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Thursday, May 28, 2009

more books to read


Neil Gaiman...one of my favorite authors.  I finally went and got one of his latest picture books
(illustrated by Charles Vess), "Blueberry Girl".  You can hear the book in it's entirety here:

                                 
          I love Mr. Gaiman's voice, his accent too. 

I enjoyed turning the pages along with the narration. It was kinda like being read a bedtime story....by Neil Gaiman...(if he asked I would say yes, check this picture out...It's a joke by the way.)


I also bought "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.
It has been all over the internet for quite a while, but I can't stand the cover...
I need to put a book jacket on this, pronto.  
My local bookseller has been very eager to sell this book (Pride and Prejudice, for some reason is one of my favorite reads), so I finally decided to pay up despite my anxiety.

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Also grabbed "Physics of the Impossible" (a scientific exploration into the world of phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel) by Michio Kaku.  Whoa.

I like how the preface starts with a word from Albert Einstein: "If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it."

...Amen...

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...and I couldn't not buy the Commemorative Edition of Necronomicon - the best weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

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I also bought all three books of the Divine Comedy by Dante today.
The wonderful bookshop owner was kind enough to tell me that I can read it online for free...

BUT I ALREADY TRIED THAT and it didn't work for me.  I NEED the paper and if I print it all out, I will waste paper and ink because the printer will get jammed...and the whole process will turn into some kind of zen training thing  (I would have to tell myself that "it will all pass...blah, blah, blah).

I also need to write memos and stuff in these books...they will be more like my notebooks.  I usually don't, (can't) do that with books, but on this occasion, an exception will be made.  It's (ehem) RESEARCH.

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So, that's what I bought at the bookstore today...I wanted to by the new Haruki Murakami book "1Q84" but like many other Japanese books, this one comes in two separate books, each costing about 19 US dollars... I'll wait for the bunko edition (Japanese equivalent of the paperback edition).  I have tons to keep me busy (obviously) and two other Haruki books I have to read first anyways.

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As far as my current reading endeavor goes:

"Middlemarch" is a good read so far (albeit a little dull sometimes) but I am not caught up with the majority of fabulous readers over at Fill in the Gaps.

So I should peel my eyes off this screen and stick them in the book...

The sticky note things you see on the side, mark the places I found particularly interesting...one of them was in the book "Old and Young".  
Will (a young man who still doesn't have a real job...at this point..and is probably falling in love with one of the main characters, Dorothea) is saying: 

"...I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning.  But this time I mean to outdo him in breadth of intention."

Can you guess which word made me stop?  

Despite the fact that this story takes place in a time when there weren't even telephones, I couldn't help but imagine Will with a mobile phone, twittering.  Twittering and trying to say more in less words than Naumann.

Goooooooood grief. 

So much to read, so little time.  Now off to my other blogs...


Wednesday, May 20, 2009

97 to 99 (filling in the gaps)

The picture is actually of numbers 97, 98 and  53 because The Leopard was right there in the same are with the other two books, nd I just love the cloth cover of my everyman's library edition!

97. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

98. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

99. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (because I want to read the Widows Of  Eastwick!)


So, one more to go.  However, new books cross my path almost everyday and it so hard to stay focused on what I think I need to read the most.  I don't know how everyone else is managing to cross of those books on their lists so fast!


Friday, May 15, 2009

86 to 96 on my list of books to read

Uh-oh.  I haven't included the book that will, no doubt, be helpful for my current "novel adventure".
...
Dante's "Inferno".  I suppose since I know the story I fell like I've read it... However, that will not do, so it goes on my list of 100 books to read.  Might as well kill 2 birds with 1 stone (enlightenment and research).

Ngh...

I'm a vegetarian, and I just realized I really don't like that expression...kill, bird...argh.

Ah, so here are a few more to add to my list that previous
ly stopped at number eight-five.

86. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
87. Divine Comedy by Dante

?

Recurring theme here?

ANYWAY,

88. Complete Prose by Woody Allen
89. Glass Book of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist
90. Five by Endo Shusaku
91. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
92. Native American in the Land of the Shogun by Frederik L. Schodt
93. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (I think I read a kiddy edition when I was little but that doesn't                                                                        count so here it is!)
94. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
95. The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux

Oh good heavens...FINALLY number 96...
96. Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson

So, four more to go.

As for my "novel adventure" it is still going pretty well.  I am writing chapters out of order though.
I have a map in my head so I know where I am headed and feel rather comfortable shifting back and forth in time.  
I just wish I had more time to read things like Dante so that I can learn something from the "masters".  

I shouldn't even be blogging right now ... but it is very therapeutic...
Speaking of therapeutic, must go take a bath in candlelight...aahhh.

Monday, May 11, 2009

filling in the gaps..

I haven't been able to choose 100 books yet...  

The whole process of looking at my list of books that I own...

The stacks of books that I brought home (when the store that I worked at closed down last year) have been looming over me like a tree in a Dr Seuss picture.

For some reason I still think that this is a necessary process.  So, here is the list of books that will continue to grow:



1. A Parisian Affair and Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant
2. The Sunday Philosophy Club  by Alexander McCall Smith
3. Dune by Frank Herbert
4. White Noise by Don DeLillo
5. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
6. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
7. Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill
8. Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies by Ken Kalfus
9. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss
10. Purple Hibiscus  by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
11. A Changed Man by Francine Prose
12. General Theory of Magic by Marcel Mauss
13. A Woman's Life by Guy De Maupassant
14. Tales of Wonder by Mark Twain
15. Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn
16. Male and Female by Margaret Mead
17. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education by Margaret Mead
18. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
19. Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner
20. The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella
21. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
22. 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
23. Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady
24. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
25. Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
26. Tolstoy's Short Fiction: (Norton Critical Editions) by Leo Tolstoy
27. The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende
28. Taking Pictures by Anne Enright
29. Passin' by Karen E. Quinones Miller
30. Adam, One Afternoon And OTHER STORIES by Italo Calvino
31. The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser by Marianne Hauser
32. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book one by Stephen R. Donaldson
33. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book two by Stephen R. Donaldson
34. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book three by Stephen R. Donaldson
35. Middlemarch by George Eliot
36. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
37. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
38. The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
39. Leave It To Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
40. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
41. First Into Nagasaki by George Weller
42. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
43. Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
44. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
45. Starbook by Ben Okri
46. The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
47. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
48. Paradise Lost by John Milton
49. From the Shadow of Dracula by Paul Murray
50. White Gold by Giles Milton
51. The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
52. Summer Doorways by W.S. Merwin
53. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
54. Writing With Intent by Margaret Atwood
55. The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
56. Possession by AS Byatt
57. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
58. No God But God by Reza Aslan
59. A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen
60. The Black Angel by John Connolly
61. Big Boned by Meg Cabot
62. Amenable Women by Mavis Cheek
63. Pope Joan by Donna Cross 
64. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
65. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
66. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
67. Chez Moi by Agnes Desarthe
68. The Keep by jennifer Egan
69. The Island of the Day Beefore by Umberto Eco
70. The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde 
71. Imperial Reckoning by Carline Elkins
72. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
73. Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris
74. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
75. The World To Come by Dara Horn
76. Forever by Pete Hamill
77. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
78. Margaret Wise Brown Awakened By the Moon by Leonard S. Marcus
79. Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio
80. Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning
81. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
82. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
83. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
84. Magoc Seeds by V.S. Naipaul
85. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger