Amazed & Confused

A Little Light Reading

I absolutely love to read.  There is something magical about opening a book, locating the first word and (with luck) falling immediately into a world that captivates and enthrals.  Not every tale grabs me so, I'm definitely describing my ideal.  Sadly I tend to only experience such immediate and complete immersion in a story about once a year; but with every crisp new spine, every un-touched page there is the potential for something like...

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

or

"Mr & Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

or even

"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would soon be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton..."

Each of these books has enraptured me at different points in my life.  I feel gratitude to their authors whenever I glance their spines on our bookshelf.  The Lord of the Rings was my companion after late nights on the streets of Ibiza.  The conclusion of Harry Potter's saga was read aloud on my living room sofa through an outpouring of tears.  The tail of Roland Deschain and the Dark Tower (probably still one of the richest pieces of writing I've delved into) found it's conclusion/continuation on our Honeymoon.

Memories of these books lead me to others, more first lines that took me to unexpected places...

"My suffering left me sad and gloomy."

"I'd never given much thought to how I would die..."

And the timeless...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Each book is filled with people I've learned from... others I've loathed... heros, villains, victims and bystanders who's lives have become as familiar as my neighbours.  Many have taken up residence in the culdasac of my imagination.  As I began to compile the stack of books pictured above for the holiday Steve and I are embarking on today, I started hoping that hidden within their pages may be one or two new additions to my most loved list.  Many of these titles I've been hoping to read for some time and with five days of nothing ahead of me I look forward to exploring them...

BBC Top 100 Books

I received a note on facebook this week and I have to admit I felt rather smug...  Apparently the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books on the BBC big read top 100 book list.  Below is their list of books and I've read all the ones with Xs next to them...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - X Love!
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X Love!
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X Love!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible - X Love!
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - X Superb
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X Love!
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X Hasn't every woman in Britain?
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

From this list it's pretty obvious that I love Jan Austin and don't love Dickens and have a potentially respectful 25 out of their 100 top books so though I can stick out my toungue at Mr BBC's assumption I now have a great reading list to work through in the coming year.  How many of these have you read?

Reasons to Rest

I have been inspired and challenged by Phil Togwell and Jude Smith's aim to read a book a week each year. I absolutely love reading fiction and I'm growingly getting better at reading/listening to Christian literature.  Their challenge speaks to me... I yearn to read a book a week.  I won't make it.  I don't have enough time, the books on my too read pile are big fatties and I'm already one and half books behind... I could slip in a few shorties maybe next weekend to try and catch up, but if I'm too religious about it I may not savour what I'm reading.  My current book for example is an enjoyable beast.  It doesn't fit comfortably in my bag but I'm loving it and I'm glad the story won't end any time soon.  Reading lost a bit of it's luster last year so I was overjoyed when I found new drive for it in December.  There's something about sitting and having to focus on just one thing that really relaxes me.  I'm such a multi-tasker, I'm often doing at least two things at once and I'm totally guilty of having constant sources of stimulation and back ground noise around me.  Maybe if I took on this challenge it would force me to be quite for a little time every day... bliss... xc

Favourite Books of 2008

So the musing and listing begins... as the end of the year approaches I'm reflecting on the joys, adventures and highlights of 2008.  To kick off here are some of my favourite books of this year.  They weren't necessarily released this year, merely I only discovered and dove into them in the last twelve months.  So in no particular order...

Communicating for a Change by Andrew Stanley

I haven't done a lot of speaking this year as I didn't think I was very good at it and wanted to take a break to consider how I could improve and why I should speak.  This book was lent to me by the ever excellent (and one of the most consistently challenging speakers I've heard) Eloise Armstrong.  It definitely makes some great points and I'm gonna try out some of it's structure ideas in the new year :)

Sex God by Rob Bell

I read this and Velvet Elvis over the summer and enjoyed both. This in particular though was a surprisingly rounded look at our sexuality and what God's got to do with it.  It's a book I finished and immediately though... "Hmm, I'd like to read that again." 

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

Though I first read parts of the Chronicles of Narnia as a child I only dived into it's last installment this year. I absolutely loved it. I was moved to tears.  Read it.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

Top of my totally enjoyable junk reading this year was Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series.  It was a surprisingly enjoyable even with all the slightly annoying angst and I did enjoy her take on Vampires (the Cullen brand of veggie vamps are a metaphor for abstinence). If you love romance, adventure and good teen fiction take a look.  If you hate Dawson's Creak, moaners and low brow entertainment look elsewhere.  Team Edward! 

