Best Books of 2013

I have a slight problem with doing a 'Best Books of 2013' because I really don't believe that what Goodreads thinks I've read this year is the full total of everything I've actually read. As you may have noticed, my internet presence this year has been somewhat... sporadic this year and so I've only listed things as 'currently reading' on Goodreads when I remember to, thus I'm pretty sure some important stuff has been overlooked!

However, ignoring that I do just so happen to have exactly ten books on my Five Star list for 2013, and they are as follows (in kind of the order I read them):

1. Maus by Art Spiegelman (review) - Brilliant, quirky and very important. Awesome graphic novel which I should have read sooner. 
2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed (review) - The best memoir I've read in a while. Totally inspiring and beautifully written. I need to buy myself a copy so I can read it again. 
3. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor (review) - This was a re-read of a series that I thought was great as a child, and it really stood up to re-reading. Not easy reading because it's about difficult issues, but very well written and really well told. 
4. Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti (review) - Lots of people kind of hated this book, and I think having read their thoughts that it's probably worth a re-read because I tend to get carried away with people making points that are brilliant and which I agree with and gloss over the other stuff. That said, this book does make many brilliant and important points and has a lot of great reasons why feminism should be important to everyone. 
5. Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales edited by Melissa Marr & Tim Pratt (review) - This was a brilliantly timed arrival, as it turned up the day before we went to see Neil Gaiman, whose publicist is responsible for sending this collection to me, as he had written one of the stories in it, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty which was, of course, brilliant. There were a lot of stories in it which were particularly great and it was nice to read something which had some fairytales but also some other classic tales as well as some lesser known ones. 
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - I never got around to reviewing this for some reason, I think because I loved it so much it was difficult to talk about it, and also probably because I watched (and also loved) the film at around the same time so it was a bit of an overload. I wish I had written about the book now because to be honest, the film is kind of overriding it in my head. All I really remember is that I prefered the ending of the film, which is totally ok to say when the director of the film is the guy who wrote the book, right? 
7. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan (review) - I only read this a couple of weeks ago after picking it up on our epic book buying spree in Leeds, and it really didn't disappoint. It was full of awesome characters and didn't play out at all the way I thought it was going to. 
8. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell - Also didn't get around to writing about this, again because I was overwhelmed by the awesome. Eleanor and Park were both awesome, and it was so well written and beautiful and the ending was totally not what I expected. Loved it. 
9. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (review) - If I had to pick a favourite book of the year, just one, this would be it. It's my favourite of his books as well I think, and basically it's just beautiful and brilliant and you should all read it. 
10. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell - Yes I did just put The Ocean at the End of the Lane in the middle so you wouldn't notice there are two Rainbow Rowell books on this list, but I just finished Attachments and I adored it. Such awesome, gorgeous, quirky characters who I totally love now, and such a lovely, romantic, unusual plot. Rowell for the win. 

An an honourable mention needs to go to This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, which has to be the cleverest and most beautiful collection of short stories I've read this year. 

So there's that. This post took me a looooong time to write as I've been totally flat out with a horrendous cold/flu type thing and unable to take anything for congestion or do much about my horrible cough except drink honey and lemon :-( Once I've recovered I hope to be back to blogging more regularly!

The Weekly List

When my sister was about to start A Levels (16, for the non-Brits reading this!), she asked me to write her a list of books she should read over the summer. To give an idea of time scale, she's now 19, so this was a list I made preblogging. I just found it last week and it got me thinking about book lists and what makes them good. Some of the titles on this list I haven't even read myself and looking at it now, I've really no idea why some of them were on here, but it made me wonder why I haven't turned my obsession with bookish lists into a feature on the blog before now. So here it is. This week, part 1, is the list I made for my sister, and next week I will publish a list of internet recommended reading for similar aged kids. This is how it will go; one week my list of certain subjects/genres, the second week an outside source (e.g 1001 books to read before you die, Guardian top 100 etc). I'm aware that this may not appeal to anyone but me, but if you're a similarly list loving person then I definitely welcome your input on things I've missed, things that you thought were awful and so on. It's all about the debate :-)

