tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-147305142011-04-21T11:33:22.826-07:00NIT TO PEARL TOOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17085040838137200243noreply@blogger.comBlogger21100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14730514.post-1142350284072413482006-03-14T07:17:00.000-08:002006-03-14T07:31:24.083-08:00Found this nifty meme on <a href="http://gardenpurls.blogspot.com/">Linda's</a> site, who says she found it on Erica's, and thought I'd give it a try...<br /><br /><br />Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won't, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you've never even heard of.<br /><br /><u>The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown</u><br /><b>The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger</b><br /><i>The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams</i><br /><i>The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald</i><br /><i>To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee</i><br /><b>The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger</b><br />(His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman)<br /><del>Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling</del><br />(Life of Pi - Yann Martel)<br /><b>Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell</b><br /><b>Catch-22 - Joseph Heller</b><br /><b>The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien</b><br />(The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon)<br /><b>Lord of the Flies - William Golding</b><br /><b>Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen</b><br /><b>1984 - George Orwell</b><br /><del>Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling</del><br /><i>One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez</i><br /><i>Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden</i><br />(The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini)<br /><u>The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold</u><br /><i>Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut</i><br />(The Secret History - Donna Tartt)<br /><b>Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte</b><br /><b>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis</b><br /><i>Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides</i><br /><b>Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell</b><br /><b>Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte</b><br />(Atonement - Ian McEwan)<br />(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)<br /><b>The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway</b><br /><b>The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood</b><br /><i>The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath</i><br /><b>Dune - Frank Herbert</b><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14730514-114235028407241348?l=votboo.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>NIT TO PEARL TOOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17085040838137200243noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14730514.post-1122060040177315622004-12-18T12:07:00.000-08:002005-07-22T12:20:40.183-07:00==============================<br /><b>2004</b><br />==============================<br /><br />18 Dec -<br />Elmore Leonard: Split Images<br />pb<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />15 Dec - 18 Dec<br />Elmore Leonard: The Switch<br />pb - 279 pages<br />crime fiction<br /><br /><br />A couple of ex-cons kidnap the wife of a disinterested developer, hoping to get a piece of his offshore tax shelter. In chapter three there's some pointless dialogue between the cons which almost turned me off the book, but then it gets interesting and stays there. The ending took me by surprise, though I should have seen it coming ...what I *did* see, that I was running out of pages, was disappointing. I wanted this story to go on for at least another hundred, & that's not a position I normally take with this genre.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />13 Dec - 14 Dec<br />James Patterson: The Big Bad Wolf<br />pb - 398 pages<br />crime fiction<br /><br /><br />13 Dec: I hesitate to read another Patterson. I'm crazy about Alex Cross, but Patterson's villains are just too villainous.<br /><br />later: Either I'm getting a stronger stomach or Patterson has toned it down. You never know what is going to happen in one of his books - - except you can be sure that something _will_ happen. And it does. And then something else happens. And another thing. And before you know it, you've run out of book and are looking around for another of his Alex Cross novels.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />9 Dec - 13 Dec<br />Jim Harrison: Warlock<br />hardcover - 262 pages<br />novel<br /><br /><br />Though there's quite a bit of goofy, funny, loveable humor in this look at one man's mid-life crisis, this view of the world is really depressing. If deep down most of us are like the people in this book, someone ought to just go ahead and put us out of our misery. "Warlock" has internal dialogue which indicates if he ever caught his wife cheating his world would crumble around him ...yet he is unfaithful every chance he gets - always with good reason ("it's my birthday" "I'm bored" or "a blowjob isn't really cheating"). Somehow, though two dozen pages in I was thoroughly disgusted with the characters, I kept reading to the end ...that must be Harrison's skill with words.