CatsEye

225. Breaking dawn

First there was Buffy and Angel.  Now we have Bella and Edward.  Sigh.  (Excuse me while I go and pretend in my head that I'm seventeen again).

I couldn't wait for Breaking Dawn to appear in paperback on Tesco's shelves.  So instead I bought it out of this month's credits from Audible and downloaded it to my iPhone. 

Eclipse took me 6.5 hours to read (one sitting, in bed, finishing at 4:30 one bleary-eyed morning) and I'm delighted that the new book is lasting even longer.  Although this is mostly due to the battery life on the iPhone, because once it's gone, I have no other option but to take a break while it recharges.

189. Book book book

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
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
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 - Will Read
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA 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’ 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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
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

Hmmm, so 23 out of a 100 - is that good or bad? 

(A lot of them were required reading at school/college though and I'm also counting unabridged audiobooks.)

67. Closing the Borders

I love me a good book shop.  I really miss the Books Etc that used to be in the square outside Fenchurch Street station.  (Lunch)hours I'd spend in there. It's now an HSBC and a sandwich shop, which is just not the same.

When that closed, I graduated to the Waterstone's in Leadenhall Market.  But that was kind of expensive and pokey and pretty lacking in the Craft section.  So I don't really miss it.

But they're closing the Borders on the retail park.  It's apparently not doing well enough to keep it going.  I can see that it would be likely - it's got a lot of floor/wall space to fill, but that's what makes it great.  It's huge.  There's a lot of books.  (And a Starbucks).

I popped in today to see how the 75% clearance sale is going.  It's so sad.  Because it's going well.  All the empty bookcases and only a tiny area near the front desk filled with the forlorn remnants of books, desperate for a home.  I did my bit and bought £160 worth of reading material. 

What I don't know now is where I'm going to get all my American knitting and beading magazines.  Even the big WHSmith's in Lakeside doesn't carry all of them.  Bummer. 

Bye bye Borders.  Sniff.

9. Look at ME!

I sat out in the garden yesterday afternoon, gently swinging in the hammock and read this book.

I am a little disappointed to see loads of people comparing it to 1984 (and saying it's a bad rip-off at that).  Maybe that's true - I offer no deep literary insight here.  I did enjoy the book though. 

As someone who enjoys their privacy (hey I blog under an alias after all), yet unofficially intends to try blogging every day (which is a resolve I've probably jinxed now I've typed it "out loud") - it really made me think. 

Where do you draw the line between telling the world out there everything or nothing?  I personally hate being photographed or videoed, so there'll be no need ever to go rushing to YouTube to see the significant moments in my life.  And MySpace or Facebook won't know me because I'm not big on being sociable either. 

But you know, if I really wanted privacy, I could write this in a paper journal that no-one would ever see.  Just because we have the modern technology (and legible handwriting seems to be a dying art) it shouldn't be all encompassing in our lives. 

Moderation in everything ... there you go.  Unless we're talking about the Posh stash, or possibly chocolate.

And the ISBN number is ...

Belonging in the general tidy up/catalogue everything theme, the audio books were done, which could only mean it was time to look at the actual book books.

I have a lot of paperbacks.  The conservatory is my library.  Both walls are lined with bookcases, and the bookcases are full.  Back in June I wrote about LibraryThing, and looking at my stats, I seem to get the book organising bug every six months.  I guess there was no fighting it this time, I was due.

The drawback to this whole process though is that most of the books were a little hard to get to.  The  conservatory is also the dining room.  Not that I eat in there very often, but it has the table in it.  With the two extra drop in leaves, that makes it a six person table and it was right in front of the three big bookcases.  With stuff piled on top of it, and Posh stash crammed in bags underneath it.  And no room to pull the whole thing out and negotiate around it. 

So, the room least needing of an extensive tidy up, got one.  I have filled the entire wheelybin with "rubbish".  Unfortunately I now have to wait over a week, what with Christmas and all, for it to get emptied again.  No more tidying for me eh?  What a shame!

Then there was the entering of 633 ISBN numbers into LibraryThing.  And checking whether the covers matched my particular book.  And changing it if not.  That was fun.  That was two days.  Finally the entire collection is noted in one, online place, and I only had two duplicates out of 1025 titles.  (This is what happens when you don't know what you have and you go book shopping).

Still I can at least see the surface of the dining table now.  And a larger part of the floor, which will give me more options for the obligatory sock photo shoot (as the light is non-existent in the rest of the house).  I suppose I should clean the floor now though, as Osca's muddy paw prints are not that artistic.  Isn't there always just something ...

Oops

It appears that ever since I blogged about LibraryThing ... it's been down.  (Was it something I wrote?)   I love this bit on their temporary front page:

"We're confident it was a bad hard drive, and that we're on the right path to fixing this. Fortunately, that system has six hard drives. Unfortunately, they were not configured redundantly (RAID 0 not RAID 5). "

The IT geek in me so wants to wave my finger at them and "tsk tsk" in their direction.  (But then I don't like RAID 5 for databases anyway ... RAID 0+1, that's the way to go, stripe and mirror - best of both worlds.)

I've been listening to Eddie this week on the train, having finally run out of knitting podcasts.  A bizarre side effect seems to be that I hear him in my head all the time now.  "Well being a transvestite, I'm aiming for 80.  Wear all the clothes, shag all the women.  Best of both worlds."

And perfectly suited to the LT situation - "What do you mean I've wiped the file?  I've wiped all the files??  I've wiped the Internet???  But I don't even have a modem!" 

Sorry.  I could go on.  For days actually.  But I won't.  Well, maybe just "in my mind." 

Oh, by the way, did you notice the facelift?  I'm not overly sure I like the new layout.  But that's change for you.  And it killed about 2 hours when I could have/should have been knitting.  I don't know what's up with me this week - it's like I have a malaise.  Even LaStrada is just sitting there, glaring at me from its bag, daring me to make it a UFO, along with all the others (15+ and still counting).

Maybe I'll go bead something, or just go to bed.  Oh, there's some chocolate in the fridge, that might do the trick...

It's a LibraryThang

I spent a very productive morning yesterday cataloging some more of my books at LibraryThing.com.  I opened my Lifetime account back in January when I read about it on Franklin's blog (and he heard about on Cast-On - I just love the diversity of the knitting world!).  I put about 80 books on, and I thought I was doing great.

It took me four hours to enter 207 books, which is half a bookcase.  I have four bookcases left to go.  And that's just the paperbacks.  Don't talk to me about the "reference" section (gardening, beading, knitting, quilting, cats ...)

On the plus side, I am inordinately proud to be the LibraryThinger with the most Ed McBain books (77).  My nearest rival only has 76 (hah! in your face, whoever you are!).  I'm not sure when spending money in a bookstore became a competitive sport, but there you go.  It's nice to know I can excell at collecting other things and not just yarn. 

Of course, as Ed McBain, aka Evan Hunter, aka Salvatore Lombino (and numerous other names, de plume and otherwise) passed on in 2005, there is a finite limit to my collection.  It is so strange to think that we will never know if Bert manages to convince Sharyn to take him back (tailing his own girlfriend, like she's some sort of criminal) or whether April and Mark will escape being thirteen and (not) popular.  (April, what were you thinking?  Shoplifting and smoking pot, and you a detective's daughter.)

Ah well.  Such is life.  The world keeps turning, with or without us.  Sometimes the sun even shines.