Tag Archives: Literature

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 8: 364-415 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week eight of our Read More Books challenge? 

 

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

 

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

 

WEEK ONE   WEEK TWO   WEEK THREE   WEEK FOUR   WEEK FIVE    WEEK SIX  WEEK SEVEN

 

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

364. Father and Sons — by Ivan Turgenev
365. A Wild Sheep Chase — by Haruki Murakami
366. Point Counter Point — by Aldous Huxley
367. Babbitt — by Sinclair Lewis
368. The Souls of Black Folk — by W. E. B. Du Bois
369. The Thirty-Nine Steps — by John Buchan
370. The Jungle — by Upton Sinclair
371. Under Satan’s Sun — by Georges Bernanos
372. The Voyeur — by Alain Robbe-Grillet
373. The Secret Agent — by Joseph Conrad
374. All Quiet on the Western Front — by Erich Maria Remarque
375. Double or Nothing — by Rayond Federman
376.  The Bonfire of the Vanities — by Tom Wolfe
377. The Phantom Tollbooth — by Norton Juster
378. Amers/Oiseaux/Poesie — by Saint-John Perse
379. The House of the Spirits — by Isabel Allende
380. Paradise Lost — by John Milton
381. The Joke — by Milan Kundera
382. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — by L. Frank Baum
383. At Swim-Two-Birds — by Flann O’Brien
384. Contempt — by Alberto Moravia
385. Dealing with Dragons — by Patricia C. Wrede
386. Blood Meridian — by Cormac McCarthy
387. The Home and the World — by Rabindranath Tagore
388. 2001: A Space Odyssey — by Arthur C. Clarke
389. American Pastoral — by Philip Roth
390. The Cannibal — by John Hawkes
391.Matilda — by Roald Dahl
392.The Thornbirds — Colleen McCullough
 393. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie
394.Good Night, Mr. Tom — Michelle Magorian
395. Nadja — André Breton
396.King Lear — William Shakespeare
 397. The Magnificent Ambersons — Booth Tarkington
398.Othello — William Shakespeare
399. Aurélien — Louis Aragon 
400.Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Haruki Murakami
401.The Color of Water — James McBride
402.Soulier De Satin — Paul Claudel
403. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
404. The Sonnets — William Shakespeare
405.American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
406. The Bean Trees — Barbara Kingsolver
407. Nightwood —by Djuna Barnes
408. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction — by J. D. Salinger
409. High Fidelity — Nick Hornby
410. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson
411. Kane and Abel — Jeffrey Archer
412. Franny and Zooey — J. D. Salinger
413. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui —by Bertolt Brecht
414. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
415.The Faraway Tree Stories — Enid Blyton
 
I love to hear from you!  From the above list:
  • Which books have you read?
  • Which books do you want to read?
  • Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Note: I got permission to share this list on my blog. (Thank you, Stuart!) You could go HERE for the list of “623 of the best books ever written” and see them all at once for yourself, and/or you can follow the list here a few at a time.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  :)

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‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 6: 260-311 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week six of our Read More Books challenge? 

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE   WEEK TWO   WEEK THREE  WEEK FOUR  WEEK FIVE   

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

260. Les Misérables — by Victor Hugo
261. Tristes Tropiques — by Claude Lévi-Strauss
262. Dream of the Red Chamber — by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
263. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — by Joan Didion
264. Old Goriot — by Honoré de Balzac
265. Oscar and Lucinda — by Peter Carey
266. The Interrogation — by J. M. G. Le Clezio
267.  Appointment in Samarra — by John O’Hara
268. A House for Mr. Biswas — by V. S. Naipaul
269. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer — by Patrick Suskind
270. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — by J. K. Rowling
271. The Secret Garden — by Frances Hodgson Burnett
272. Asterix the Gaul — by René Goscinny
273. The Wasp Factory — by Iain Banks
274. The Fountainhead — by Ayn Rand
275. Four Plays — by Eugene Ionesco
276. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — by J. K. Rowling
277. Germinal — by Émile Zola
278. The Moonstone — by Wilkie Collins
279. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — by Roddy Doyle
280. Sixty Stories — by Donald Barthelme
281. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality — by Sigmund Freud
282. Waiting for the Barbarians — by J. M. Coetzee
283. Angela’s Ashes — by Frank McCourt
284. The Abyss — by Marguerite Yourcenar
285. The Way We Live Now — by Anthony Trollope
286. The Rifles — by William Vollmann
287. Democracy in America; and Two essays on America — by Alexis de Tocqueville
288. Cranford — by Elizabeth Gaskell
289. A Christmas Carol — by Charles Dickens
290. Fahrenheit 451 — by Ray Bradbury
291. The Rocognitions — by William Gaddis
292. On the Origins of Species — by Charles Darwin
293. Sula — by Toni Morrison
294. Daniel Deronda — by George Eliot
295. The Tartar Steppe — by Dino Buzzati
296. Young Lonigan — by James T. Farrell
297. On the Social Contract — by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
298. Sea of Poppies — by Amitav Ghosh
299. Portnoy’s Complaint — by Philip Roth
300. Shadow of the Torturer — by Gene Wolfe
301. Das Kapital — by Karl Marx
302. Cider with Rosie — by Laurie Lee
303. The Prince — by Niccolò Machiavelli
304. The Horseman on the Roof — by Jean Giono
305. The Executioner’s Song — by Norman Mailer
306. Atlas Shrugged — by Ayn Rand
307. Suite Française — by Irene Nemirovsky
308. Mountains Beyond Mountains — by Tracy Kidder
309. Cold Comfort Farm — by Stella Gibbons
310. The Story of Tracy Beaker — by Jacqueline Wilson
311. Angle of Repose — by Wallace Stegner
 
