the throes of its own urban mythology. It desperately tries to anchor itself in reality. We have at least 3 narrators for starters: Zampano (a blind man who to me resembles Jorges Luis Borges more than anything (more on this for next week!), Johnny Truant (a young drug-addled failing tattoo artist who picks up the mantle of Zampano after he dies, whose voice is a footnote in the margins of the book) and Navidson (a man who may or may not have existed, who moved into a haunted house, that grew a labyrinth one day that was physically impossible according to some shaky home videos). In fact, here is one person’s very useful diagram of how many ‘narrative layers’ one experiences when reading this book:

 

Can you say ‘unreliable narrator’? Um, yep. So paranoia when reading this novel is inevitable. The hypertext aspect of the book comes into play as you go deeper into the story. You will find yourself breaking off, going away and delving into the story of the Minotaur for a few days, coming back, then realising that the page you are reading has a secret code embedded in it. Off you go again, figuring out what it means, you will go back several pages, pontificate on a word, a letter, a line. Repeat ad nauseam.

This aspect of hypertext is experienced more literally with MZD’s Only Revolutions, where you literally flip from the front to the back to the front of the book constantly to experience that same moment in time, from two different perspectives. It is a physical process and creates a feeling of symbiosis between the two lovers who are, interestingly, alive at two different points in history, and are travelling towards each other from opposite ends of the USA. It is the great American road novel, turned ergodic and hypertextualised (apt, since MZD’s fans had a hand in creating the novel itself).

But I digress… (as is natural for a novel like this). Let’s look at those all important words “This is not for you”.

Why does this greet the reader before the story begins? Some say it is a warning from Johnny Truant, who let’s face it, wishes he never went to Zampano’s apartment that day with his friend Lude. It is reminiscent of Milton’s “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” which greets those at the entrance to hell. I would like to agree that it is this an nothing more, as the house is a hell to anyone who enters it and especially goes down the 5 1/2 minute hallway to the great unknown.

However others have stated that the work itself consists of personal notes, scribblings, Zampano’s obsessive writings which are reminiscent of diary entries. The man was a graphomanic and died in a place much like this:

So maybe we are NOT meant to read his things, because they are a diary of his mad thoughts. The reader is solely himself (ironic, as the man was blind – another link to Borges!)

Others have suggested that since ‘echo’ plays a big part in the core theme of the book, then maybe we should apply to myth directly, in that if this is Echo’s voice, only the last two words would chime back to us ‘for you, for you’. An interesting theory (and one of my favourites!)

Lastly, one member of the book club made a very valuable contribution about how he had once met Danielewski at a signing, and he said the following ‘I wrote this for you so you could swim in it, not for you to drown in it’. Very revealing, as yes, it is for us and for the reader. Nice to know MZD worries about us and our obsession with his creation.

So remember guys – have fun, don’t drown. From one Pisces to another, just swim with the current*.

*Just an observation but it is WBD, 1st March. That means 4 days to go for MZD’s birthday, and 6 days for mine. Check out the publisher of my edition of the book:

*sly grin* Okay, I’ll stop now… I’ll stop. Those of you who got it, have got it. Thank you. I’ll just ‘swim’ and try not to drown. 

 

HoL Book Club | Part 1 (Front matter, back cover, dedication, flap copy)

Tags

book challenge, book club, books, gothic fiction, HoL, house of leaves, literature, mark z danielewski

After a lengthy hiatus, I have decided to make a return to blogging. What pulls me out of my prolonged absence is a cocktail of slightly unpleasant things that life has thrown at me this week. Thursday especially was a pretty nasty bastard, I’ll have you know.

Here are the ingredients, in case you should want to emulate my Poe-esque misery:

