What i am reading now.. and all.

Prize for the first person to guess (and yes its great but yes i am thinking with an accent in my head already!)

  4:05 PM  

  Now here is a weird thing

Max is reading Rebecca and finding it hard gonig. Not cos of the way its written or the story but because he says he can't identify with them main character. He says he can't think of a single time he has felt intimidated by a person, or unsure of himself in a way that means he goes along with the "way its done" - he can't even begin to put himself in the place of the "Second Mrs de Winter". Says he has never ever felt insecure or threatened or worthless like that.

Am wondering if he is human.... ????

No wonder he can never understand how stressed i get when i work places!!!!  5:39 AM  

  Hmmm....

Will there be a His Dark Materials movie?

Probably. New Line Cinema has acquired the rights to the series and tentatively plans to begin production after Lord of the Rings finishes its run in theaters (in Winter 2003). Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin. Go to the Facts and Speculation page to find out more information.  4:18 PM  

  Back and done His Dark Materials

Obviously didn't express myself very well - i was trying (and obviously failing!) to say that i think part of the backlash against HP has been the hyping around it - its devalued it and made it a brand but that its a shame if that actually reflects on the books themselves, as i feel has happened. HDM doesn't really figure in that as there is no "brand". I'd never heard anything about HDM till the big read - will the plays be the start? Who knows?

Finished HDM anyway - i think... i think... i've been a victim of everyone saying how great it was - I think i was slightly disappointed. I also think i will enjoy reading it much more second and third time round and that i WILL read it many times. I think i felt it tried to do too many things and didn't always do it that well. I think i felt confused by its themes and its backwards and forwarding of the good and evil in everyone although i could obviously see that that was the point. TBH - the whole Dust thing left me floored - i STILL don't get that and will presumably have to get a study guide or something!!!! Maybe it will be clearer on a second read. On the other hand i sat up extremely late and i am fairly sure i did all 3 books in 5 evenings, so it must have kept my attention!

I did cry. I also now want to know what my daemon would be. I didn't much like the ending, i felt a bit let down - maybe its cos i HE!!!! I did love some of the challenges it posed- and need to think much more about them. I also think that my own failure to have either a true faith or no faith in God made it harder to be really challenged by some of its ideas.

Actually Chris, i agree about the comparing in most senses - but i like to compare in terms of difference more than better even if "better" is a way of saying "enjoyed more personally" - i love to set things up against each other in my mind because it helps me crystalise my feelings about them. But i do now think that HDM and HP don't make the best comparison in all but the time they are written in. On the other hand i think that from my own personal understanding of life, the Narnia books, and The Last Battle in particular, does what (i think) HDM set out to do (although from an opposite angle) somewhat more effectively.

I am going to have to trawl discussion boards on it and re read heavily to take some of these "i think"'s out... i think....;~)  10:16 AM  

  BBCi - The Big Read - Top 100 Books

This was the final top 100 i assume - i looked down into the top 200 and some of the ones i originally counted as having read are there so it must have been changing for a while. I KNEW i had read more originally!  8:02 AM  

  The Northern Lights (His Dark Materials)

Grin... compulsive reading methinks - did it in 2 nights anyway. I liked the premise of this, alternate reality, things nearly the same but different, the undercurrent of darkness about the church, the feeling that something weird is occuring under the surface, adored the idea of daemons (not sure i can decide how to pronounce that and certainly can't type an "ae" stuck together!) In a way it reminded me of "Fatherland"

I can't decide, at this moment, whether i felt like a few too many "things" were chucked in - night-ghast instead of night-mare etc and although i think its really very original - i am not totally sure its more so than Harry Potter. In HP the inventions and alternates seem to just flow out, in this i felt they were occasionally a bit forced. Its more Narnia like than HP - and i think thats the intention anyway. I said today i got the feeling it would be better as Sunday afternoon BBC drama than Hollywood big screen.

What i did love was the tapping of feeling and emotion. The descriptions of love for the bear, hate for some of the adult, the awkwardness of Lyra's age, the passion for her daemon and the agony she goes through. I loved reading an awakening of a child, loved the learning of "reading" in it and the real beauty of the descriptions of pain and separation that the witch describes about boy children and love.

So yes - very good, lived up to expectations, will read again (i suspect it will also be better second time!) and am on to the second one tonight.

  1:23 PM  

  The Wise Woman, Philippa Gregory (slight digression!)

One of my favourite authors but i didn't enjoy this which was disappointing. Its about a young girl who starts in a nunnery but falls back into witchcraft during Henry VIII reign. It could have been good, its certainly an interesting subject but it just seemed too far fetched and as if she tried to accomplish too many things somehow. Firstly the heroine was dislikeable, irritating and unconvincing - which i think was supposed to be a story device but she just didn't seem to have any redeeming features and the one that was, i think, suppose to be at the end just seemed like both she and the story were copping out. Secondly, it started from the premise that witchcraft (ie making of wax dolls) was real and possible and i just got annoyed by the way it was portrayed - it would have been more satisfying to portray peoples fear of it rather than little dolls coming to life.

Or maybe it was a portrait of a girl breaking down due to her own weakness of character and believing her own black magic - either way, it wasn't obvious to me.

I ADORE all the other books i have read by her though - but i am not sure i will even keep this one.

  1:02 PM  

  Rebecca
Old Alan T did a really good job of this one in his review and i am glad i have read it now - i never fancied it before although i loved Jamaica Inn which i read when Scruff was born. This was fabulous, it had a really edgy air to it - simultaneously reminded me of being young at home and knowing your parents are not talknig for some reason and of a time when i loved someone who still loved someone else. I felt really anxious and wanted to get through it to put it all right! i shall definitely read that again. Even though i knew how it was going to end and knew the twist i still found the emotion it was written with very gripping.

Max is reading it now but can't get into it - he's not keen on things from the opposite sexes perspective (or maybe its just he's nearly as remote at times as Maxim in the book!!!)

  12:54 PM  

  Hm... Merry the Not So Well Read after all.

I always thought i was pretty well read. I read CONSTANTLY as a child and i read a book or 2 a week now. But i am starting to think i must have done a lot of reading the same things over and over. One thing i do know is i have been put seriously off reading "classics" by the way we studied them at school. Its a bit sad really isn't it? Teachers pick literature to bits and force you to evaluate it all - and you just end up hating the book, all its ideas and everything it stands for :~(

Anyway, at the start of the year here is how i stand. 25 read before i started (some of which like alice and pooh i will read again - anything i can't really remember) This count seems to get worse and worse, when i first looked i thought i had read 31 - that must have been when the top 100 was still changing or something. I'm sort of dreading things like Catch 22 and The Stand - in fact, i may well bottle out of The Stand - too scary!!!!!

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien - READ IT
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams - READ IT
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling - READ IT
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne - READ IT
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis - READ IT (all time fave)
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë - READ IT
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks - READ IT
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame - READ IT
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens - READ IT
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres - READ IT
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling - READ IT
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling - READ IT
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling - READ IT
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien - READ IT
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll - READ IT
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - READ IT
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery - READ IT
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams - READ IT
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald - READ IT
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett - READ IT
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck - READ IT
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome - READ IT
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding - READ IT
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding - READ IT
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl - READ IT
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
  12:41 PM