 
I love to hear from you!  From the above list:
  • Which books have you read?
  • Which books do you want to read?
  • Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Note: I got permission to share this list on my blog. (Thank you, Stuart!) You could go HERE for the list of “623 of the best books ever written” and see them all at once for yourself, and/or you can follow the list here a few at a time.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂

‘Read More Books’ challenge: week 5: 208-259 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week five of our Read More Books challenge? 

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE   WEEK TWO   WEEK THREE   WEEK FOUR   

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

208. Dead Souls — by Nikolai Gogol
209. Rabbit, Run — by John Updike
210. The Complete Stories — by Flannery O’Connor
211. The Making of Americans — by Gertrude Stein
212. Crash — by J. G. Ballard
213. The Glass Bead Game — by Hermann Hesse
214. Darkness at Noon — by Arthur Koestler
215. The Plague — by Albert Camus
216. The Soft Machine — by William S. Burroughs
217. Les Liaisons Dangereuses — by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
218. The Wanderer — by Alain-Fournier
219. Winesburg, Ohio — by Sherwood Anderson
220. Froth on the Daydream — by Boris Vian
221. Trainspotting — by Irvine Welsh
222. The Moviegoer — by Walker Percy
223. The Canterbury Tales — by Geoffrey Chaucer
224. Main Street — by Sinclair Lewis
225. Take It or Leave It — by Raymond Federman
226. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China — by Jung Chang
227. Nightmare Abbey — by Thomas Love Peacock
228. My Name is Red — by Orhan Pamuk
229. The Second Sex — by Simone de Beauvoir
230. The Awakening — by Kate Chopin
231. From Here to Eternity — by James Jones
232. The Black Sheep — by Honoré de Balzac
233. The Man Without Qualities — by Robert Musil
234. The Way of All Flesh — by Samuel Butler
235. The Wapshot Chronicle — by John Cheever
236. Going Native — by Stephen Wright
237. The Charterhouse of Parma — by Stendhal
238. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum — by Heinrich Böll
239. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare — by William Shakespeare
240. The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street — by Naguib Mahfouz
241. Stranger in a Strange Land — by Robert A. Heinlein
242. In Cold Blood — by Truman Capote
243. The Code of the Woosters — by P. G. Wodehouse
244. The Red and the Black — by Stendhal
245. Sybil, of Two Nations — by Benjamin Disraeli
246. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories — by William H. Gass
247. Paroles — by Jacques Prévert
248. The Maltese Falcon — by Dashiell Hammett
249. Alcools — by Guillaume Apollinaire
250. Wise Blood — by Flannery O’Connor
251. The Magus — by John Fowles
252. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils — by Selma Lagerlöf
253. The Blue Lotus – by Hergé
254. The Naked and the Dead — by Norman Mailer
255. Orlando: A Biography — by Virginia Woolf
256. Hunger — by Knut Hamsun
257. The Time Traveler’s Wife — by Audrey Niffenegger
258. A Tale of Two Cities — by Charles Dickens
259. A Wrinkle in Time — by Madeleine L’Engle
 
I love to hear from you!  From the above list:
  • Which books have you read?
  • Which books do you want to read?
  • Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Note: I got permission to share this list on my blog. (Thank you, Stuart!) You could go HERE for the list of “623 of the best books ever written” and see them all at once for yourself, and/or you can follow the list here a few at a time.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! :)

It’s Banned Books Week: here’s a list of 100 banned books

This is Banned Books Week. It seems the last time I posted anything about this was in 2010, so I think it is time to mention it again with a list of 100 banned books. I know if a book is banned … or challenged, as it is usually called in the USA … it is drawn into focus more than it would have been if left alone.

The following paragraph and list is from modernlibrary.com which you may wish to check out.