The Last Battle

I just finished reading The Last Battle, the seventh and final installment of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. As I read through the last section of the book I was overwhelmed by the depth of emotion that stirred within me and moved me to tears. I won't say too much because if you haven't read it I would encourage you too. It has instantly become one of my favourite books and the image of the real Narnia and the real England will stay with me... xc

Velvet Elvis: or How to Confuse Carla in Three Easy Chapters

My head is a bit mashed. With the wonder of audio books I'm actually managing to get through some pretty great Christian books at a respectable speed. There's something much easier and about listening and absorbing stuff about God than there is about sitting down to read anything but my Bible. I think it's totally psychosomatic, I was never a lover of text books and I think I've made an unhelpful association with boring school work and non-fiction books...

Stories of interest...

Down time brought the beautiful opportunity to take more than 15 minutes in a day to read (oh the luxury) and a few much needed visits to the old cinema. Purely for fun I thought I'd run through the narratives that have inspired or bored me in the last few weeks...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time

What an amazing book. I am truly blown away by its subtlety, intelligence and depth. Wow. I thoroughly recommend this one to absolutely anyone. Very easy to read and totally engaging as you experience life, family, fear and adventure through the eyes of an emotionally detached teenager. xc

Gutted!

Never has an email made me scream so hard for so long! Today Pete Ward broke some terrible news to me in a rather flippent manner... Robert Jordan author of the epic Wheel of Time series died. Very sad, my thoughts are with his family though my vocal disstress was for a slightly more selfish reason...

The Life of Pi

I've been reading the most engaging book this week, "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. The story of a young indian boy who is at once a Hindu, Muslim and Christian and his adventures on the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal Tiger. Discribed as a story that will "...make you believe in God" it's full of magic realisim, adventure and faith. Even if that faith does seem a little conflicted...

Allegories and accusations

I have always found the witch hunt of J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series a little bewildering. Well maybe witch hunt is a strong phrase. I can totally understand why parents would choose not to read them to their children, especially as the story progresses with maturity in proportion to the age of it's heros. I would not give a 12 year old Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as a little light bedtime reading. I found it traumatic and I'm 26 next week...

For One More Day

Last night I finished reading For One More Day by Mitch Albom. He has a very engaging narative style and it reminded me quite strongly of his other book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, similar theme but distinct enough that my deja vu was mild...

It is finished!!!

We've done it! Last night Stephen and I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aloud to each other, though Steve had to do most of the reading, tears were sliding down my cheeks for the last two hours, stealing my breath. It was absolutely fantastic! She truly surpassed herself... !!!PLOT SPOILER WARNING!!!

A momentus occasion...

This evening will be a momentous occasion in my young life. I am not however referring to the Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix film out tonight, but to the construction and careful filling of my first ever, proper bookcase. I cannot tell you how excited I am…

Homecoming

Ever read something that conjours so tangible an image in your mind that it takes your breath away? Night before last I was lieing accross my sofa opening my new adventure/book "The Return of the Prodigal Son" by Henri J.M. Nouwen, glass of wine on the floor next to me and high expectations of the contents awaiting my perusal...

Two weeks to Potter 7

I have been very restrained and not blabbed about my excitement about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows but as today is 14 days til the release, the dam is broken, I'm all about Potter baby! Here are my predictions, you probably don't want to read it if you're still catchig up on the story, it will include plot spoilers for the story so far. Potter fans please read, I want to hear your thoughts...

Geek out

Preperations for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has begun. I found out the release date a few days after the rest of the world as it was announced during the period I like to call the winter of my disscontent aka being sick in bed and only realised there was news when Pottercast from the Leaky Cauldron released two episodes instead of their usual singular weekly offering...

The Celebration of Discipline

There are times when I'm simply ready to hear something. Today is one of those times, Spiritual Discipline is the topic. In the absence of any decent books on prayer I picked up Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline feeling a little guilty. I was supposed to read it a year ago on Transit but when I flicked through it's pages I was terribly bored...

Wolves, reality & the Number 19

I am in awe... My journey through The Dark Tower: The Wolves of the Calla has come to a close and I feel like the finali was blow after blow of sophisticated story telling. I feel the need to be reading this with someone just so we can marvel together at the clever use of intertextuality and how rich and expansive the story has become...

