what i've been reading since last i posted.

well, i can't remember all of them, though there haven't been many. i finally got round to reading the georgia nicholson series by louise rennison, which people have been recommending to me since i was 14, which is, admittedly, a more appropriate age. however, they are still absolutely hilarious and compelling and original and i can read about three a day. they were the perfect relief during year 12 because they're quick and light and nothing to do with the rest of my life.
i also read northanger abbey and persuasion because my dad's going through a jane austen stage and got them out of the library. northanger abbey was really good, very witty but i just absolutely adored persuasion. it is the most romantic book ever written. i've read it a few times and i read the letter captain wentworth sends anne a million times because it proves that boys aren't always dreadful and heartless. plus having a mental image of rupert penry-jones is very enjoyable.
tammy lent me water for elephants at some point and that was really good as well. you don't get too many circus books and this one had a very convincing plot (complete with flashbacks) and was very well written. but it made me wish carnivale was back on tv, that was an amazing show.
i got 84 charing cross road for christmas and i read it in that day. i haven't come across the letter format much in adult fiction but this was genius; it allowed the characters to grow and develop in a much more natural way than conventional prose does. plus i really identified with helene's anglophilia.
i also got one of the phryne fisher detective novels for christmas which i've only finished today. i liked it to begin with but i just didn't like phryne at all. she's made to epitomise the 20s and the flapper lifestyle, combined with a bohemian intellectualism. and the australian setting had absolutely no correlation with her lifestyle, except that she like swimming. she was just too perfect in personality and appearance and when she solved a case it turned out that there was only one piece of the puzzle missing instead of a line of dominoes falling throughout that only makes sense in hindsight. and the whole book seemed to be taken up with descriptions of what people were wearing or what she had for lunch (some of which was incredible for mebourne in 1929) and the important action-y plot points were skipped over. i really didn't like it.
and i really liked chesil beach, even though it was really tense and awkward. so was atonement, i guess. i intend to read more mcewan.
last night i was up 'til 2 finishing high fidelity by nick hornby (the guy who wrote about a boy) because it was just so compelling. all the characters were likable insomuch as they were realistic and the whole novel was just so insightful about the big events in life as well as the small, mundane and insignificant ones. ron found himself at the place that i fully expect to be when i'm 35. wishing i'd done something more before and not really knowing what i'm good at and what i should do with the rest of my life. which is slightly depressing but it all turns out in the end. however, i feel like i have a musical disability. in the book they say you're not a real person unless you have at least 500 records and i have 45. though i never thought i was a musical expert.
anyway, it feels good to get all that off my chest. i haven't just written stuff out in ages, it's theraputic. happy reading.

book meme: 15 months later

book meme.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today).

Bold what you have read.
Italicise what you started but couldn't finish.
Strike through what you couldn't stand.
Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once.
Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Illiad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense & Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest
To The Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

very little improvement.