Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

If i'm honest there's not really much to write about this, its a classic. I was working it out earlier that Miss. Austen started writing this around 216yrs ago (unless my maths is faulty) and yet people today can still relate to it, and the characters within. As many people have said its sort of the original chic-lit romance, with so many other stories based upon it.

I started this some time ago, yet never managed to get round to finishing it until today where i sat down and gobbled up the last 100 pages.

Character wise I liked Lizzy, although she was almost too outspoken at times, but one of the brilliant things is the way the characters faults are shown up, making them seem much more human and real to the reader. Darcy was ofc amazing, yet there was fun to be had with mr.collins, lydia bennet, and mrs.bennet also. The annoying characters are so fantastic i cant help feeling affection towardst them. Overall a good read (ofc), personally i'd reccommend getting a copy with well spaced non-bold lettering if possible, particularly if you're a bit slow on the classics like me, as when i changed copies i found this so much easier, it really saves peering and getting lost between lines. (my second one was the everyman's 'the millennium library' one, although this may be out of print.)

Touch the Dark - Karen Chance

I've recently re-read this series and am still loving it :) Thought i'd tinker my amazon review for here, as it seems wrong not to post one for a book i like so much :)

Cassie has just spent the last several years on the run from her former master, vampire crime boss Tony. At the start of the book her motivations revolve around trying to either avoid being found by him, or getting revenge. However, as the story progresses she becomes ensnared in a mess thats much more dangerous.
Touch the dark focuses a lot on the vampires, and i really like the way Karen Chance brings back people from history and hangs them into this story like choice ornaments on the christmas tree. For the most part we are not told exactly who they are, but you get hints. For example, we meet cleopatra; "it wasn't an asp that bit her, mia stella", dracula's brothers, and one who i think is marie antoinnette. There are others also. (Raphael, Rasputin...)

Characterisation is something that Chance does well, my favourite is of course pritkin, who really comes into his own in the later books :D he is described as a sort of rambo meets mad scientist and jumps out of the page at you.

Some reviewers have said they've found the plot a little confusing, but i enjoyed the twists, however, as this was my third reading i may have got used to it :P if you do find it a bit of a boggle keep going because its worth it and you will be left craving more and counting the months till the next release. Chance deals not just with one problem or storyline but holds several at once, which may confuse some people, but overall i think it makes things more interesting. Its not just problem.resove.problem.resolve. like many others. This may be an advantage or disadvantage according to tastes but i believe it to be a strong point, as while waiting for book 5 to come along i can't wait to find out which problems she tackles and how, and see how the relationships between different characters and factions develop. I am well and truly hooked. so far nothing else i've read of this genre has compared.

I've read a few people saying that they've picked this up because amazon recomended it as something to read after twilight. If it helps they are completely different, as another reviewer pointed out the only thing really in common is the vampires. Twilight is all gushing romance and sweetness, everlasting love etc. This series is more action filled and isn't meant as a teen book (although i read when was 16, so its fine if thats what you're into). If you've read twilight and are looking for more of the same id recomend checking out listmania rather than amazon's own recomendations, as its written by people with the same dilema. But that doesnt mean you won't enjoy these, they're just different and its probably good to realise that before you buy expecting more of the same. I've read both and enjoy these a lot more.

And for those who arent a fan of Mircea, the main love interest in this book, due to the slighly creepy childhood crush cassie had on him where he took on a fathery/uncle type role, he meets some competition in the later books, so don't dispair as its not all over yet :P

Hope this might be some help. I'd say its definitely worth reading and that the later books are even better. :)

R.I.P. IV Challenge

Hosted by Carl, this challenge is about all things that go bump in the night. There are seven subgenres:

• Mystery
• Suspense
• Thriller
• Dark Fantasy
• Gothic
• Horror
• Supernatural

The aim of the game it to read either 4, 2 or 1 books from any of these subgenres by October the 31st and have fun doing it :P Because i'm predicting an intense year at college i am only going to put my name down for Peril the Second, which is to read two books, but i hope to do better than that.

Its recommended to create a pool of books you'd like to read from, so im going to write down some that i have waiting on my shelves, but will look into aquiring others to read instead/aswell.

1. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
2. The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
3. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen (its supposed to be a piss take of gothic horror novels)
4. The Host - Stephenie Meyer (not sure if this one counts)
5. The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
6. Dracula - Bram Stoker
7. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
   
8. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (i've tried reading this twice, but its freaked me out to much, so am going to include it, definitely spooky for me :P)
9. Agatha Christie - (have a few to choose from, ABC mysteries, Towards Zero, Onboard the Orient Express etc)
   

I also have two stories in a selection of Victorian mysteries called Nottinghill mystery and Carmilla by J. Sheridan le fanu which i dont know anything about, but may look into

Library books: Wicked - Maguire (not sure if counts as spooky :P), Kitty Goes to Washington -Carrie Vaughn, Grave Peril - Jim Butcher, Dead as a Doornail - Charlaine Harris and Sunshine by McKinley.

Ones i've had my eye on getting for a while (and this would be a good excuse :P): Inkdeath - Funke, Inkexchange - Melissa Marr, The Graveyard book - Gaiman and Breaking Dawn - Meyer (have been delaying the inevitable with that last one, too many of my friends are obsessive about it and it puts me off) some of these are probably a pretty loose interpretation of spooky, but shall see how it goes.

Personally, i think this is going to be fun :)

The Sweet Scent of Blood - Suzanne McLeod

I'm still not quite sure what i think about this book, so it might be a little tricky to review.

