3 posts tagged “books”

It may not be a commonly known fact, but...

It's not a really good idea to spend a lot of time looking at old World War I photos just before you go to bed.  Looking at destroyed cities and muddy trenches and leveled forests and devastation as far as the eye can see, yeah, it's sobering.

I don't believe there has ever been a nastier war.  Ever.  From the perspective of a soldier, anyway.  It was right on that line between the old ways of fighting and the mechanization of armies, and wow.  Talk about brutal.  Somewhere between the Civil War kind of battle and the WWII kind of battle.  Just hellish stuff.  I can't even imagine what people went through there.  We hear a lot about WWII, and we see movies about it and other wars, but I feel like WWI is often forgotten, especially in the United States.  It shouldn't be.  I can't imagine anything worse.

Yes, reading Hemingway recently has made me think a lot about this, but I think I've been interested in the subject since I read All Quiet on the Western Front in school.  And the movie A Very Long Engagement, I think, is a unique look at that war, too.  In a totally different way.  That's one of my favorite movies, easy.  It's not hard to see why guys would self-mutilate in order to get out of the trenches.

Anyway, A Farewell to Arms is a lovely book.  I'm so, so glad I picked up a copy.  Brilliant.

After going through that book list down below, I've made a decision.  A resolution.  I'm going to make a very strong effort to actually sit down and read a book and not give up on it halfway through.  And I've decided that the book I'll be reading is ... The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

I'm quite looking forward to it, too.

As you were.

R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi is a cool album, by the way.

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you have read a bit from but never finished, italicize the ones you might/want to read in the future, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10-foot pole, and do not do anything to the ones you’ve never heard of.

Those are the rules, but I'm also gonna do the following: For each book I italicize because I have some interest in reading, I'm gonna put the ones I actually MIGHT one day read in green.  I need something between "want to read" and "won't touch with a 10-foot pole."  AND, for the books I HAVE read, I'm gonna put the ones I hate in red, and the ones I loooove in blue.  Ha.

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride And Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: (Tolkien)

NOTE: I freaking hate Lord of the Rings, but I HAD to read these books and The Hobbit in a classics course in college.

8. Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)   
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shruged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
42.The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Gift & Award Bible NIV (Various)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52.  A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaids tale ( Attwood)
60. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview with a Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brahares)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn(Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander ( Jane Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

And ... I think that oughta do it.  It's sad how few of these I've read.  I desperately want to read more of the classics in particular.