• Add two parts arctic ‘Beast of the East’, by standing out in the freezing cold for 50 minutes. You are not allowed a coat, and should stay there in the whipping rain until your marrow aches with pain, you can’t feel your ears and your nose is dripping like a broken tap.
• This, along with one parts of fatigue, will ferment to produce influenza-like symptoms quite nicely, with a pinch of voice loss to kick-start the whole thing. Fever, in the form of so many Shelobs will insert their pincer-like legs into your shoulders and neck, and if you are lucky, the small of your spine will also host a little succubus intent of riding the hell out of you indefinitely.
• By day 3, your voice has completely gone, or it alternates between a foghorn and the squeak of a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. It is important that you are bedridden and mentally ‘crawling up the walls’ (a la The Yellow Wallpaper). This means you will do ANYTHING to combat the boredom within and without.
• Day 4 gifts the afflicted with an unbearable itch that pulsates like gamma rays from the INSIDE of ones forehead, just behind the eyes. I call this the ‘Clockwork Orange’ effect. It is okay to want to claw your eyes out, but to no avail. As a bonus, within the ears there is further movement that can only be described as something out of The Wasp Factory. Yes, wasps. Angry ones. In your head. Buzzing. Itching. And no way to itch it…
• Day 5 and you have to do something or you are going to go fairly insane… you are ill, you are missing World Book Day at school (the only time of year that is worth being a teacher at a school), everything you eat tastes like sawdust (oranges mostly). And if that is not enough, there is the grim approach of your 35th birthday, along with the thought of ‘what am I doing with my life?’ What is a girl to do?

So it is with all moments of productiveness, that are spurred on by desperation I find, that something comes to the rescue: The House of Leaves Book Club!

I thought to myself ‘why not?’ After all, it’s been 11 years since I entered that formidable htnirybal House on Ash Tree Lane, 11 years since I experienced quite literally the most powerful piece of fiction I have ever come across. I liked the fact that MZD planned this so close to his birthday, which is close to mine. I liked that it was a gargantuan project (once you fall into the house, there is no coming back out). In short, it felt like fate.

I’m never on time for book clubs, but this one started yesterday. Those taking part should be reading between the dates of 26th February and 3rd March the following:

• Front matter, back cover
• The dedication
• Flap copy

Now, since most people will have different editions (some coloured, some not) you will have to adjust what you read. Since I’ve gone through this monstrosity before and lived to tell the tale, for me it’ll be like entering the Overlook Hotel after Johnny went mental and the place was abandoned for years.

For those who have never read HoL but heard about it, the experience is a completely unique. There isn’t a novel like it, and I liken it to the mad genius of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, where the novel has a life, will and consciousness (rather a ‘lack of’ of its own).

Those of you who have ever watched Stranger Things, will appreciate how Danielewski takes and uses the many tropes of horror fiction and makes it a thing entirely its own. Where there is the ‘underverse’ in Stranger Things, there is the also the monstrous labyrinth in the house.

FIRST-TIMERS WARNING: This is no spoiler, but if you decide to do the read-along, then you will inevitably run into the CODES – these are secret messages embedded in the text/ footnotes/ margins etc. I shall be periodically posting my thoughts about these as I come across them. If you do not know what I mean by this, check out the official FB website, where the madness has already begun with people cross-referencing like mad between the pages: House of Leaves Book Club.

There is also the real madness of the ‘coding’ forums, which can still be found here: Mark Danielewski Forums (caution upon entry is advised… it can get rather too much in there with the info. Spoiler alert…)

So, I’m off to read the bits assigned and will come back to address the all important question that MZD will be posing, which is:

“How does “This is not for you” apply to the book, the reader, and Johnny Truant?”

Is anyone game to read along with me and throw some theories out there?

Looking Back at 2011 | A Year Through Books

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American, book challenge, kurt vonnegut, literature, Michael Ondaatje, Slaughterhouse-Five

It’s that time of year again folks, a fresh new year. We’ll all be setting ourselves fresh new reading challenges, so it’s the perfect moment to look back at 2011 and see what we have accomplished and how we can further improve on our performances. I see that throughout the year I’ve discovered how some of heavyweights like ‘Beowulf’ are not all what they are cut out to be. Yet a penny dreadful like ‘Sweeney Todd’ can turn out to be a surprisingly solid five-star read!

A way to do this is to looks at goodreads.com’s ‘2011 Reading Challenge’. Being a slow reader, my personal record has never gone past more than 50 books, yet I was determined to do better. And I did, I managed to read 72 books. I’m thrilled! For 2012 I’n trying a tentative 70!