So here it is, Esther's A Level reading list, with the comments I wrote for her at the time:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
3. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Paradise Lost - John Milton (and tell me if it's good, cos I've not read it )
6. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
7. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (this book is genius - if you don't love it, I will have to disown you)
8. Don Quixote - Cervantes (Dad has it - nick it)
9. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
10. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
11. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (stick with it - its worth it!)
12. A Passage to India - E.M Forster
13. Howards End - E.M Forster
14. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
15. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
16. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
17. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (Do NOT watch the film)
18. Beloved - Toni Morrison
19. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
20. 1984 - George Orwell
21. Animal Farm - George Orwell
22. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier 
23. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
24. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
25. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
26. The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter (I have it. Just bloody brilliant. Read it. Now)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
28. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- Anne Bronte
29. T.S Eliot poetry - especially... The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, and The Wasteland but also Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and others... he's a genius poet
30. A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams (WATCH WATCH WATCH the film starring Marlon Brando (very often shirtless :D) and Vivien Leigh... pure brilliance)
31. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Film Recommendation - Kenneth Branagh.. don't bother with Mel Gibson...)
32. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (Baz Luhrman, obv)
33. The Tempest - William Shakespeare (Return to the Forbidden Planet :p)
34. Othello - William Shakespeare (don't watch the film.. go see it at the Globe)
35. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
36. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
37. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque
38. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
39. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
40. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
41. The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas (absolutely GENIUS writer)
42. Our Tragic Universe - Scarlett Thomas
43. The Hunchback of Notre- Dame - Victor Hugo
44. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
45. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
46. The Odyssey - Homer (Dad has, but I'm reading atm so you can have it after :p)
47. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
48. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R.L Stephenson
49. Wild Swans - Jung Chang
50. Quo Vadis? - Henryk Sienkiewicz
51. Translations - Brian Friel
52. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
53. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
54. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
55. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
56. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
57. Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
58. True Notebooks - Mark Salzman
59. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
60. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
61. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
62. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
63. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (due to Stalin, he wasn't allowed to leave Russia to get his NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE for Dr. Zhivago. This is one of the many reasons why we hate Stalin..)
64. Poetry of W.H Auden
65. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Unhand me, grey beard loon!)

Looking at it now, this list could otherwise be entitled 'All the books I'd loved at this point plus the ones I wanted to read but was too scared/lazy to have got around to yet'. 

It's not necessarily the books I'd recommend now, but I know that she's read a fair few of them now on my recommendation, and loved a lot of them :-) 

What would you put on a list like this? What have I missed, and what shouldn't be on here? 

The Classics Club :-)

***This is my original post which I've left up for posterity. I have since revamped my list and you can find the current one here***

Jillian from A Room of One's Own has come up with the brilliant idea of a Classics Club, where people make their own list of 50, 100 or 200+ classics that they want to read within a 5 year period. I adore list making, and there are a lot of classics I want to read. I also love the totally unstressed nature of this project, and the fact that a 'classic' is whatever you define a classic as. Because of this, my list has probably ended up with a lot more rereads of series I loved as a child than it otherwise would have, but I tried to limit myself to books I actually want to read, rather than titles I feel I should have read as I know that they'll just sit on the list intimidating me for five years and I'll feel guilty about not reading them for five years... Hence the addition of such titles as Ian Fleming's James Bond series (they are classic spy fiction), and L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which I never read the entire series of as a child! 

Anyway, here's my list. Currently I have 142 books, but the number may grow. I'm hoping that as so many are children's books they won't actually take me that long to read!

Titles I own are in bold; ones I have read are struckthrough with a link to the review, if I've got around to it!

      20th Century

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

2. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

4. Alice Through the Looking Glass * by Lewis Carroll

5. Ariel by Sylvia Plath

6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

7. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

8. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

9. Charlotte's Web * by E.B White

10.Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

11.Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

12.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

13.Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

14.Forever by Judy Blume

15.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

16.Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier

17.Gone with the Wind * by Margaret Mitchell

18.Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

19.Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

20.Kid by Simon Armitage 

21.Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H Lawrence

22.Let the Circle Be Unbroken * by Mildred D. Taylor

23.Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winnifred Watson

24.Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

25.My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

26.Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm * by Kate Wiggins Douglas

27.Robin Hood by Henry Gilbert

28.Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry * by Mildred D. Taylor

29.Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

30.Tell me the Truth About Love by W.H Auden 

31.The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

32.The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

33.The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

34.The Bell Jar * by Sylvia Plath

35.The Cocktail Party by T.S Eliot

36.The Collected Poems, 1909 - 1962 by T.S Eliot

37.The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

38.The Enormous Room by E.E Cummings

39.The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

40.The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

41.The Great Gatsby * by F. Scott Fitzgerald

42.The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

43.The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

44-57.The James Bond Series by Ian Fleming (Casino Royale *, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, From Russia with Love, Dr. No *, Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, & Octopussy and the Living Daylights )

58.The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

59-66.The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Big Woods *, Little House on the Prairie *, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of the Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, & The First Four Years)

