merry10's 100 Books in 2010 Challenge

My reading log for 100 books in 2010.

1. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
2. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
3. Monkey Grip, Helen Garner
4. Ice, Louis Nowra
5. The Aeneid, Virgil
6. After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007, Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman
7. Consier the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
8. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
9. Lovesong, Alex Miller
10. Joan Makes History, Kate Grenville
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Island of Eternal Love, Daina Chaviano
13. The Boat, Nam Le
14. The Legacy, Kirsten Tranter
15. Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey
16. Pandaemonium, Christopher Brookmyre
17. Graceling, Kristin Cashore
18. Five Children and It, E. Nesbit
19. Blackout, Connie Willis
20. How to Train Your Dragon, Cressida Cowell
21. Hyperion, Dan Simmons
22. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
23. Replay, Ken Grimwood
24. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin
25. The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin
26. The Farthest Shore, Ursula Le Guin
27. Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
28. Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi
29. I shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett
30. Artemis Fowl, The Atlantis Complex, Eoin Colfer
31. The Master and Margarita, Mikhael Bulgakov
32. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Ptrick Ness
33. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
34. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Phillip Pullman

Hi Merry, I'm sure I will enjoy . . .

1. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, 1818,

Charming light satire of 19th Century gothic romances. Catherine Morland visits Bath, becomes friends with Henry and Eleanor Tilney and is invited to Northanger Abbey. I will have read this at 19 and just not been able to see what's happening behind the words. I would have found it dry and not particularly romantic. Now I can see Jane Austen's characters much more clearly and can interpret the unspoken and I'm much more amused.

Why I chose this now. My first ebook. I wanted to see how readable an etext on Stanza was. Northanger Abbey was a good choice as it's short, I was familiar with the story and pretty much enjoy every word in an Austen sentence. Stanza works well. The font size is easily changed, but you sacrifice number of words on a page. My reading style is very fast with paper books and I can't replicate it with ebooks until a larger tablet interface turns up. I wouldn't use an ipodtouch/iphone for most reads - but it was fun!

2. White Teeth, Zadie Smith, 2000

Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones have been friends since WWII. This amazing novel looks at three generations of their families and through them explores immigrant experiences of British culture and its effects on their families. I really loved Zadie Smith's ability to write in different voices, so flexible, so credible. My favourite were the varying registers of Jamaican accent - Hortense, first generation, then daughter Clara who marries Archie, and then finally their daughter Irie. There’s also the rhythms of the street, the gangs, the school yard, the cafe and the home of the white middle class Chalfens.

Samad has twin boys Millat and Magid, one of whom is sent back to Bangladesh to remain a good Muslim boy, but with unexpected results. Through Millat we see young British Muslim men being attracted into a fundamentalist ideological group with political motives. I can't imagine how Zadie Smith must have felt after the 2005 London bombings. Nothing in her book foresees this scale of this tragic result, but it did document the disaffection of some young Muslim youth.

What my ramblings don't tell you is how funny, how apt, how interesting the book is. Through Samad, we find out a bit about Bangladesh, about Islam practiced by an intelligent humane man who struggles to know how to be a good man of faith in Britain, where his tradition and culture are swamped.

White Teeth shares in common with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the fateful synchronicity of its story and its rich variety of characters. Archie Jones comes into his own at the end as the wise fool who proves the worth of his lifelong friendship with Samad.

Interesting comments on Northanger Abbey. I would have found it soooooo boring when I was 19 too! Glad I saved it until last month when it was just right.

It was just right! - very sweet and quite earnest about loyalty and friendship alongside the humour and the spirited defence of Authorsl! I read a lot of regency romances once upon a time and I can see where some authors, Georgette Heyer included, got their inspiration. Coquelicot ribbons indeed!

3. Monkey Grip, Helen Garner, Australia, 1977

Monkey Grip is Helen Garner's debut novel, based on her own diaries kept during her time in group houses in Melbourne. The novel deals with the obsessive love Nora has for Javo, an actor and junkie. Javo must have been an absolutely charismatic person as she loves him through worsening addiction. Javo loves drugs, Nora loves Javo with the same addictive intensity.

The novel is written in a kind of diary style with dreams an important adjunct to the daily happenings. The life outside the group home is hardly touched on but relates to writing, acting and rock music, but the main focus is on the ever changing relationships within the same group of people - and of managing to be independent and not falling into the stereotype relationships of an earlier generation.