Here’s my selective reading journey for 2011:

5 Star Reads

White Oleander – Janet Fitch
The Snow Goose – Paul Gallico
Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
Beginners – Raymond Carver
The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
Marvels – Kurt Busiek
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Legend of the Sleey Hollow – Washington Irving
The Tales of Bejamin Bunny – Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
Labyrinths – JL Borges
A House of Pomegranates – Oscar Wilde
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
Sweeney Todd – Anonymous
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

4 Star Reads

Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
The Angel’s Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
2BR02B – Kurt Vonnegut
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Doll Short Stories – Daphne du Maurier
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Aesop’s Fables – Aesop

3 Star Reads

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Octopussy and the Living Daylights – Ian Fleming
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – A. Solzhenitsyn
Kung Fu Trip – Benjamin Zephaniah
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Informers – Brett Easton Ellis
Point Omega – Don DeLillo
Wolverine: Origins – Paul Jenkins
The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming
The Summer Without Men – Siri Hustvedt
Dune – Frank Herbert
First Love, Last Rites – Ian McEwan
Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
Japanese Fairy Tales – Theodora Yei Ozaki
English Fairy Tales – Joseph Jacobs
Grimms Fairy Tales – Brothers Grimm
Beowulf – Anonymous
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

2 Star Reads

Tales of Freedom – Ben Okri
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Civil War – Mark Millar
Florence and Giles – John Harding

1 Star Reads

Lost World – Patricia Melo
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette LeDuc
Lost Souls – Poppy Z Brite

So, how was your reading year? I hope you had an interesting one, and good luck for all the 2012 challenges.

Related articles

• God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut (neatorama.com)
• lest we forget the wit and wisdom of kurt… (digger666.com)

The Problem with Gargantuan Book Challenges, and How I Handle Them…

Tags

1001 book list, book challenge

As Hallowe’en approaches I tend to look back on my reading record to see how well I’ve done throughout the year. Although I am heading nicely towards my target of 60 books, I was not pleased to discover that I had grossly deviated from my other book challenges, especially the most important one: 1001 Book Challenge.

It’s not an easy list to conquer, as anyone who is currently undertaking it will know. The sheer number of books aside, it is probably the only list that well and truly makes you ‘feel’ your mortality. Especially if you have (like me) gauged their yearly reading speed. Mine stands at approximately 50 books a year, placing me in the ‘slow reader’ category compared to some readers who manage well over 100 books a year!

One good thing about gargantuan challenges like the 1001 Book List is that many people are attempting it. It’s tough but it’s highly popular and if you can find a good online reading group (I’m a member of the goodreads one) there is plenty of camaraderie to be had along the way. And you’ll soon discover that most people are there to discover truly good books that deserve their time and effort. There is no pressure to actually COMPLETE the list. In reality, it would take a lifetime of reading. So the challenge is viewed as one that allows you to read a lifetime of ‘quality’ titles that have been tried and tested by critics.

Joining a group also means you’ll meet many people who have varying reading habits, some quite surprising. Some people begin to read the books in list order, finding a sort of rhythm as they tick off the books one by one. Some like me, tend to pick and choose haphazardly whereas others read books in ‘author’ order, e.g. reading all titles that happen to be in the list by Dickens, then go onto another author and so on. If you can’t be bothered to choose a book from the list yourself (and there are plenty of lists floating around in all formats) or you rather can’t bear to look at that heart-stopping list for fear of fainting then there is always the monthly readalongs that let you know which books are being read by the whole group. This is best by those who like to enter into heated debates. I like a good discussion every once in a while, but it’s rare that I choose to do a readalong, mainly because as soon as I commit something is bound to come up and stop me from joining in!

Now this year has been very up and down for me reading wise and with all good intentions I have not had the chance to make the best use of my time. I also believe that because I have 3 different 1001 lists (2006, 2008 and 2010), I have put myself off a bit. Just a tad. So I sort of gave up on it. But I won’t let that happen for 2012. Oh no, I’ve decided to make a shortlist of 1001 books that I have been DYING to get my hands on. My list is a mish-mash of titles taken from all three versions which makes things a bit more manageable.

Here’s what my proposed 1001 Book Challenge for the coming year looks like:

Pre 1700’s
*Don Quixote (Own)
*Oroonoko (Own)
*Tale of Genji
*Aesop’s Fable
*Metamorphoses

1700’s
*Rasselas (Own)
*120 Days of Sodom
*Caleb Williams
*Camilla
*Wilhelm Maisters Apprenticeship

1800’s
*La Bete Humaine
*Germinal
*Bel-Ami
*Against Nature
*Nana
*Erewhon
*The Moonstone (Own)
*Crime and Punishment (Own)
*Woman in White (Own)
*The Red and the Black
*The Brothers Karamazov
*Tale of Two Cities (Own)

