Category Archives: Reading
It’s a New Feature We Like to Call a VLOG….
It’s my first Vlog!! This is going to be an ongoing thing here, because I’m hoping it’ll get updated more than my written blog articles 
Hope you all enjoy & I’ll be doing more soon.
Classic Books that You (I) Should Read
One of the wonderful people I follow on Twitter is Madeleine Rex. She’s 15, has completed first drafts of two novels and is an accomplished book reviewer. Yeah, she makes me humble.
Anyway, she posted this on her website, Wordbird, and challenged others to take a stab at it. So here’s my go. She got this list from Bookish in a Box. I’ll use the same format that she did:
Books I’ve read once are in BOLD
I’ve never read any of these twice, so I’ll leave her formatting for that out.
Books I’ve started but not finished will be in ITALICS
Books I own will have a * next to them.
So here goes….
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien*
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling*
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible*
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*
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
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*
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis*
34. Emma -Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis*
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden*
40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne*
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown*
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel*
52. Dune – Frank Herbert*
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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*
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*
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
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 Ishiguri
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom*
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery*
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 Factory – Roald Dahl*
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo*
So I’ve read 16/100 (Ugh, not so good)
I started, but never finished 7/100
I own 25/100
Wow, I have some work to do 
Thanks to Madeleine for passing along the list. I’ll throw out the same challenge she did; How many have you read?
Reading is the greatest teacher
I started reading a book two weeks ago, Justin Cronin’s The Passage. It’s the first book I’ve read in several months. Unusual for me, as I’ve usually managed to read a book every two weeks for the past couple years. Truth is, I’ve been too focused on my own words to allow someone else to take up my free time. I realise now that has been a considerable mistake.
You see the advice everywhere; If you want to be a writer, you need to read. I’ve taken this to heart in the past, but I don’t think the truth of it has impacted me until this past week.
First off, let me say The Passage is quickly becoming one of my favourite books. I’m about 200 pages from the end, and the first 500+ pages have been incredible. It’s been inspiring reading this book, following its twists and turns, watching how relationships have been built and how shifting point of view helps to build the tension and add substance to the world.
Which is exactly what I needed, because The Veil had become stagnant. I’ve had that little work in progress at a standstill for several weeks; partly due to family things, mainly because I just didn’t feel excited about it. I wondered how I would fill the pages. Now I’ve had a number of ideas. The structure is making more sense to me. I’ve seen how I can use and develop other characters in a manner that will not only deepen the world I’ve created, but also the story in general. All because I decided to take a break and read something else.
Learning by doing is often my preferred manner of doing things. But in this case, learning by having an example is doing wonders.
So if you’re like me, writing but feeling like you’re getting nowhere, watching as pages fill, but being overwhelmed by how many more remain, take a break. Stop. Read a good book.
Nano Project