The Sweet Scent of Blood is an urban fantasy novel, which was definitely enjoyable, but i also found it a little confusing in places. Here's the basic overview.

The main Character Gen is Sidhe fey, the only one in London. This makes her incredibly appealing for vampires and the like because her blood tastes particularly good to them. Gens been trying to avoid the vamps for years and is working at spellcrackers.com where she gets protection from the witches council and is relatively safe, however, when the girlfriend of a celeb vampire gets murdered, his father comes asking for her help

(which she, due to a debt being called in, unwillingly gives) this puts both her witch protection and her job in jeopardy and she becomes caught up in a power struggle between some centuries old vamps.

-Thats how things stand at the start of the book, but the plot moves on quite quickly, so lots more interesting stuff happens.

The way this is set is sort of modern day london, but rather than with some urban fantasy books, where the vamps/weres/whatever are trying to hide from the norms, this one has everything out in the open and vampires have some celebrity status so getting the 'gift' becomes incredibly fashionable. There are also quite a few different types of fey involved. The characters are quite interesting, my favourites were Hugh, (who's a troll (in the police force) coming from a tribe in the cairngorms, Scotland), Malik (a vamp) and Finn (a satyr fey, who is rather lovely :) ). The main character is also interesting- without a lot of the whining that tends to come hand-in-hand with many of the leads in this genre - so although Gen had her problems, she got on with it and didnt moan too much :) bonus :)

There were lots of twists and turns and lots of excitement, along with some interesting concepts - such as being able to turn herself into an alter-vamp ego, although sometimes a turn would leave me going 'huh?' until i read on a bit, but it all made sense in the end and was lots of fun to read, so yeah, id recomend it if you're interested in the genre but want something more than the basic whiny girl + gorgeous guy + watery plot + urban fantasy concepts dealy (or even worse, gorgeous girl + gorgeous girl + even thiner plot). Its interesting and different to most of the ones i've read and although there are possible romantic attatchments [^^] and lots of sexy characters, it doesnt take over the plot.

* * * * *

I'm reading this as part of my whats in a name challenge for the body part (its a bit weak, but blood is kindof bodypart like, and will have to do till i get something better :P) it is of course also being used in my 100+ challenge and is book number 51. :)

Whats in a Name Challenge

I was trying to stop joining challenges half way through the year, but this was too tempting to miss...

*The Challenge: Choose one book from each of the following categories.

1. A book with a "profession" in its title. Examples might include:
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (Read)
The Ranger's Apprentice - John Flannigan (Read)


2. A book with a "time of day" in its title. Examples might include:
Embrace the Night - Karen Chance (Read)
Midnight's Daughter - Karen Chance (Read)
Curse the Dawn - Karen Chance (Read)


3. A book with a "relative" in its title. Examples might include:
The Memory Keepers Daughter - Kim Edwards
A Friend of the Family - Lisa Jewell*

4. A book with a "body part" in its title.
The Sweet Scent of Blood - Suzanne McLeod* (review)
'...and thats when it fell off in my hand' - Louise Rennison (Read)

5. A book with a "building" in its title.
Animal Farm - George Orwell (Read)

6. A book with a "medical condition" in its title.
Memoirs of a teenage amnesiac - Gabrielle Zevin (Read)

Okay, im not sure about some of these, if i read better ones then i shall change it. Some need their reviews linking/writing and hopefully i'll get around to that soon. Not sure if a farm counts as a builing or not though...

Reading Project

According to the BBC (BBC Big Read top 100 - this list has been passed around a bit, and can apparently be found on facebook...) the average person has only read 6 of these books, today i printed it off and counted and i am that person (i have also started 13 and had another 5 read to me) but still, bad form. Compared with the mother and she has read about 26. we have each selected five we want to read by christmas.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird
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 (seen the bbc addaption - looks far too depressing)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - (MsNDream, parts of macbeth + romeo&juliet, sonnets)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (mum read to me)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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 X
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 (lion witch & wardrobe and magician's nephew)
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 - 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’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 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 (03/03/10)
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 - HATEDHATEDHATEEDHATED So very much!
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X (I think so)
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

Blue = own
Green = mums read to me
italics = started (generally mean to continue, just got distracted...) includes series read part of
bold = finished/read all of
Purple bold = read and own

Mum and I have each selected five we wish to read by christmas

Mum:
Far from the Madding Crowd
Tale of Two Cities
The Da Vinci Code (not sure if she'll like this, being religeous)
Catch 22
The Three Muscateeres

Me:
Pride and Predudice (Finished 18th September 2009)
Animal Farm (Finished 24th September 2009)
The Handmaid's Tale (Finished 23rd September 2009)
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (Finished 4th October 2009)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Finished 23rd November 2009)

Of course i would like to read more than that, but hopefully there will be other years and i can chip away gradually, reading the woman in white and grapes of wrath and all the others that look tempting (but which im probably not going to stick to if i try now).

5 To read by end of easter hols...
Emma - Jane Austin
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Hitch-hiker's guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Summer Holiday Reviews

Reviews to books i read over the summer hols that are not directly linked to the main challenges im doing can be found on my other blog, however, links to these reviews can be found on the 'Read this year:' section on the left, or within my 100+ challenge. I am trying to write reviews for most of the books i'm reading this summer (who knows, it might make me a little better at it :S) but i shall probably still skip out on books i read that i dont think other people would want to know about (i read a lot of fiction that is rather light-hearted and is unlikely to interest a great many people). Just so you know where they are, in the off chance anyone actually cares :P :) have a nice summer :) :)