1900’s
*Locus Solus
*Rashomon
*The Great Gatsby (Own)
*The the Lighthouse (Own)
*Steppenwolf
*Lady Chatterley’s Lover
*Les Enfants Terribles
*Tender is the Night (Own)
*Nausea
*The Little Prince
*Zorba the Greek
*Love in a Cold Climate
*Go Tell it to the Mountain
*Casino Royale
*Bonjour Tristesse
*The Mandarins
*The Talented Mr. Ripley
*Pale Fire
*Ada
*Heartbreak Tango
*The House of Spirits (Own)
*If not now, When?
*Beloved
*The Black Dahlia
*Kitchen
*Buddha of Suburbia (Own)
*The Virgin Suicides
*A Suitable Boy
*The Poisonwood Bible

2000’s
*Kafka on the Shore
*Suite Francaise
*Elegance of the Hedgehog
*The Children’s Book
*On Beauty
*After the Quake

There are a total of 58 books, which means it is well within my means to conquer such a list. Obviously I hope to read more than that, as each year I try to stretch myself beyond the 50 mark. This year I’m trying for 60 books, of which I have read 47 so far. I know it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m really determined to take a big chunk out of that 1001 list. There are so many important books on there that I just have to make the knowledge of them ‘mine’! But considering that the list is updated every two years, I won’t be making much of a dent in it really.

So, enough of my list mania, what about yours? How do you handle your Book challenges? Is there a particular order, pattern to how you pick your next read? I don’t care how wacky it is, I would love to know.

Reviews, Resolutions and Remnants… 2010 at a Glance

Tags

2011 resolutions, book challenge, book review

“2010 – The year I thought I lost my colours, but found them again through books… and blogging.”

For me, 2010 was the year I accidentally discovered blogging. Like all good ideas, I happened upon it by chance when I was reading a particularly entertaining review of ‘Lolita’; and it suddenly dawned on me, ‘why don’t I give this a try?’ Truth be told, I was going through some particularly nasty emotional problems (remnants of the evil 2009!) and in a position I call ‘zero gravity’ where I felt like I was floating off into deep space with nothing to anchor me to reality. So without thinking, I opened my first blog account and started to write myself out of my mini-depression. Before this I felt like all the colour in my world had been sucked out, but reading and writing eventually brought those colours back to me again. If you think of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and the sequence where Dorothy is in Kansas; that’s how it was. For Dorothy, it took a hurricane and some munchkins to do the trick; for me it was a blog. It seems a little silly and a bit strong to say ‘my blog saved my life’, but in this instance it gave me those ‘little steps’ I needed to help find my true self again. And what better way to do it than through the very real and sincere love of books.   

With time I found the world of book blogging to be a particularly special community, because it was here that I realised people like me had a name (bibliophile) and what’s more, they almost always felt the obsessive urge to write down their thoughts on a book; which when you think about it isn’t what your average reader does now is it? Prior to blogging I had about 4 notebooks full of such scribblings and took a funny pride in them. For me, my reading journals are a year-by-year record of book-themed reflections on the world of literature and how this often manifests in real-life. I’m pretty sure most bloggers out there have experienced the phenomenon of the ‘book/ life collision’, when a read deals with the exact same problem that you are facing at that moment in time. It’s a pretty special moment, as it feels like the book has been ‘sent’ to you in some way.

In 2010 those books were ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe and ‘Disgrace’ by JM Coetzee. The former is the story of a proud and powerful tribal chief who is so strict in his adherence to the ‘old ways’, he is left absolutely powerless when the white man finally comes to town. In ‘Disgrace’, an equally nonchalant college professor learns the value and worth of mankind in ways he never dreamed he could. Both novels struck a deep chord, as we often lose perspective of what we actually are in the scheme of things. In ‘Disgrace’, people like animals are only pawns on a very, very large cosmic chessboard. In ‘Things Fall Apart’, the village chief loses to the white man because he is unyielding and impatient. Like the ancient chinese proverb says: ‘A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall.”

Despite it being a very gloomy year, 2o10 did go pretty fast, and it was a good thing it did! However, I am left with the one thing I was hoping I wouldn’t have: ‘review remnants’; which means there were quite a few books I didn’t get round to writing up about. Here’s my shameful list of laziness:

A Man’s Head – Georges Simenon
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami 

It would have been nice to start with a clean slate (and an empty TBR list for that matter), but I suppose I will have to add my rogue review remnants to my ever-growing list of new years resolutions, which brings me onto:

Zee’s 2011 Reading Resolutions!