It's a well written book, but the subject matter I found ultimately tedious. I was glad that the book ended with Nora's obsession. I liked Nora, I identified with her yearning, I could understand Javo's charisma although he was doing a good job of obliterating it. I loved Nora's clear eyed commentary on her situation and her enjoyment of children, her daughter Gracie and another child of the group house.

SOme great titles to start off the year.

I read and felt just about the same about White Teeth a few years ago. The friendship of the two main characters was such a vivid portrayal of what could be.

Oh, White Teeth was a wonderful read. I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed it!

What I don't understand is, if I loved White Teeth so much, why can't I make myself read On Beauty which I have owned forever!

Judy it's funny you should say that because my first serious lit was On Beauty some years ago now and I liked it a lot and took this long to get around to reading White Teeth. WT is the more fun book though.

I am, perhaps, getting sick of seeing On Beauty which has been on my bedside table for, maybe, three years? Perhaps I will put it away and let it call me when I am ready for it.

I did enjoy On Beauty (although I agree, merry10, that White Teeth is the more fun read), but there's nothing like shelving a book to rediscover it at a later, better, time.

I got The Yiddish Policemen's Union off the shelf where it languished for some years just last year. And I enjoyed it immensely. Sometimes it's just not the right time for a particular book.

4. Ice, Louis Nowra, Australian author, 2008

Louis Nowra's Ice is a multilayered novel about undying love.

Ostensibly we are reading a historical novel about Malcolm McEacharn - his drive to innovate and build a fortune as told by a contemporary narrator who is hoping and grieving for his biographer wife lying in a coma. The novel begins with an iceberg towed into Sydney Harbor in the 1880's and that is just the start of the fictional diversion from McEacharn's life.

The crossover story-telling in the historical fantasy and the contemporary narration is unsettling at first, but you are left feeling impressed by Nowra's imagination at the very end. What I really liked about the novel is the historical and multicultural descriptions of Australia in the late 19th Century, the technological revolution of refrigeration and electricity alongside economic development and social tension. But that's not the main purpose of the novel which is to explore passionate, grieving, loving madness.

In the final pages, the narrator reveals his motives for the way his story is told, and while you know how the novel is structured by then, it still takes your breath away. A rollercoaster ride where you think you've been alienated but then are brought back to sympathy in the last chapter.

I'm glad you liked Ice as well! I agree, the ending was just breathtaking. Nice review, too.

Thanks wookiebender. It was an interesting reading experience.

5. The Aeneid, Virgil

My translation of The Aeneid is by Robert Fagles and is wonderfully readable. It's an epic poem that celebrates Rome by giving it poetic history in the tradition of Homer. There is all the passion and courage of The Iliad and The Odyssey and so much more. Dido and Aeneas' tragic love story, a bloody war to establish the right to settle in Latium, some great female characters, tragic deaths, and heroic derring-do.

The gods have much more involvement in the story in wonderfully interesting, madness inducing and usually bloody ways. Juno is an implacable enemy. Venus is always looking out for Aeneas. Jove enjoys his role of King of the World but he gets tired of Juno's tirades by the end. You can't get any where as a hero unless you have divine approval. I've even got used to the endless sacred barbeques of gilded browed snowy white bulls.

I have the same translation, and really like it. I took a class in college on The Aeneid, where among other things we read parts in the original Latin.

I have a box set of Fagles' Iliad, Odyssey, & Aeneid, and I'm hoping to read all three this year. I'm going to consider both your posts as encouragement!

I just read bits of that translation of The Aeneid for my class on Rome last week (and I had to read other bits for a class last year). I have to admit, I'm not a fan. It leaves me cold somehow. Glad to hear it works for someone!

I had to translate chunks of The Aeneid from Latin for my HSC (far too) many years ago. But I'm not sure if it's been long enough for me to return to Virgil! (I'm slowly returning to the books I studied in English...)

And I've forgotten all my latin. The main usefulness (apart from enjoying the class) is that I have a slight edge on crossword puzzles and anatomical terms. :)

Hi all! I'm thrilled that you've all read it or contemplating reading it. Medellia, you will enjoy it. I'm wondering whether slogging through all of them did help me to enjoy the Aeneid, more than perhaps reading excerpts Joyce. I did enjoy the Greek and Roman myths as a child so perhaps that helped.

