13 posts tagged “books”

Happy Birthday Monster (cl, se)
Olivia Helps with Christmas (cl, se)
John, Paul, George & Ben by Lane Smith (cl)
Cowboy & Octopus (cl, se)
Strawberry Freckleface by Julianne Moore (cl, se)
Minnie and Moo & The Seven Wonders of the World by Denys Cazet (cl, lb)
Minnie and Moo & The Haunted Sweater by Denys Cazet (cl, lb)
Minnie and Moo & The Attack of the Easter Bunnies by Denys Cazet (cl, lb)
Cowgirl Kate & Cocoa: School Days (cl)
Sleepover Larry by Daniel Pinkwater (cl)
The Godmother
That Bunny Belongs To Emily Brown (cl)
Identical Strangers (rv)
Dodgeson in New York by Tim Egan (cl) (se)
Dry by Augusten Burroughs (lb) (rv)
Home of the Brave (lb) (ya)
Minnie and Moo: Wanted Dead or Alive (lb) (cl)
Maynard and Jennica (se)
Baby Changes Everything (lb)
The Girl Inside the Castle Inside the Museum (cl)
Half-Assed by Jennette Fulda
Kaline Klattermaster's Tree House by Haven Kimmel (cl)
The Pinball Theory of the Apocalypse (lb)
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

cl = children's literature
se = signed edition
lb = library book
rv = review on vox

This has been going around my neighborhood. Because I switched high schools, I missed out on a lot of American Literature.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read.
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated. 
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track dow these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heighs by Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9. His Dark Marerials by Phillip Pullman
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
19. The Times Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstory
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
34. Emma by Jane Austen
35. Persuasion by Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm by George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montogomery
47. Far From the Maddening Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50. Atonement by Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58. ???
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72. Dracula by Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses by James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
    
78. Germinal by Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession by A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Condrad
92. The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
     

You can download a copy of Beautiful Children for free until 2/29. You can read it using Acrobat Reader.

I already have a copy (signed). It is downstairs in the entryway. Still unopened in the box Powell's sent it in. I am bad - I know.

Anyway, I was thinking this was a book people could read together. I miss having book club. Maybe there is a way to do it on line or with Skype. If you are interested, leave a comment.

Where do you get recommendations for new books to read?

I am always looking for a good book, and have lots of sources. Here are just a few:

DailyCandy: I currently subscribe to almost all of the DailyCandy newsletters because you never know when they might mention a good read. So far they have not let me down.

NPR: I can't tell you how many author interviews have led to me going out and getting the book. Again, I have rarely been disappointed. I get a lot of my children's books because of Daniel Pinkwater's segments. He also has a column in Wondertime Magazine.

Amazon.com: It amazes as well as amuses me how often Amazon recommends something that I like. I say amuses as well because it can be funny to see why it thinks I might like a particular book. The one for the last Harry Potter book was so non-secuiter I can't even remember - it might as well have said because you read books we think you might like this one. I check my recommendations almost daily.

Bookstores: I love checking out what the people who work at the bookstore recommend. Sometimes it can be hit and miss, but that is okay too. Powells.com has all of their employees' recommendations on line, and gives you some insight into whose tastes might be similar to yours.

And of course I get ideas from friends both on and off line.

I am feeling a combination of sad, violated and angry. Our storage space in Emeryville was broken into. It probably happened two weeks ago. It may or may not have had anything to do with the recent calls B received from his bank and credit card company.

They broke the lock and then replaced it with another. They took mostly stuff that we had bought since coming back to California. Mostly books and housewares. They got my framed print that I splurged on for my birthday. They got some Christmas ornaments and stuff like that. They got my set of Kellogg red rooster tea cups.They got clothes and a suitcase and Mister Bunn's dump truck.

One of the ornaments they got was a limited edition from Smith & Hawken. I was so happy they brought them back.

Part of me says that these are all just things. And it doesn't matter. We are okay. No one was hurt.

Still, it feels like our number is up or something. The last few weeks have been filled with just bad things. I nicked a woman's car in the parking lot. I just want the bad to stop.

I will leave you with this quote from Superhero (who I randomly bumped into yesterday):

It makes me of think of that quote from Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies:

“Carolyn Myss, the medical intuitive who writes and lectures about why people don’t heal, flew to Russia a few years ago to give some lectures. Everything that could go wrong did-flights were cancelled or overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel given to someone else. She kept trying to be a good sport, but finally, two mornings later, on the train to her conference on healing, she began to whine at the man sitting beside her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far.

It turned out that this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said-gently-that they believe when a lot of things are going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.”

The above is from here.

Why Moms Are Weird

Pamela Ribon

Pamie has a new book!  I set out to read a chapter or two the other night and ended up staying up until dawn to finish it.  It was laugh out loud funny!  I just couldn't put it down.  I think I actually liked it better than her first book, Why Girls are Weird. Sophomore books aren't supposed to be better.

There is a book signing next week in San Francisco.  The last time we met Pamie we drove out to the Borders in the middle of nowhere LA, and were two of a handful of people that showed up. We thought it would be mobbed and got there super early. The funny thing is B dropped some money out of his pocket while we were sitting in the cafe and who comes up to him and hands him back the bills he dropped - yep, none other than Pamie herself. She rocks!

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

Well, technically I don't have a night stand, but you get the idea.  This is my current read.  It's over 500 pages.  It is about a girl who moves a lot. 

It was recommended by Daily Candy and is also part of Border's Original Voices.  So if you want a copy, it is 20% off at Borders.

Okay, I am going to go to the library now.

We gave the road a break (of sorts) and took the day off from driving.  We met up with the lovely Miss E for lunch yesterday at this amazing tea house and then took in Boulder. We tasted some great Belgium chocolates and also stopped at a Starbucks and a cool independent book store, where I picked this book up for the cows.

The Sound of Colors: A Journey of the Imagination

Jimmy Liao

We then drove out to a park to take in the naturescape that is Colorado, and ended up at the Stanley Hotel where they filmed the movie, The Shining.  Someone was actually get married there!

Today we continue to head West (and north), back to I-80.  We will pass through Loveland and then stop in Little America for the night.

Hopefully photos later.

___________________________
I say of sorts because I think we managed to still drive a couple of hundred miles.

I am a big fan of Daniel Pinkwater.  He has written over 100 books. 

The Artsy Smartsy Club

Daniel Pinkwater

Some have been about his time in Hoboken and some about his time in Chicago.  He also lived in Los Angeles, and has a new book coming out about it.  These are children's fiction, by the way.

The new one is called The Neddiad, and he is making it available free on-line, one chapter at a time.  So this is your chance to read a Pinkwater for yourself for free no less.  Of course, you could already do that by going to the library, but I digress.

Every Tuesday, starting on August 1, just go to the website for the next chapter.  It won't be exactly the same as the final book due out in April 2007, but pretty close.  And you get to read it before it hits the bookstores.

Superpuppy: How to Choose, Raise, and Train the Best Possible Dog for You (How to Choose, Raise, and

Daniel Manus Pinkwater

You may know of Daniel Pinkwater as he is a contributer to NPR.  He reviews children's books on Weekend Edition.  He also has a book about training dogs called Superpuppy.