Yeah, I make one every year, and it usually ends up having things like ‘read x amount of books’, ‘read such and such writer’ etc. But this year I hope to be more realistic (so she says!). So here’s my modest 2011 list:

1. Gather and read ONCE AND FOR ALL all the really hard, thick books that I have lying around that I have ‘claimed’ to have read in the past: a.k.a the ‘Fat Fiction’ Challenge.

2.Renew the ’50 Books A Year’ Challenge for 2011, half of which will consist of the 1001 books challenge.

3. Attempt to be more ‘technologically open’ when it comes to literature. Which means trying out at least more than one audiobook/ ebook this year. It also means making more use of online resources such as Librivox. Even a technophobe like me must adjust a little to the changes around me; even if I have taken an oath to read the written word!

4. Finish reviewing the ‘remnants’ of the last year.

5. Start to review books for authors and publishers (haven’t done this before, but it would be fun!)

6. Continue to take books out of the library and SAVE MONEY! (This was last years resolution, which I did stick to – and broke only on very special occasions!)

7. Join more readalongs! I missed the Midnight’s Children one and would like to make it on time for another book.

8. Complete the rough draft of my novel. It’s been a very exciting time for me as I finally give shape to the story that I’ve been carrying around for the longest time.

and finally 9. Discover more book bloggers and post more often to the people I have subscribed to! I do follow a large number of blogs, but lately real-life has been getting in the way of my blogging and responses to some otherwise great, great topics I have been reading about.

So to wrap things up, I wish everyone in the blogosphere and beyond a very happy, peaceful and fun-filled 2011. I hope it will be a good year as I continue to meet more great people. Happy reading everybody!

Zee.

BBC’s ‘The Big Read’ Top 100 Books – How Many Have You Read?

Tags

book challenge

I’ve been doing my rounds today, checking out the blogosphere with what’s happening and came across the BBC’s ‘The Big Read’ book list. I know it’s been around for a while but I thought it would be fun to share the shortlist and see how I fair.

“Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here, in their The Big Read list. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.”

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8. Nighteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet)

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveler’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 Hitch Hiker’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

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (Read the first one…)

34. Emma – Jane Austen

35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Correlli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm- George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (Currently reading)

46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

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

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 – 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 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

74. Noted from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses – James Joyce

76. The Inferno – Dante

77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal – Emilie Zola

79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession – AS Byatt

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 – Robinston Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web – EB 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

So far I’ve got 45 books that I’ve read, and 13 that are unfinished. Not a bad start. Some are collections which mean they are bound to be some that I haven’t read. Hopefully I’ll fill up the gaps in the future. Big books like ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Counte of Monte Cristo’ are all part of my ‘Fat Classics Challenge’ for 2011. Can’t wait to tidy up those loose ends.

How many have you read from the list? Which ones did you HAVE to leave off and why?

50 Books A Year 2010 | Challenge Complete!!

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50 books a year, book challenge

Congratulations are in order, for I have finally finished my first book challenge ever. Yes, after many weeks of posting and obsessing about it I have reached the top of my own personal Everest: a pile of 50 books! In the past, the most I could manage was 20-25 books, but now I’m sure that if I really put my head to it, I can read much more. My aim for next year will be to read 100 books. So, fingers crossed for that!  

Below is the grand list of my conquered reads complete with ratings. To read the reviews, just visit ‘Zee’s Book Reviews’ on the right. All except ‘Lavinia’ of course, because that review was written for ‘The Blue Bookcase’. Note: I still have a backlog of about 7 books that I am still working on, and they will be up as soon as I finish them.

Excellence 5/5
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter

Almost Perfect 4/5
Motorcycle Diaries – Ernesto Che Guevara
Fantastic Mr. Fox – Roald Dahl
The Twits- Roald Dahl
Boy: Tales of Childhood- Roald Dahl
Memoirs of a Master Forger – William Heaney
PUSH – Sapphire
Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Story of Blanche and Marie – Per Olov Enquist 
South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Disgrace – JM Coetzee
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth – Xiaoluo Guo
Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

Good 3/5
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Crazy – Benjamin Lebert
A Partisan’s Daughter – Louis De Bernieres
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein – Peter Ackroyd
The Lost Estate – Alain Fournier
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Goethe
A Man’s Head – Georges Simenon
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
Disquiet – Julia Leigh
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories – F Scott Fitzgerald
Ether’s Inheritance – Sandor Marai
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
A Pale View of the Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
In The Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
The Rapture – Liz Jensen
Winter Trees – Sylvia Plath
The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson
Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lavinia – Ursula Le Guin
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Nocturnes – Kazuo Ishiguro