>18 jfetting:>21 Very envious of you, jfetting and wookiebender having read the original Latin. It would be fun to learn Ancient Greek too, but then there are all these books to read.

6. After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007, Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman, 2009

This is a book of literary criticism surveying literary and genre fiction in Australian publishing over the last 20 years. I really appreciated the survey of authors and their recent publications, but I could almost give this book 2 stars for the authors' turgid sentences and boringly repetitive point scoring.

I have now been introduced to the eco-genealogical and rural apocalypse genres of literary fiction which is interesting since I live in the Australian bush in the middle of a drought - plenty of opportunity for apocalyptic thinking. It was interesting to read what novels had been tipped into modernism, realism, postmodern and anti-post modernism categories. I am a complete novice in literary theory, so these chapters will have given me plenty to think about.

A couple of literary controversies are looked at in the end of the book, Helen Garner's The First Stone and Darville/Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper. My eyes started to slide over the pages after this.

Meg - eco-genealogical and rural apocalypse - Please Explain!

Hi Judy, just skimming the first chapters:

The eco-genealogical novel looks at home, landscape and settlement and includes family history and ancestry. It includes the regeneration of landscape compared to the rural apocalypse novel.

Tim Winton's Cloudstreet "charts the steady possession and occupation of a particular place.

Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide is more ambivalent to the idea of home.

The novels "describe more than just Australia's landscape, they take a position on it" like David Foster's The Glade within the Grove.

Murray Bail's Eucalyptus is looked at most comprehensively as an eco-genealogical novel and is also described as a kind of "anti-postmodern contemporary novel".

Other eco-genealogical lit
Tom Griffith's Forests of Ash,
Roger McDonald's The Tree in Changing Light,
Julia Leigh's The Hunter

Rural apocalypse: "presents rural Australia in bleak, extreme terms and works towards emptying it out."

The White Earth Andrew McGahan
Oceana Fine, Tom Flood,
Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, Carrie Tiffany,
The Salt of Broken Tears, Michael Meehan.
Oyster, and Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital.
Thea Astley's Drylands: A Book for the Last Reader - some of these novels involve Gothic themes too.

7. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace, 2005

I read the first essay last year about the US porn industry and put it aside. Too much information, even if wonderfully strange and incredibly clever. My favourite was about a literary biography of Dostoevsky. There is a personal moral questioning to some of the essays which is pretty rare in the Australian writing I've come across, but that may be just my limited reading so far.

Oh, I loved Eucalyptus. Not being au fait with literary theory either, I never would have picked it as "eco-genealogical". :) But I can see where they're coming from with the term.

I have The White Earth and Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living on Mt TBR. I'm looking forward to finding the time to read them (and finding out about "rural apocalypse". :)

8. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, 2004

An amazingly densely woven book, which on the surface seems so still and simple. John Ames, a third generation Congregationalist minister writes a journal to his young son while he sorts out the conundrum to himself of a reprobate who has returned to the home of his best friend, the local Presbyterian minister.

The writing radiates splendid spiritual goodness and still the ending for the middle aged Ishmael is tragically shadowed. I haven't enjoyed sniffling so much through a book for a long time. What Marilynne Robinson does so thoughtfully is have John Ames draw on an intellectual trove of theology and philosophy to think through the consequences of any actions he takes and to reinforce his understanding of grace and forgiveness. It's much simpler to read and marvel at the clarity of description.

9. Lovesong, Alex Miller, Australia, 2009

Lovesong begins with Ken, an ageing writer, returning from Venice to his home in Carlton, Melbourne where he lives with his 38 year old daughter Clare. He stops briefly in a new pastry shop where he is beguiled by the calm busyness of it's proprietor Sabiha, a beautiful North African woman with an impression of tragedy behind her eyes. He notices her husband and very young daughter Houria. Later he meets John Patterner and they strike up a conversation where John begins to tell Ken their story.

Alex Miller is one of Australia's premier writers and he is a joy to read. His last novel was Landscape of Farewell, Ken's last novel is called The Farewell in playful reference to a writer's retirement. The love story between John and Sabiha and her intense need for the daughter she is destined to bear is framed by Ken's story which looks at the difference between writing and storytelling, narrative and realism. Lovesong is a delight.

