Blissful holidays -

I took a stack of books home from the library, seeing as I'd have a decent amount of time to read over the break and no guilt that I should be doing marking.

These are the ones I have read so far:
Mad Dogs - Robert Muchamore
the latest in a long series of ripping good spy stories for boys.

Wildwood Dancing - Juliet Marillier
Cybele's Secret - Juliet Marillier
I borrowed these because a girl (13 or so) on ravelry said she really enjoyed them. They are, again, ripping good yarns that lean heavily on folklore and fairy tales and have a very Baba Yaga/ central europe flavour to them.

Regeneration - Pat Barker
Semi-true/semi-fictional account of Sigfried Sassoon and his doctor in WWI, there are two more books in the series but, as much as I loved this one, I couldn't read them one after the other. Great book, fascinating.

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Sort of post-apocalypse. Ended in a different place than I expected, given the start. I felt like I should have spent time thinking and considering it before launching into the next book.

The Declaration - Gemma Malley
People have discovered the drug that allows immortality and children become illegal. A bit flat after Oryx and Crake. Found it a bit internally inconsistent and the pacing was off, but it was a nice idea and quite a good read.

The Gospel According to Larry - Janet Tashjian
Nice book, plausible, only took three hours to read.

feed - M. T. Anderson
The internet is connected to our brain in a live feed, we are always switched on, the government controls the flow of information - the blurb is wildly misleading - don't read it.

The White Tiger - Kylie Chan
Loved it, read it in the bath on New Year's Eve. I'm busting to read the rest in the series, I hope they are out already. There were a few annoying repetitive things, but on the whole, a really fun read.

I tidied up my flat today and threw out a wheely bin full of stuff. I am feeling much the better for it, and the place almost looks tidy/organised.

Flagging -

Nell, perhaps sensing that I am flagging in the relatively minor task of blogging daily, offered me a meme. Nell will be appearing soon with a guest post to introduce her blanket.

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold what you have read, italicise that you started but couldn't didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods*
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave new world*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park*
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid* (and in Latin)
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In cold blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers”

I changed 'couldn't finish' to 'didn't finish', I might get round to them one day (Plus, I just worked out how to do strikethrough and don't want to pass up any opportunities to use it. This list suggests to me that I should stop re-reading. I might do another list of the books I intend to read one day (when I get round to it).