Avoid 2/5
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
The Calligrapher’s Night – Yasmine Ghata
The Electric Church – Jeff Somers

Waste of Time 1/5
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare

So far two books have been awarded the coveted 5/5 stars. Time will tell whether any other titles will join that celebrated rank. Only books of outstanding quality ever get this rating, so be assured that there is something very special about ‘Fear and Loathing’ and ‘The Passion of New Eve’. Both books managed to rise far and above my expectations. As a reader I found both books to be incredibly rich and terribly unique in their own way.

 

The Rory Gilmore Reading List!!

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book challenge, rory gilmore reading list

Another post, another reading list. This time I think I’ve stumbled across what is probably the most perfect reading challenge for me: The Rory Gilmore Reading List!

Fans of the Gilmore Girls will be thrilled to discover that someone somewhere has managed to collect a list of all the books she has read in the series so far and made a challenge out of it.

Perfect. Click on the link above to see the list and the ones I’ve already read.

Drowning in Book Lists!

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book challenge, book lists

Lately, it seems I’m up to my eyeballs in booklists. I am a sucker for them. Today, as I was looking through some of my journals, I realised that I’d drawn up over 20 lists that I’d either been recommended, or I’d discovered by chance. Some of the titles are actually quite funny, but there is no way on god’s earth I’ll ever read all of them. I am currently reeling under the weight of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and I’m putting together a ‘Banned Books’ list that wll have some very interesting titles to say the least. But here are some of my recent and old ones that I have managed to dig out. I’m pretty sure I’ve got more somewhere, and when I do find them, I’ll post them later 🙂 So here it is, my crazy lists!

Risque/ Banned/ Foreign Booklist Spring 2009

‘Wieland; or the Transformation & Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist’ – Charles Brockden Brown
‘Narrative of the Life of of Frederick Douglass; an American Slave’ – Frederick Douglass
‘The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Stories’ – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ – Harriet Beecher Stowe
‘The House of Mirth’ – Edith Wharton
‘Les Fleur du Mal’ -Charles Baudelaire
‘Essential Victor Hugo’, ‘Notre Dame du Paris’ – Victor Hugo
‘Against Nature’ – J. K. Huysmans
‘Crimes of Love’, ‘Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Tales’ – Marquis de Sade
‘The Red and the Black’ – Stendhal
‘La Bete Humaine’, ‘L’Assommoir’, ‘The Ladies Paradise’ – Emile Zola

Hidden Gems Booklist Summer 2009

‘Lace’ – Shirley Conran
‘Les Diaboliques’ – Barbey D’Aurevilly
‘Little Big’ – John Crowley
‘A Report on Probability’ – Brian Aldiss
‘The Dispossessed’ – Ursula Le Guin
‘The Neverending Story’ – Michael Ende

Random Books from Amazon 2005

‘Zazie in the Metro’ – Raymond Queneau
‘The Whalestoe Letters’ – M. Z. D.
‘Cryptonomicon’, ‘Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
‘Count Zero’, ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’ – William Gibson
‘Girl, Interrupted’ – Susanna Kaysen

50 Books A Year | Reached 30/50!

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50 books a year, book challenge, goodreads

Just a quick post to mark my 30th book read this year (yay!). *Finally* got round to finishing ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and I am feeling positively elated, if not a tad bit tired. What a feeling. Here is the run down of the books I’ve read so far for the ’50 Books A Year Challenge’ on goodreads.com:

1. The Twits by Roald Dahl
2. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe
3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
4. A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres
5. The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
6. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
7. A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon
8. The Lost Estate by Alain Fournier
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl
10. The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho
11.The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Crazy by Bejamin Lebert
13. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
14. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
15. The Calligrapher’s Night by Yasmine Ghata
16. Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl
17. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
18. Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney
19. The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
20. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
21. Disquiet by Julia Leigh
22. Push by Sapphire
23. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Esther’s Inheritance by Sandor Marai
25. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
26. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare
27. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
28. The Book about Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist
29. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
30. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

That’s the grand total so far… All reviews of these books will be up, I promise, I just have to carry them over from my old blog over at live.com.

Thirty down, twenty more to go! If you have any book recommendations I’d love to hear from you – or if you have any personal reading challenges or book lists.