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />7 Dec - 9 Dec ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />John Sandford: The Hanged Man's Song<br />paperback - 340 pages<br />crime fiction<br /><br /><br />When a hacker is killed and his laptop stolen all hell breaks loose. Kidd and LuEllen need to find the laptop, break the code, and avenge their friend. If the fast pace and wonderfully drawn characters hadn't kept me turning pages, the computer technology and hacker inside information would have. I read the last 300 pages in one sitting.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />4 Dec- 7 Dec ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />Sheila Kay Adams: Come Go Home With Me<br />trade paper - 120 pages<br />memoir<br /><br /><br />"Sealie" gives a lesson on writing in dialect. Her colorful turns of phrase and sometime odd grammatical use make funny spelling unneccessary while conveying in detail the voices of her home town. I bought this book after hearing Sheila read at Hindman, hoping it was not only her way of reading that made me want more. I wasn't disappointed. The stories -literally dozens of them- are anecdotal; vignettes, really, many from early childhood. All are about growing up in a place where Family and Home mean more than random accidental attachments; so much more. There aren't plots, no intrigue and resolution, but I laughed aloud in places and cried in others, and next time I see Sheila I need to ask about that little "life's secrets revealed" she got from Granny.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />23 Nov - 3 Dec ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />Lee Smith: The Last Girls<br />trade paper - 382 pages<br />fictionalized memoir<br /><br /><br />At age 18-22, a dozen girls, college classmates, float down the Mississippi River on a raft. Twenty or twenty-five years later four of this group take a river cruise which retraces their earlier route. During this trip we get to know these four as they are now and listen to their memories and their thoughts about one who was unable to make the reunion trip.<br /><br />Lee Smith reveals one truth that has bothered me for years: We never really grow up; it's all a lie; there's not some "magic" age where all secrets are revealed. It's a relief to learn I'm not the only one who looked forward to the enlightenment of adulthood only to come to the conclusion it never happens.<br /><br />Character-driven. An interesting read -I finished the book in days- but something about open-ended stories bothers me... they're so ...unresolved. The characters are strong and will stay with me forever.<br /><br /><br />==========================================================================<br /><br />earlier stuff - thanks to Kathryn van Rooyen for the idea of keeping track<br /><br />==========================================================================<br /><br /><br />16 Nov - 20 Nov ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />Clyde Edgerton: Lunch at the Picadilly<br />trade paper - 252 pages<br />fiction<br /><br /><br />Well... it was okay. It was a real *nice* story, and made me want to do what the protagonist did, which is go hang out in a nursing home, and only partly because of the good karma :)<br /><br />The characters were interesting and I would have liked to learn more<br />about *most* of them... but I often got confused about who was who.<br />There could have been more detail.<br /><br />There were some minor conflicts, which IMO didn't get resolved, and if this book is character- rather than plot-driven, the characters should really have been explored in more depth.<br /><br />It made me laugh, but really didn't make me think.<br /><br />just my $.02 midway through the first coffee of a Tuesday morning<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />13 Nov - 16 Nov ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveller's Wife<br />trade paper - 536 pages<br />fiction<br /><br /><br />A realistic look at what a relationship would be like, in which one is a time-traveller and the other one isn't... It's comedy & drama, but I wouldn't call it sci-fi or fantasy.<br /><br />This book is flat out wonderful.<br /><br />The temptation is to flip back and forth through the pages to see what happened in which "when," but I quickly stopped doing that (1) because it just wasn't necessary, and (2) because the story didn't want to let me stop long enough to do that.<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />Nov 3 - Nov 7<br />Dennis LaHane: Mystic River<br />paperback<br />crime fiction-mystery/drama<br /><br />fast paced, but a weak ending<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />30 Oct - 1 Nov<br />Grace Metalious: The Tight White Collar<br />paperback<br />fiction/drama<br /><br /><br />reason for reading it: worrying about the election had me in hives; a friend suggested I find something lurid, bodice-ripping to read to take my mind off it. Grace Metalious is the author of Peyton Place.<br /><br />It was supposed to take my mind off politics and it did the trick. In 1962 this book was quite racy :) The storyline runs at a fast pace. A few more like this I might not have bothered voting at all. (Is that why 1/2 the voters stay home - - they're reading lurid romances?)<br /><br />==============================<br /><br />11 Oct - 24 Oct<br />Al Franken: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them ...submitted to Amazon.com 12/12<br />hardcover<br />political commentary<br /><br /><br />reason for reading it: to learn more about the key players in our demockery, and this slim comedy is less intimidating than a thicker and more serious volume would be.<br /><br />==============================<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14730514-112206004017731562?l=votboo.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>NIT TO PEARL TOOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17085040838137200243noreply@blogger.com0