On July 21, 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century’s top 100 novels, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board.

  1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  6. Ulysses by James Joyce
  7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  9. 1984 by George Orwell
  10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
  12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  13. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
  14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
  23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
  26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  27. Native Son by Richard Wright
  28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
  36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
  38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
  39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
  40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
  42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
  48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
  52. Howards End by E.M. Forster
  53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
  55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
  56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
  57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
  58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  59. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
  61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
  62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
  64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
  66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  68. Light in August by William Faulkner
  69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
  70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
  76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
  77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
  78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
  79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
  80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
  81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
  83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
  84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
  85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
  86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  87. The Bostonians by Henry James
  88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
  89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
  94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
  95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
  96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
  98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
  99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
  100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

For someone who loves to read my record is poor: six I have read, seven I have seen as movies, eight I have on hand to read – four of those I started.

Have you read any of these? Do you agree with any of them being banned, or do you believe banning books is a bad practice?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Feeling blue, & Emily Dickinson’s poem “I started early”

I lost last week.

Do you ever experience those segments of time when the hours seem to simply float on to nowhere leaving you behind, alone?

Do you ever feel that you cannot even get motivated enough to be progressive, or to even care whether you are or not?

Last week got away from me. I hate when that happens. Blue isn’t just a beautiful colour.

BLUE

The up side is Spring is taking hold here now. The birds are singing and building nests, some already feeding their young. Buds are beginning to swell, although at my home on a higher landscape the snow is not completely gone. This week is expected to be rainy some days, so that will take the last of the snow away. Good, I say!

Now to the main topic of my post … Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

She was a melancholy person and became very reclusive. Are you familiar with any of Emily Dickinson’s poetry? I didn’t know much about her or her writing, but awhile ago I came across one of her poems and I liked it so much I thought perhaps you would enjoy it on You Tube. Please take your time and watch it/listen to it several times to take it all in. Check it out: Emily Dickinson’s I started early    

Y0u can read about her life here. It’s a very interesting article.

I used to write a lot of poetry, but haven’t written much the last many years except in an online challenge. For me, poetry seems to tap into a part of my being that nothing else can reach, and releases from my inner thought processes what nothing else seems able to do.

blue sparkles

How do you feel about poetry? Do you enjoy it? 

Which do you prefer – reading it or writing it? or do you enjoy equally reading and writing poetry?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂

Book review: Save The Lemmings – by Kai Strand

Save The Lemmings by Kai StrandBook: Save The Lemmings
Author: Kai Strand
Publisher: Featherweight Press
Date: August 10, 2012
Genre: MG (middle grade), contemporary fiction
Pages: 108, paperback
Price: $8.99
My rating: a wonderful book for today’s young readers
 
 

 I received this book from the author in exchange for my free and honest review.

I enjoyed this little book. First of all, it is just the right size for the young audience it targets, so is a rather short but good read. Secondly, the author worked her magic into creating believable characters of varying personalities to whom young readers can relate.

Save The Lemmings, by Kai Strand, delves into the interests and conflicts of a girl in her nearly-teen life. The star of her book is Natalie, a twelve-year-old in grade eight. She is smart, a young inventor, and not the trendiest dresser in school – but that doesn’t bother her. She is her own person,  a nice girl who is focused on doing well with her life.

With a few ideas from her three best friends, Natalie invents a handy little tool for communication and calls it the Texty-Talker. During her research she comes across an organization called Save the Lemmings and gets wrapped up in wanting to save the little suicidal animals. (Actually, as the author points out at the end of her book, some lemmings die during migration, but it is unintentional and a myth that they’re self-destructive.)

When her invention becomes a nationwide hit and Natalie is thrust into the public limelight ill-prepared, problems arise. There are those who are jealous and the bullying she occasionally experiences increases; she is set up for trouble and falls right into it. Rumours fly. With her reputation at stake, even her friends begin to doubt her, and  …  well … I’m not going to tell you anymore, except to say, this little book is very fitting for today’s young readers – with all the peer pressure that’s going on.

Warning: in a couple of conversations God’s name is ill-used, but even so – do let your children read Save The Lemmings. It is inspiring for those who want to move forward with their hopes and dreams and not give in to negative peer pressure.

You can visit Kai Strand at www.kaistrand.com

You can find Save the Lemmings listed on my BUY THE BOOK! page.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a winner of From One Place to Another!

The verdict is in!  We have a winner of From One Place to Another! Congratulations to Faith whose name was drawn from the basket tonight!

Faith, Carol White will be mailing you a copy of her book, From One Place to Another. I’m sure you will enjoy it.  🙂

Thanks to everyone for entering the draw, for leaving comments, for reading the review and the interview even if you didn’t comment, and for “liking” my posts.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