A present……

……for me, from me.  I have, after umming and ahhing, bought myself a Kindle.  I’ve been wimbling round Amazon’s ebooks and looking at The Gutenburg Project, which also contains thousands of free ebooks.  It’ll take me a while to get used to it, but I’m rather liking it.

Wine and nibbles……..

Just been to a book promotional lecture with Professor Paul Gilbert launching his latest book, The Compassionate Mind.  Really enjoyable evening; met loads of people to talk with, including some people I haven’t seen for ages.  I bumped into an ex-client (from work) who looked really well, and it was very nice to see someone happier and better in themselves – I only really ever see people at their most depressed or manic, or psychotic, so it’s good to see someone well.

Congratulations…..

…..to the new Sir Terry Pratchett, who was formally knighted today, or so I heard on the radio when driving home.  Can’t imagine what he made of the whole pomp and ceremony, but I look forward to the experience being translated into his next Discworld book.  Hehe.

Feeling bookish?…….

Courtesy of Liz, I bring you this – 100 books everyone should read but mostly haven’t.  Apparently, most adults have only read six off the list.  See what you can tick!  And whether or not you enjoyed the book is also important!  Must find out what the source of this list is, cos personally, there’s a few more I’d add for “books everyone should read.”

I have read the ones in bold.

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 – various authors (not read all of it….)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (a trilogy, I think, btw)
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
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 (ploughed through it…)
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 (all seven of them….)
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (dull)
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 (hand me the pills, I’ll die now….)
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile
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 (and adored the film)
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
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 (Le Petit 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

My additions

On The Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin

The Evil Cradling – Brian Keenan

The Railway Man – Eric Lomax

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

Silent Spring – Rachel Carson

My Name Is Red – Orhan Pamuk

Consider The Lilies – Iain Crichton Smith

The Name of The Rose – Umberton Eco

1066 and All That – Sellar and Yateman

any Omaar Khayyam poetry

What else would you add? (ta Liz for the inspiration!)

The books…….

…….now have a better home: we finally went and spent all our IKEA vouchers and now one wall of the dining room is pretty much solid bookcase.  I shall take a picture.  Rob’s still got loads of books at his parents’ house to bring over, so once it’s full, it’ll look tidier than it has been (boxes of books all over the place).  And hopefully the whole place will be tidier once it’s all finished.  At least it’s given us something to do whilst the weather’s been shite.

Odder and odder…….

I’ve just found this on www.thebookseller.com and it made me chuckle:

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, The Bookseller is pleased to announce the “Diagram of Diagrams” – a public vote to find the oddest book title of the past 30 years.

The winner of the Diagram of Diagrams will be officially announced on Friday, 5th September, 2008 with anyone and everyone able to vote online at http://www.thebookseller.com/diagramprize from Friday 8th August. The full list of titles is below.

To mark the occasion, Aurum Press will be releasing an illustrated collection of some of the winners and nominees of yesteryears, How to Avoid Huge Ships (£9.99, ISBN: 9781845133214). It features original jackets of 50 of the best-loved titles since the prize began, and an introduction from The Bookseller’s former deputy-editor Joel Rickett.

Philip Stone, Charts Editor at The Bookseller said: “The Bookseller/Diagram Prize seems to be getting bigger each year. There’s something joyfully fascinating about the public’s own fascination for something unique and quirky, and our annual prize is just that. We received more votes for the award earlier this year than the recent “Booker of Booker” poll. I think that tells its own story.”

Horace Bent, The Bookseller’s legendary  diarist and custodian of the prize said: “It’s overwhelming; incredibly emotional to dig through my substantial archive of press cuttings and public correspondences regarding the prize. To look over the last thirty years of the prize – has it really been that long? – I am reminded of so many of my personal favourites; both the winners and the nearly made-its, including our first ever winner, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.

“In fact, in 1993, I arranged a 15-year “Oddest of the Odd” prize, which was won by Nude Mice. Given Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children picked up another “Booker of Booker” prize, perhaps Nude Mice is the early favourite.

“The public will decide. Although, let it be known, I’m still not entirely convinced about opening up the prize up to the public. Their debased vulgarity has been responsible for electing many a nudge-winker a winner in recent years, most notably High Performance Stiffened Structures in 2000, and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories in 2003.”

The prestigious prize was first conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Run by Horace Bent, the first ever winner was the aforementioned The University of Tokyo Press’ Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, in 1978.

Earlier this year, the prize received extensive coverage in the media, both nationally and internationally, and after a close-run contest and 8,500 public votes cast, Cheese Problems Solved and I Was Tortured By A Pygmy Love Queen were beaten by If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs (by “Big Boom”).

How to Avoid Huge Ships is published by Aurum Press on 8th September priced £9.99. For review copies or information on featuring this title please contact Liz Rowe on 0207 2847181 or email liz.rowe@aurumpress.co.uk 

The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year: Winners 1978-2008

1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press)
1979: The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution (Transaction Press)
1980: The Joy of Chickens (Prentice Hall)
1981: Last Chance at Love: Terminal Romances
1982: Population and Other Problems (China National Publications
1983: The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling (MIR)
1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today (Constable)
1985: Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts (Westwood Publishing Co)
1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (Brunner/Mazel)
1987: No Award
1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden (University of Chicago Press)
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (Ten Speed Press)
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (Lace Publications)
1991: No Award
1992: How to Avoid Huge Ships (Cornwell Maritime Press)
1993: American Bottom Archaeology (University of Illinois Press)
1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete (British Cement Association)
1995: Reusing Old Graves (Shaw & Son)
1996: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (Hellenic Philatelic Society)
1997: The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition (Mitchell Beazley)
1998: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw (Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust)
1999: Weeds in a Changing World (British Crop Protection Council)
2000: High Performance Stiffened Structures (Professional Engineering Publishing)
2001: Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service (Butterworths)
2002: Living With Crazy Buttocks (Kaz Cooke – Penguin US/Australia)
2003: The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (Kensington Publishing)
2004: Bombproof Your Horse (J A Allen)
2005: People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It (Gary Leon Hill – Red Wheel/Weiser Books)
2006: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Harry N Abrams)
2007: If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs (Simon & Schuster US)

 

I particularly like Weeds in a Changing World…….