General Chat

I've got an awful lot of books sitting on my shelves that have never been read. I keep adding to them. So, by the end of the year, I intend to have read the following:

List 1 - The Classics
1 - Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
2 - On Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham,
3 - Middlemarch by George Eliot.
4 - Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy.
5 - Grapes of Wrath by John Stienbeck.
6 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
7 - Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens.
8 - Women in Love by DH Lawrence.
9 - Don Quixote by Cervantes.
10 - The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

Quite liberating to admit I haven't read these! No more pretense!

List 2 - Odds and Ends
1 - Great Apes by Will Self.
2 - Promised Land by Karel Schoeman
3 - The COnservationist by Nadine Gordimer.
4 - Memento Mori by Muriel Spark.
5 - The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.
6 - Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.
7 - The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.
8 - Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones.
9 - Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame.
10 - Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon.

List 3 -Non fiction
1 - The Death of a President by William Manchester. Account of the Kennedy assasination.
2 - 10 Days That Shook The World by John Reed. Legendary account of the Bolshievik seizure of power.
3 - The North East Passage by GM Thompson. History of the infamous icebound sea route.
4 - No Left Turn by Chris Trotter. Leftwing history of New Zelanad.
5 - Rising 44 by Norman Davies. Account of the doomed Warsaw rising.
6 - Here I Stand by John Shelby Spong. Autobiography by a liberal christian.
7 - Elia Kazan by Elia Kazan. Movie mogul recounts his life.
8 - Oh Jerusalem, by Collins & LaPierre. Account of the battle for Jerusalem.
9 - My Happy Days in Hell by George Faludy. A poet describes his experiences in the death camps.
10 - The End of Iraq by Peter Galbraith. Self explanatory.

Any comments on any of these titles welcome. Is anyone else bold enough to add their own resolutions?

Rather then the over done Pride and Prejudice, read Sense and Sensibility. I read S&S and hated P&P, Darcy just does not do anything for me, give me Col Brandon any day! Please.

Steinbeck IMO is over rated. I can say that because I live in Salinas, used to work at the John Steinbeck library.
Yes I have read some of his works and well the only one I would stand was A Red Pony due to the fact I like horses!


The Historian is a must read, I just loved that book.
Also if you like sci fi, read Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. great book will get you thinking about alot of things.

My idea of hell is being trapped in a room with no books!

I've read P & P; so Sense and Sensibility is on my reading list this year.
I started The Historian, but just couldn't get into it. I've read Mister Pip and Towards Another Summer, and loved both of them. :)
I have a slightly ambitious reading project this year, that I'm blogging about (sporadically!) here:
http://justaddbooks.blogspot.com/

Thirty books is a do-able thing. I've also got a lot of books on my shelf to read, including a block of the classics. :)

No Excuses. Just Write.
SoCNoC - Untitled Chick Lit
Freeing the Flame - 30,065/40,000 words rewritten for May

My resolution is to read 5 novels from other kiwiwriters. I have my 'one' reader and it feels good to know that someone has actually read your work. This is not critique reading but just reading. So this offer is open for those who did Nano or will do socnoc later this year. I will read other peoples work if they wish to send it to me, and I will offer comments only if they really want them. From the short stories that I have read over the past year from writers here, they are good anyway.
I have piles and piles of books on my bookshelf (I am a speed reader which is a little bit of a pain on a 12 hour flight). Reading work from people I know is quite fun and I dont really bite (not writers, just co-workers ;-)

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NaNo winner 2006, 2007
SocNoc winner 2007,
WWWwace 2007, 2008!!!
Easter challenge winner 2007
Body count: 1 Institute heads, 4 professors, 2 postdocs, 2 PhD students, 2 sequencing technicians and numerous bad guys...
Oh I wish I could put that on my CV.

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I read Mr Pip, which made me want to read Dickens. But reading Little Dorrit has quashed that desire.

Blergh.