Backstory and public service announcement: Amazon has a number of Georgette Heyer novels, Georgians, Regencies, and mysteries on sale for under two dollars a piece.
These are the e-editions of the newest reissue and good quality. There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to which particular novels, but it's a wonderful deal.
I was excited enough about this when I was last in Pittsburgh that my mother ended up telling me to buy her a bunch for her kindle.
Today I get a voicemail saying something to the effect of "I'm reading my second one of those books you downloaded me and, Nic, what is it you like about these?!?"
Apparently she is not going to be a convert.
It's October first...
Oct. 1st, 2011 10:32 pm...which means it's time to read the first chapter of Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. More realistically, based on past years, it's time to read teh whle thing in one binge, and then reread it in the appropriate installments over the rest of the month.
One reason to be very happy today.
Another reason is that the temp was finally below 85 degrees! So Happy Fall Y'all, from previously muggy southeastern Virginia.
Virginia Beach, for all its myriad and horrible faults, has a great public library system. So I have access to books, and actually just finished Golding's To the Ends of the Earth books and Elizabeth Howard's 4 Cazalet books. But now I am out of inspiration.
I would greatly appreciate any recommendations. I tend to lean toward science fiction and historical fiction (except for Philippa Gregory, who writes trash at the expense of history and defamed Catherine of Aragon, one of the Great Classy Ladies of History), also mysteries, biographies, and pretty much anything else. I have catholic (small c) tastes.
Thanks very much in advance!
poor unloved little books
May. 1st, 2008 07:23 am![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uscathena via sawcat:These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights - oh, the pain, the paaaaain!
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose - after the third murder it picks up a bit :-)
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: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair - one of my favorites
The Time Traveler’s Wife - not one of my favorites
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods - wonderful book
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - I really disliked this, but I did finish
The Canterbury Tales - some for school, finished on my own
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World - oddly enough, I have practically no memory of this
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel - please make it stop!
1984
Angels & Demons - alternating between hysterical laughter and *headdesk*
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park - it's my favorite Austen, and I am not ashamed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
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 (no, but I was subjected to Light in August)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid - very large chunks, in the original
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Apparently a lot of people buy Austen and Neil Gaiman and then never read them. Odd. It's also funny to me that people apparently have lots of unread books on their shelves. I think I have fifteen.
I'm also forcibly reminded of how pathetic the assigned reading in high school was. *sigh* One Shakepeare per year, like they needed to be rationed. We even read Julius Caesar in American Lit, to make sure we had our Recommended Yearly Allowance of iambic pentameter. Plus I remebmer having a very early wtf moment in ninth grade when I realized we were reading an abridged version of Frankenstein. Anyone know what high schools assign now? I'd be interested to know. If they are still making students read The Catcher in the Rye I officially give up. I went through high school thinking I hated Steinbeck because of the texts they assigned, then read Cannery Row and completely fell in love with his prose. Why is it always the "best known"/least enjoyable book of famous authors that is assigned?
(I'm having paragraph issues today...I'm feeling a bit stream-of-consciousnessy)
At least it's a literate gremlin
Mar. 22nd, 2008 12:38 pmI'm not sure what it is about this particular used book store in Robinson, but I turn into some little goblin-creature whenever I'm there. I scuttle around, clutching volumes to my chest, gibbering, squeaking, and going "mine mine mine" and, occasionally, giggling maniacally.
I am at a loss to recall any other place where I scuttle. But it gives great enjoyment to whoever has come with me, and I got some great prices on hardcovers to replace some paperbacks that are falling to shreds.
BTW - is or has someone recently started publishing past Hugo winners in hardcover? I saw Memory and The Doomsbday Book in matching unfamiliar covers with 50th Anniversary of something or other logos on them.
"The List" is here
Mar. 4th, 2008 03:33 pmMy List, in no particular order:
* Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey
* Persuasion - Jane Austen
* Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
* Knight's Castle - Edward Eager
* Paladin of Souls - Lois Bujold
* The House on the Strand - Daphne du Maurier
* Sorcery and Cecelia - Caroline Stevermer and Pat Wrede
* Scout's Progress - Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
* Brat Farrar - Josephine Tey
* The Riverside Shakespeare
The whole exercise was great fun, and really thought-provoking. It's funny how you re-evaluate things once the criteria is "Can I live without this book?" Some things that I would have said I really loved I decided I can live without, and I surprised myself with some of the books that are really indispensable to me.
I also now have quite a list of necessary rereads. You start thinking "I really can't go to the island without reading the Company books again."