67.The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bugakov

68.The Outsiders by S.E Hinton

69-82.The Oz Series by L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz *, The Marvellous Land of Oz *, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Tik- Tok of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, Rinktink in Oz, The Lost Princess of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, The Magic of Oz, & Glinda of Oz) 

83.The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

84.The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

85.The Road to Memphis * by Mildred D. Taylor

86.The Silmarilion by J.R.R Tolkien

87.The Story of Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

88.The Stranger by Albert Camus

89-101.The Swallows and Amazons Series by Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons *, Swallowdale *, Peter Duck *, Winter Holiday, Coot Club, Pigeon Post, We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea, Secret Water, The Big Six, Missee Lee *, The Picts and the Martyrs: Or Not Welcome at all, Great Northern?,  & Coots in the North)

102.The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

103.This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

104.Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

105.Ulysses by James Joyce

106.Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M Forster

19th Century

107.A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

108.Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

109.Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

110.Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant

111.Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

112.Grimms' Fairytales by Jacob & Willhelm Grimm

113.Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

114.Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

115.Nights with Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris

116.North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

117.Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

118.Quo Vadis? * by Henryk Sienkiewicz

119.Shirley by Charlotte Bronte 

120.Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

121.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

122.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

123.The Awakening by Kate Chopin

124.The Children of the New Forest * by Captain Marryat

125.The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

126.The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G Wells

127.The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

128.The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

129.The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

130.The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

131.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

132.The Time Machine by H.G Wells

133.The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

134.Villette by Charlotte Bronte

135.Walden by Henry David Thoreau

136.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

18th Century

137.Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

17th Century

138.Macbeth by William Shakespeare

139.Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault

1st Century B.C (approx)

140.The Aeneid by Virgil

8th Century B.C (approx)

141.The Odyssey by Homer 

142.The Iliad by Homer

* = re-reads (some so distant I only barely remember that I've ever read the book, and not at all what it was about!)

Top Ten Tuesday - Book to Movie Adaptations

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week is a different theme!

This is my first Top Ten Tuesday, and I'm excited. Mostly because I looooove lists, but also because I'm particularly fond of movies. So, here's my top ten best book to film adaptations:

1. Alice in Wonderland - the Johnny Depp/Tim Burton version, rather than the animated Disney film. I actually have to admit to thinking that the film is much much stronger than the book, and the costumes, sets etc are just mindblowing. Love it.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs the World - So unbelievably well cast, and amazing how they managed to condense 6 books into 113 minutes of AWESOME!

3. The Lord of the Rings Triology - These were the first films that I saw which were absolutely as good as the books, if not better in some places. Although, I do have to say that I'm not a huge fan of the amount that they just made up in the second film...

4. Watchmen - I saw this at an Imax cinema, and it was absolutely amazing. Just such an intense experience.

5. Breakfast at Tiffanys - Audrey Hepburn. Moon River. And that is all.

6. Stardust - The film and the book are very very different, but I actually loved them both. First time this has happened for me. Well done, Mr. Gaiman

7. The Railway Children - the 1970 version with Jenny Agutter as Bobby of course. The ending is just gorgeous.

8. Harry Potter 4,5,6, and 7 - The earlier ones were total crap, but the later ones (especially since Luna came into it!) much much better. As almost everyone else ever has mentioned, the adult cast are just unbelievable, and I am totally loving Evanna Lynch!!

9. The Phantom of the Opera- I was a big fan of the stage musical before I saw this, or read the book. But, having read the book, I'm now a massive fan, and although both Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson really really annoyed me, Gerard Butler made the film for me. Which is the way it should be.

10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Atticus Finch was voted by the American Film Institute to be the greatest hero ever in 2003. And I have to agree. Every time I read the book, I notice something else about it, and fall a little bit more in love, and in the film, Atticus's closing speech gets me every time. Gregory Peck was a genius!

I just thought that I'd add onto the end of this the two films that I can thing of which are adaptations of two of my absolute favourite books of all time, that I really really disliked.

These are Little Women and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Despite both having really good casts, they failed to live up to the books so much that I can't even sit through the first without wanting to slap somebody, and the second one just makes me sad, for Douglas Adams, Martin Freeman, and anybody else involved, really.

So that's my ten, what are some of yours?



this year...

being 2011, I've decided to get serious about recording the books I read. Inspired by Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree, I'm going to use this blog to keep track of what I've read, and how I felt about it. Far too often I read something that I absolutely love, and then promptly forget what it was called, or who it was by, therefore making it difficult to find more books by the same author, or even to find similar types of novels. This year, this will stop. And that's my New Years Resolution. Let's see how it goes.