Summer Reading

I have temporarily given up on A Dance To the Music of Time.
It's not the book's fault. It's a little slow starting but a lot of books are like that. I think it's me.
I started reading a book that was a birthday gift from the much beloved Skippy. It's called The Story of Layla and Majnun.
I am enjoying the fairytale story style of the book.

After this I'm going to start the most recent David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I never miss one of his books.
I've been in the mood for Haruki Murakami. I think I have Kakfa on the Shore at home, waiting to be read.

I've been very distracted lately so it's been hard to read but hopefully that distraction will come to an end soon.

What are YOU reading?

Can't Resist a Good Book Meme

Got this from Gadfly :

What books have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Yes

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - No

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – Yes

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – Yes (2 or 3 times)

6 The Bible – Some

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Yes

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – I might have in highschool but I can't remember

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman – No

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens – No, but I have the book at home.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – No

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – No

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – ehhhh… mostly… ish?

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes, several times

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – No

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk – No

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – yes

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger – No

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot – no

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel – yes, my favorite novel..several times

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – yes

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens – No

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy – no

25 The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – No

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh – No

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – no

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – yes

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll – yes

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame – no

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy – yes

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens – No

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – No

34 Emma - Jane Austen - No

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen – No but I have the book at home.

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – no

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini – Yes

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres – No

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden – Yes, twice

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – Yes

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell – Yes, I think I read this in highschool

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – yes

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Yes

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving – no

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins – no

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery – no

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy – no

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood – Yes

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding – Yes, I think I read this in highschool

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan – I started it but never finished.

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Yes

52 Dune - Frank Herbert – No

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons – No

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen – No

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth – No

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon – no

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens – No

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – No

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon – No, but I own a copy

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Yes

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – yes

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov – No

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt – no

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – no

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – Yes-ish...I'm still working on it.

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac – no

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy – no

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding – Yes

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie – No

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – Yes, I think I read it in highschool

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens – no

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker – No

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – No

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson – no

75 Ulysses - James Joyce - no

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath – Yes, many times

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome – no

78 Germinal - Emile Zola – no

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray – no

80 Possession - AS Byatt – no

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens – no

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell – No, but I own a copy

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker – Yes

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert – no

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry – no

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White – yes

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom – no

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – no

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – No

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – no

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Ban – no

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams – No

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – yes

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute – no

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – no

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – yes

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – no

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo – no

Kota Bonus Books:
101. The Beet Queen - Louise Eldrich – no

102. Clockwork Orange - Stuart Y. McDougal – No

103. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein – No

104. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut – No

105. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe – no

Gadfly bonus books:

Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco - No, but I own a copy
A Winter’s Tale – by Mark Helprin - No
Strange Matters – Tom Seigfried - No
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey - No
The Lecturer’s Tale – by James Hynes - No
Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters - by J.D. Salinger - No

De Bonus Books:

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
The Thornbirds - Colleen McCollough
Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers

You Can Dial Down the Terror Alert...

I found the book I was looking for.

A large part of my Summer Reading List was A Dance to the Music of Time Vols 1-3 (still haven't picked up Vol 4 yet) but I soon realized that I couldn't find Vol 1.

Funny thing, memory. I could still SEE it in my mind, laying in my back seat but it wasn't there. I know I had started reading it and took it with me somewhere but as usual, I got distracted by newer books and never really got into Vol 1.
I searched all through my car with no luck but I was prompted to go out and wash it last night. GOD what a fucking mess that car was. Dog hair, straw wrappers, receipts and shopping bags all over the place. It looked like I had been living out of my car for about three years.

Anyway, the car was clean but I still didn't have Vol 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time.
Then I went through my apartment. Which in turn, prompted me to realize how fucking hideous things had gotten at home....books EVERYWHERE.
I had this extremely untidy stack of books in a basket next to my bed. There were books and DVDs sloppily stacked, precariously teetering on the edge, just waiting to cause a massive landslide of reading material and porn from Skippy.

I had a clean car now so I felt like I could do anything. I was going to fix this mess of books next to my bed.
When I picked up the basket, there it was: A Dance to the Music of Time Volume 1...right there, next to my bed...this WHOLE time.

So, screw the other books. I'm reading this one. I earned it.

You Decide

I finished The Strain last night.
I recommend it if you're into dark, horror type stuff. I wouldn't have said I was before reading it but I liked it.

Since my birthday, several books have been added to my collection.
All from Skippy:
The Reagan I Knew
Secret Identity
The Story of Layla and Majnun

I'm overwhelmed...what do I read next?
I'm thinking of staying on my reading list just so I don't get lost in the piles of books!
Maybe Carbon Diaries next?

Summer Reading...Happened So Fast...

Ok, so I finished City of Thieves and loved it.
Might write more about it later.

Right now I'm reading The Strain and it's SUPER spooky and VERY engaging.

I'm adding a book to my Summer Reading List:
The Starr Report, because it's sexy to do so...or so says the man of my dreams, Skippy.

I have a feeling I'm going to be adding several more by tomorrow!

What Do You Think....

Will my blog implode if I post something after all this time?

I have no real excuse except I've been over blogging for a while.
I don't really have anything interesting to say nor the energy to make something up.
I've been a maniac on Twitter because I feel like I can handle 140 characters at a time. A blog...not so much.

I haven't even been reading much but I finally grabbed a book off of one of my many shelves of unread books and started reading again.

It was good....so I read another and am reading another and I feel like I have my book mojo back.

I made a little informal reading list for the summer.
I am free to add or take away from the list at any time but I think this is going to be The Summer of Reading.

City of Thieves (reading now)

A Dance to the Music of Time
Volumes 1 - 3
There are 4 volumes but they only had the first three at my favorite used book store so I thought I'd track down the 4th if I liked the first three.

Carbon Diaries
I got this as an advance readers copy and intended to read it a long time ago.

The Strain
Another advance copy that I've been meaning to read for ages.

What's on your list?