I forgot to mention, Lovesong is both a delight AND delicious. Food is an important part of this novel. I'd love to see this book on the Booker longlist.

I read Landscape of Farewell last year, and was a bit indifferent to it. Well done, but it just never really connected with me. This year, I am looking forward to reading Lovesong as I have heard good things about it.

I look forward to your review wookiebender. I liked Landscape of Farewell so I really want to read more of Alex Miller's work. I have his two Miles Franklin winners to look forward to, Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game.

Oh, I've got The Ancestor Game *somewhere* in the house. I really must organise my books a bit better, so I can go "ahah, with the Australian authors!" or something...

Here's my review for Landscape of Farewell: http://www.librarything.com/review/52515212

10. Joan Makes History, Kate Grenville, Australia, 1988

Australia Day marks the settlement at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. Kate Grenville wrote Joan Makes History, her debut novel, as a playful exploration of Australia's history with the eponymous Joan always near centre stage.

There are many Joans throughout this book; Joan, the photographer's assistant who takes the likeness of Ned Kelly, Joan, the part Aboriginal who swaps tall stories with Herman Melville, Joan, the swaggie's wife immortalised in Frederick McCubbin's, On the Wallaby Track. There are many Joans, heroic and bawdy and heart breaking.

Today's Joan is the female convict who unbeknownst to conventional history, is first to land at Sydney Cove and later restrained between two soldiers, witnesses the first planting of the British flag on Australian sand.

Grenville makes a comic dig at the history writers who ignored the women, the migrants, the domestic workers and the Aboriginal people who were all part of the making of Australia of today. Lots of fun.

And a very appropriate day to be reviewing such a book. :) I shall hang my head in shame because I've never read a Kate Grenville novel.

11. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Gacia Marquez, Columbia, 1967

One Hundred Years of Solitude follows three generations of a family living in Macondo, a small village in Columbia, starting with the settlement of Macondo by Jose Arcadio and his wife Ursula, followed by the story of his sons Aureliano and Jose Arcadio Buendia and then his grandchildren.

Magical realism enables Marquez to write tragedy, humour, compassion and energy into his family saga which would be impossible in a straight out history of Columbia. Read this before Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits which is also excellent.

I know that One Hundred Years of solitude gets rave reviews here on LT and other places, but I just could not get into it when I tried to read it a couple of years ago. I've got The House of the Spirits on the TBR pile and I hope I like it better. I really enjoyed Allende's memoir Paula and thought she was a terrific writer.

Love both One Hundred Years of Solitude and House of Spirits... I might need a magic realism re-read session! Excellent choices and recommendations.

>37 loriephillips: Lorie, I did like One Hundred Years and perhaps it takes a bit longer to get into than most novels. Ursula's character was fun to follow, though the story took longer than I expected to finish. Since it seems to be an allegory for the rise and fall of a culture, it is not surprising that the end is drawn out. I could read it again easily.

12. The Island of Eternal Love, Daína Chaviano, 2006 English Translation 2008

Daína Chaviano mines European, African and Chinese mythology to create a paranormal romance that follows the fortunes of the Cuban nation from the 1830's on. The music of the bolero is an important part of the story. A magical realism story from Latin America reminiscent of Allende's House of Spirits.

13. The Boat, Nam Le, Australian author, 2009

The Boat is a debut collection of short stories from Vietnamese-Australian author Nam Le. It won the Prime Minister's Literary Prize last year. I read the first story with great interest and enjoyed it a lot for it's metafictional reference to Nam Le's own writing ethnic literature is hot!. Nam Le's other stories are in the voices of a young Columbian hitman, an alcohol sodden painter, a young teenage Australian boy in bloodying coming of age scenario, a Hiroshima orphan and a boatload of refugees. For me, they are best consumed one at a time and not like I read, in huge chunks. They are very good, but really tested my emotional tolerance. The first story is my favourite and it reminded me of the fun I had reading Vincent Lam's Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.

14. The Legacy, Kirsten Tranter, Australian author, 2010

The Legacy is by Kirsten Tranter who is daughter of Leon Tranter, Australian poet, and Lyn Tranter, a prominent literary agent so there's going to be a lot of interest in her debut novel. The Legacy is a well written mystery; both a missing person mystery and an art mystery. Julia is friends with well to-do Ralph and his half-cousin Ingrid and the first part of the book details how their occasionally fraught friendships develop over the university years.