Caught between Aes Sedai and Dragons!

I'm in a bit of a pickle, trapped between two great books, anticipation waxing whilst my reading stamina is waning. I'm currently four fifths through The Wheel of Time: Crossroad of Twilight, the excellent 10th installment in the series whilst I'm starting to get really excited about diving in Eragon, the adventure trilogy. If WOT was pap, I'd skip or skim read it to rush to my next story but instead I'm caught between quality and excitment. If only I could stay awake for more than three pages at a time. With everything happening my late night reading is being replaced by waking and wondering if I have print on my cheek... xc

Time for Jazz

The two great pleasures of this holiday so far have been the overwhelmingly heavenly feeling of cold seawater on hot, sandy skin and the hours I’ve spent each day, lying in the sun, reading…

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

There's something about the perspective of a child that brings an entirely fresh, sublte and straight forward take on a well trodden subject. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is a fabulous example of this perspective used with menacing yet enchanting effectiveness. I can't say what the book's about as part of it's charm is your own journey through the clues of a child to dicifer the world he's living in but I reccomend this book to anyone who fancies a weighty subject told by a fresh and intrigueing voice. xc

The Drawing of the Three & The Stand

I arrived back in in the UK on Sunday morning and was greated by the gorgeous Stephen Harding looking quite scrummy with a freshly shorn head and new clothes. Kos was a wonderful oasis in a busy August and I am very grateful for the rest...

Half Blood Prince & The Horse & his Boy

After a week of Potter cold turkey I pounced on the half bood prince with an enthusiasm I usually reserve for Star Wars. After months of anticipation it was in my hands and I whipped through it like Mansell through Brans Hatch...

The Gunslinger

I finished The Gunslinger last night, it came to an end all of a sudden and took me by surprise. It's left me slightly frustrated... I feel like I've glanced over a work with real genius permeating it and I haven't had a chance to explore...

HOW DARE HE!!!

I've been listening to the radio this afternoon as I've sat infront of my computor and I can't tell you how mad I am about what I just heard!!!!!! I'm listening to Scott Mills (I don't particularly like him anyway) and as part of his show he just read out the key event at the end of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince...

Book Fever

Whilst planning for Transmission my reading life depleted and my energies had to be focused elsewhere. Not an easy task when you've just discovered Stephen Kings Dark Tower series and you desperately want to hide away and tear through The Gun Slinger...

Cat's Cradle

I finished Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle on my first day in Germany and I've been mulling over it for the last week. It took me quite a while to get used to his writing style and about half the book to really get into the story. It's an unusual book, well written with some interesting thoughts but I would struggle to say that I like it because I fundamentally disagree with it...

The Philosopher’s Stone

I’ve just finished one book and I’m starting two more. The reading bug has me in it’s grip and I’m loving it!

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

What a classic! I loved it. Totally different things struck me reading it as an adult. I laughed, cried, found words for things I haven't been able to articulate about God and felt challenged about my attitudes; all in a kid's book!

To Kill a Mockingbird

What a fantastic book! I finished it earlier this week and it's been mulling round my mind since. It's so simple, weighty social narratives told from a child's idealistic perspective. Predjudice, jealousy, racism, hypochrisy, love, fatherhood, faith and freedom...

Generation X

Yesterday was my beautiful Mother's Birthday! Like the faithful daughter that I am I spent approximately 9 1/2 hours on trains yesterday to get to Grendon and back to celebrate with her! 'Quelle horror!' I hear you cry but no! I had 9 hours of time to write in my journal, bring my head noise to God and finish Douglas Coupland's excellent 'Generation X'...

Now in the Vow...

I'm now about two thirds of the way through The Vision & The Vow and I really can't tell you how much it's impacting me. It feels like it's been written to articulate many of the things I've felt challenged, encouraged, dissatisfied, hopeful and excited about in the last 6 months...

Half Blood Prince!

Aaaaaahhhh!!!!!!  I am soooo excited I just found out that the 6th book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, is finished and will be released on the 16th July 2005!  You don't know how shallow I feel at being so excited by this piece of news!

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"Time", the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat that down next to Eddie.  "Dying?  Not the end of everything.  We think it is.  But what happens on earth is only the beginning."

Eddie looked lost.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

"Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in the margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading - so let us remind ourselves.  The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order.  We read privately, mentally listening to the writers voice and translating the writers thoughts.