Towards 100 Books : 57 !

I've upped my previous book count to 57 with these recent reads.

1) Decent Exposure Phillipa Ashley
2) The File on H Ismail Kadare
3) High Fidelity Nick Hornby
4) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
5) The Outsider Albert Camus

Five books in half-a-month? Of course I cheated.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Outsider are very good books, both focusing on a strong alternative-personality character as the central story, and are both a very short 100-ish pages each only.

Decent Exposure is a Little Black Dress floozy read, and a very bad one too! Very roll-your-eyes lame. Don't waste your time reading this.

High Fidelity is a male version chic-lit (what do you call it? dick-lit?). It's a good fun laugh-out-loud read on the inner-monologue of a neurotic song-obsessed relationship-impaired guy. Was that sentence over analysing? The book is too. Highly recommended.

The File on H is a thoughful read. Read some excepts here and here.

Towards 100 Books : 52 !

I've added four books to my previous book count, bringing the number of books read this year to a total of 52. That's the halfway mark crossed, on the journey to 100 books. Hurrah!

1) Disgrace J.M.Coetzee
2) A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Marina Lewycka
3) The Color Purple Alice Walker
4) More Work for the Undertaker Margery Allingham

Towards 100 books in 2007

Remember my resolution to manage 50 books this year?
It's the end of May and already I've hit 48!

Hebat! Not quite, my read list is peppered by floozy (but fun!) little black dresses and lots of kiddie books. Both types are a couple of hours read each, some even less, so I think I'm cheating by putting this into my book-count. But it makes me feel good to see the number rising, so...

Little Black Dresses
1) Spirit Willing Flesh Weak [Julie Cohen]
2) Blue Christmas [Mary Kay Andrews]
3) How to Sleep with a Movie Star [Kristin Harmel]
4) Singletini [Amanda Trimble]
5) Step on it, Cupid [Lolerai Mathias]
6) Accidentally Engaged [Mary Carter]
7) Hex and the Single Girl [Valerie Frankel]
8) She'll Take It [Mary Carter]
9) The Balance Thing [Margaret Dumas]
10) The Men's Guide to Women's Bathroom [Jo Barrett]
11) Mounting Desire [Nina Killham]
Book Count: 48 - 11 = 37

Kiddie
1) Just So Stories [Rudyard Kipling]
2) The Wizard of Oz [L. Frank Baum]
3) The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
4) Pinocchio [Carlo Collodi]
5) Emil and the Detectives [Erich Kastner]
6) Charlotte's Web [E. B. White]
7) Peter Pan [J.M. Barrie]
8) Mary Poppins [P. L. Travers]
9) Pippi Longstocking [Astrid Lindgren]
10) Wind in the Willows [Kenneth Grahame]
11) The Weirdstone of Brisingamen [Alan Garner]
12) A Book of Nonsense [Edward Lear]
13) And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street [Dr Seuss]
14) Where the Wild Things Are [Maurice Sendak]
15) The Little Prince [Antoine De Saint-Exupery]
16) A Wrinkle in Time [Madeleine L'Engle]
17) Tom's Midnight Garden [Philippa Pearce]
18) Anne of Green Gables [L.M. Montgomery]
19) Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]
20) Winnie-the-Pooh [A. A. Milne]
21) Grimms' Fairy Tales [Brothers Grimm]
22) Dr Dolitte [Hugh Lofting]
23) The Human Comedy [William Saroyan]
24) The Color of Magic [Terry Prachett]
25) The Happy Prince and Other Stories [Oscar Wilde]
26) Black Beauty [Anna Sewell]
27) Heidi [Johanna Spyri]
Book Count: 37 - 27 = 10!
* Some book in this list are must-read classics, but they are still kiddie books, ya

My Actual Read List
1) My Family and Other Animal [Gerald Durell]
2) The Master and Margararita [Mikhail Bulgakov]
3) Paula [Isabel Allende]
4) Lord of the Flies [William Golding]
5) The Stepford Wives [Ira Levin]
6) Wuthering Heights [Emily Bronte]
7) Things Fall Apart [Chinua Achebe]
8) Surfacing [Margaret Atwood]
9) The Handmaid's Tale [Margaret Atwood]
10) Confessions of an Old Boy [Kam Raslan]