Ingrid comes into a significant inheritance and leaves for New York to study ancient curse scrolls at Columbia University. While in New York she falls for a much older man, a part-owner of a gallery, Gil Grey, and marries him. Grey is father to Fleur a former child prodigy of the art world and Ingrid and Fleur become close. On September 11, 2001 Ingrid has an appointment and is never seen again.

Julia visits New York to discover more about Ingrid’s new life to make some sense for both her and Ralph twelve months after Ingrid goes missing.

The Legacy is a great read on a number of levels. It has a sense of foreboding that engages you straight away. The novel does take it's time to tell its story, but it's evenly paced and well written. The September 11 attacks and the novel's exploration of the aftermath on the locals was sensitively done and fit well with the story.

The Legacy is a great novel for book clubs because there's art, friendship, love, loss, truth, and some great quirky bits to chew over. Highly recommended.

I'm reading The Boat too at the moment, and agree - it'd be much better if I read it in chunks. I did have to laugh at ethnic literature being "hot", too.

I read a great review of The Legacy the other day - I'm very keen to get a copy!

WB it had a less than flattering review in the ABR, and I could see the criticism: characterisations being not quite deep enough, drowning in surface detail, and whether the novel achieved its aim. I still liked the writing though. What I didn't know, is that it is scaffolded on Henry James Portrait of a Lady.

Well, the review in the Sydney Morning Herald simply *raved*. (Doesn't seem to be online, and I've gone and chucked that particular weekend edition into last week's recycling.)

It's been years since I read Portrait of a Lady! I'm not sure if I'd be able to see any parallels. (Or if I'm up for a re-read of Henry James just yet...)

15. Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey, 2009

I loved Theft: A Love Story and here we have characters based on artists and engravers so Peter Carey again has fun describing the process of art and it's frustrations, but that's only a part of the story.

Parrot is the nickname of John Larrit; a peripatetic orphan, gentleman's servant, talented engraver and expert mimic. Parrot lives and works at the beck and call of Monsieur, an aristocrat of France, beggared by the Revolution, who had turned to selling off his family's library and spying. He gives Parrot the job of making sure Olivier gets on the boat and to assist him in America.

Olivier is a young finicky French aristocrat who attends lectures by Guizot on democracy while still wishing to maintain the old guard. His parents organise for him to be bundled off to America under the pretext of writing a tract on prisons for the French government so he can avoid trouble. Thus Olivier is based on Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote Democracy in America.

Olivier at first despises Parrot and vice-versa, so their subsequent journey towards friendship is the vehicle of the story. It allows Carey a fond look at the early years of his adopted country and perhaps some commentary on where the US's particular form of democracy as a great leveller may lead.

There is one scene in Parrot's childhood where a house hiding a forgery burns down, the workers are arrested and Parrot escapes. Reviewers describe the scene as Dickensian, I suppose, because of the paradoxical mixture of tragedy and theatre. That scene is the most memorable in the book. Great story.

>46 merry10:

That one is definitely going on the list.

It's been a while since I've read much of anything, but I have recently read-

16. Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre

This is a real genre crosser, funny if you're younger than me, although I absolutely admired some witty analysis of teenage tribal social hierarchies. It's kind of like a teen horror film crossed by Richard Dawkins.

17. Graceling, Kristin Cashore

My teenage daughter borrowed this from the library, so I read it. Good first novel for this kind of genre - wish fulfilment power fantasy for young women.

18. Five Children and It, E. Nesbit,

I am certainly not too old to enjoy this collection of anti-moralising moral tales. E. Nesbit reminds me of my grandmother's six o'clock stories that she would make up for us on holidays. She had a no-nonsense approach to story telling for children, the same kind of phrasing and satirical comments.

Five children discover a Psammead, a sand-fairy living near their local gravel pit. Sand-fairies give one wish per day, and this is the tale of how the children use those wishes. The girls' first wish was to be "as beautiful as the day". They become so, and one looks at another and proclaims that they were "so beautiful that they must be destined to die young". Wonder if it's Wildean, or Wodehousian or some such.

Why I'm reading this now - because I'm going to start on AS Byatt's The Children's Book soon.

Thanks for your interesting comments on Five Children and It. That's been living in Mnt TBR for about ten years. I think it might have to come down from the mountain this summer.

