Lalala

You guys know I like Tracy Chevalier, right? Oh, maybe not. Well I've read all her books, a nice art lesson mixed with romance and history. Girl With a Pearl Earring? Scarlett Johansson? Anyways, I just finished her newest book, Burning Bright. Well last time I checked it was her newest book. That was like a year ago, when it wasn't available at the library for the longest time. So I enjoyed it. They all seem to be aimed at 12 year olds, only they're rated R. Like Pan's Labyrinth, or the Fall. This just made me really want to go to London. I've wanted to go there for awhile, but I'm drawn there even more now. It's so completely steeped in history, decades of kingdoms and opium and knights and whores and artists. All that fog and all those churches. All those pubs and everything. Notting Hill, 28 Days Later, Sweeney Todd. I decided that once I have $5000, I'm going to head out there and live off of cereal and chips and beef jerky for a week. And one day I will splurge and have Shepherd's Pie and Tea and shit. Well after that break of "easy reads" (AKA books written in this century) I think I'm going to go back to classic literature.

Interesting!

I just found this while browsing livejournal, and couldn't resist.

"The Big Read thinks that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Put a star by the books you LOVE."

Is it crazy that most of my favorite books are on here? Like, should I expand my interest? Heh..

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. Nineteen 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'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien*
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger*
19. The Time Traveller'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
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 Corelli'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 Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
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-time - 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 Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile 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 Flauberti
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton 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

Eughh...why all the Dickens?

Hipster's Choice

I've had this book on my shelf for maybe 3 years. I heard about it through a hipster friend who's hipster brother had read it. And tempted by all the hipsters who have been reading it lately, and the HEFTY 100 something pages, I had to read it. Also tempted by the author, J.D. Salinger.
The book I read was Franny and Zooey, and the author also wrote one of my favorite books Catcher in the Rye. But there's a reason as to why one is famous among EVERYONE, and the other is only notorious through hipsters. Want to know why? Because Catcher is OBVIOUSLY good. Franny and Zooey, not so much. It just didn't hold up well, I can't figure out why. But anyways, hipsters only like things that are obscure and secret, and since F&Z is not well known, it's all of a sudden golden.
I don't get it hipsters. Please explain your logic. Please explain why crappy garage bands are somehow better than bands signed by huge record labels? Pray tell why poorly filmed indie movies, hardly even raved about at Sundance are better than blockbuster hits? There's reasons why Titanic is the highest grossing movie of all time, y'know? I mean, kid me not, I love my share of Wes Anderson and Belle & Sebastian, but you don't see me worshiping the Moldy Peaches. Y'know? You do know. Sure, sure, beauty in the ugliness, the simplicity of things, the reflective nature. But what's wrong with Green Day? Oh yeah, they played on MTV.
Well that's cool. To each his own. I need a new read.

Middlesex

YES! Finally a book I can sing praises about! Finally a reasonably large sized book that I finished in a good amount of time! And most of all, finally a book that isn't a movie, or isn't going to be a movie anytime soon! Hurray! Maybe I'll get back on the reading track.
SO this time, when choosing the book, I did it the right way. I randomly chose with my eyes closed from the "Priority Pile" under my bed, consisting of the books that I feel are most important for me to read. This is aside from the 2 leisure shelves of books that should be read at some point in time. See why I need to pick up the pace? I happened upon the book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I bought this like 2 years ago because there was a rave review of it in the school newspaper, and it's the same author as one of my favorite books, The Virgin Suicides. (Which is also one of my favorite movies.)
Here's why I loved it: It was a mixture of some of my favorite things.
It had the messed up romance of my favorite book, Lolita. It made you sympathize for their love, despite the fact that you would consider them sickos in real life.
It had the kooky, ironic humor of my favorite show, Arrested Development. How the messed up family has secrets that make one thing lead to another in terrible yet funny ways.
It was like one of my #3 favorite movie, Amelie, in that it told uninteresting and silly things about characters that ultimately filled them out.
It had foreign people with funny accents. It had war-torn lovers. It had every age and type of human, every gender (including the mysterious 3rd gender). It had beautiful imagery.
This is exactly what I needed after reading Twilight, a well written romance/epic/...mystery I guess. Who has ever made freckles sound so amazing? Seriously, why would someone tell their kid that they are angel kisses when they could simply describe the freckles like:
"A Big Bang had occurred, origination at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears."
I am on my knees right now. Bowing to a statue of Mr. Eugenides in the temple of literature.

(Speaking of statues, Edward is compared to marble a total of 8 times in just the first book. Isn't that going a little too far? Couldn't she think of anything else? Like that his skin was like the universe?)

Finally

So, this morning I finally finished Emma by Jane Austen. It took me 7 months, which I'm absolutely certain is a personal record. I started it last winter and halfway through became bored and started other books, and this summer I came to the conclusion that since I have the time, why not finish it before I forgot how it began? But it took me almost a month to read the second half. It's not that it was boring, it just wasn't engaging. It was extremely well written, and the characters were more developed than any I've ever read. It was clever and realistic, and put other books that claim to be realistic to shame. It just wasn't my cup of tea. I just waned to give the famous author a chance. And I might not even give up on her yet! I have every intention of reading Pride and Prejudice. I just hope it's more filled with adventure than Emma.
It just sucks that I didn't read too many books this summer. There have been summers where I read ten in a month! But I've been trying to stay focused and finish what I started, therefore avoiding all books. I've been reading articles on the internet and newspaper and magazines to keep me occupied. I'm just going to accept the fact that reading more than one book at a time is something I can handle. When I was a kid, I couldn't handle it. But I'm pretty sure I can do it now. It took me long enough to notice though.