Oh, I've got to start The Children's Book soon too! I'd forgotten it referenced Nesbit's works, I think I've got one of her books somewhere in the house. Good excuse to read one, but I might wait until after I read The Children's Book. :)

I am jealous of the grandmother who tells six o'clocksers. And a great fan of satire and reality for children. I might have to go and hunt out The Phoenix and The Carpet, the only Nesbit I know I've got. I look forward to your reading The Children's Book.

19. Blackout, Connie Willis

This is another in Willis's time travel series. I really enjoyed the snippets of historical interest, London during the bombings and the Dunkirk rescue flotilla, but found the sense of disorientation and entrapment through multiple characters and constantly missed drops a little tedious. And the book doesn't finish at the end, the next is called All Clear. I was much in need of of a gentle story arc with simple resolution. Maybe next time.

I've missed seeing your posts! I've been holding off on Blackout until All Clear comes out. I would be really irritated to read one, then have to wait for the other.

>53 Medellia: Lovely to see you Medellia, I'm dropping in rarely these days.

20. How to Train Your Dragon, Cressida Cowell

I really enjoyed the film, and found the book quite different and very entertaining. It owes a little something to the satirist, Geoffrey Willans, and illustrator, Ronald Searle, who created Molesworth, (Down with Skool!) "as any fule kno".

21. Hyperion, Dan Simmons

The first part of an epic. We hear the stories of seven pilgrims who must journey to the Shrike, a deadly, unstoppable force. The Canterbury Tales helps form the structure of the novel and Keats makes a starring appearance. Surprisingly good, but I'm relaxed about finding out what apocalyptic vision must be worked through for the resolution.

22. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

I found the start of this novel intriguing, a funny mix of hubris and pathos, and an idiosyncratic introduction to the range and purpose of philosophy in life. Hedgehogs find their camellias. End.

23. Replay, Ken Grimwood

This is another philosophical tract in the form of a science fiction novel. The film "Groundhog Day" owes so much to this novel.

Jeff dies in his forties on a a particular day in 1988 and wakes up in his college age body twenty-five years earlier. He gets to make his life decisions all over again with the advantage of knowing the outcome of the Kentucky Derby and major political events. Second chance! Oh no, he replays his life again and again, but returning to a slightly later time.

Good structure and a reasonable thesis makes this book worth the inevitable masculine fantasies of choices without meaningful consequences.

until next time.

I found your review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog very ... diplomatic. Very deftly done!

24. A Wizard of Earthsea
25. The Tombs of Atuan
26. The Farthest Shore
27. Tehanu all by Ursula Le Guin
28. Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi My first ebook
29. I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett
30. Artemis Fowl, The Atlantis Complex, Eoin Colfer
31. The Master and Margarita, Mikhael Bulgakov

I'm having such trouble putting my brain through the novel reading process lately. I have had two books started and unfinished. But all of the above I have read without trouble. The Wizard of Earthsea quartet was so lovely. The characters just do not ruminate, a very quiet, in the moment quality. I was given a Kobo e-book with 100 classics on it. I've started a few of the classics, but ripped through a John Scalzi pulpily humourous SF free ebook with great glee - a must if you like Hollywood Oscar's nights.

A couple of YA to keep the momentum going and The Master and Margarita today. Beautiful in parts, grittily satirical in others. Some confusion, but wasn't going to slow down. Just loved the Pontius Pilate novel, and Margarita's story.

Hi Meg, Sometimes I find the need to read 'differently' for a while. There are times when I am unable to read prose, and find myself looking for a STORY. Sounds like you are feeling a bit this way too.

I've put Replay on my wishlist. Sounds like my cup of tea.

32. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
33. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
34. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Phillip Pullman

The Knife of Never Letting Go was incredibly fast paced with an amazingly slow but well managed reveal of the plot. Excellent YA with a moderately apocalyptic feel and great characters. Loved the annoying talking dog character.

The Good Man Jesus had me howling like these stories always do. Perfection vs human frailty.

Re #32> "Poo, Todd, poo."

Manchee cracked me up. :) I'm well into book #3 now, the pace just doesn't stop with these books (and when you're reading #2, have #3 to hand, the cliffhanger's a doozy and you will probably want to read straight on).

2010 wrap-up

Favourite books: Gilead, White Teeth, The Aeneid

Lot less books than 2009. Here's looking at 100 in 2011!