Apparently the BBC reckons that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I count 51, but I’m not very good at counting…
Copy and paste – put an X next to the ones you have read.
(I found this on a few blogs and facebook. I have no idea if the 6/100 thing is legit or not.)
1. (x) Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. (x) The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. (x) Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. (x) Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. (x) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. () The Bible (not all the way through – I’m ashamed to admit!)
7. (x) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. (x) Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. (x) His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. (x) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. (x) Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. () Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. (x) Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. () Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. (x) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (I’m pretty sure I read this one)
16. (x) The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. () Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. () Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. (x) The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. () Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. () Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (I’ve seen the movie, does that count?)
22. () The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. (x) Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. () War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (I started this one…just couldn’t finish it)
25. (x) 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. (x) Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. (x) The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (I was actually in the play when I was younger!)
31. (x) Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. (x) David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. (x) Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. (x) Emma – Jane Austen
35. (x) Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. (x) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. (x) The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. () Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. (x) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. (x) Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. (x) Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. (x) The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. () One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I’ve started this one a couple times and always had to return it to the library before I got a chance to finish it)
44. () A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. () The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. (x) Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. () Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. () The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. (x) Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. (x) Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. (x) Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. () Dune – Frank Herbert
53. () Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. (x) 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. (x) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. (x) Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. (x) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. () Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. () The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. (x) 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. (x) Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. () Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. () Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. (x) Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. () Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. (x) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. (x) 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. (x) 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. (x) A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. (x) Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. (x) 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. (x) The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint
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. (x) Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. (x) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. (x) Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
*Warning – There are spoilers in this review!*
I was going to do this book as one of my favourites, but I’m not sure yet that I can put it up there with some of the other books I’ve reviewed. I did just reread it and couldn’t put it down. I think I even liked it better this time around. Anyway, onto the review!
Atwood starts the book with this line: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” She just dives right in. The book is divided into alternating parts. One set of sections is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen at the age of 83. Her writings are a journal that she is writing for her estranged grand-daughter, basically the story of her life. The other set of parts starts with newspaper articles that tell more of Iris’ story and alternates with a novel attributed to Iris’ sister Laura, and published posthumously by Iris. Laura’s novel is also called The Blind Assassin.
Iris begins her story with Laura’s death and then begins to describe their childhood as daughters of a successful industrialist. As the girls grow up they lose both of their parents and Iris is married to one of her father’s competitors. As a result Iris and Laura end up in Toronto living with Iris’ husband, Richard. Iris’ marriage is not a happy one and Laura does not get along with her brother in law at all. As the novel goes on, we realize that there is a very good reason for Laura’s hatred of Richard, which Iris is unaware of.
Meanwhile, the reader is treated to Laura’s entire novel. It’s a story about an unhappy married socialite carrying on an affair with a communist agitator in hiding. There are no names or details in Laura’s novel but as the story continues, you realize that the story is autobiographical and that Laura is not the author. The details of the affair are never described, but he tells her a story in instalments. It is in this story that we meet the blind assassin.
What I love about this novel is the way Atwood tells the story. The reader starts out with many questions. As the story goes on, all of those questions are slowly answered. I just love the way Atwood gradually reveals more details as the novel unfolds. I also love the way she tells a story within a story within a story. (I read one website that described compared them to Russian nesting dolls.) You’d think is might be complicated and confusing but Atwood does such a good job timing and relating the different parts of the story that it’s easy to follow.
The novel isn’t a happy novel with a happy ending, but I do think it’s very well written and very poetic. This is the kind of writing that is truly amazing. I can see why it won the Booker. Other books by Margaret Atwood that I would recommend are Alias Grace and Oryx and Crake. (Two entirely different books though…I’m warning you!)
Hiding in Plain Sight by Ken Bowers
“Unmasking how secret combinations operate in the last days”
I read this book for book club and I wish I hadn’t. I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy.
The book is basically a mormon version of all the same bullshit conspiracy theories you can find anywhere. (I realize that “bullshit” is a very strong term and I do not use it lightly. This is exactly what this book is.)
He begins by claiming that if you think conspiracy theorists are just nutters, then you are just mindlessly following the media, which is controlled by the conspirators. He says that if you pray about his message that God will let you know that it is true. (Which by the way, is totally against the teaching of the church.) He continues, throughout the entire book, to use scripture and quotes from church leaders taken out of context and twisted to fit his theories.
He starts his book with a chapter titled “There Is NO Conspiracy So There!” He makes a list of some of the reasons that people give for not accepting conspiracy theories and attempts to argue against them. I won’t go into detail about all of his arguments, but here are a few. He invokes Occam’s razor, claiming that everyone should accept his theory as truth because it is the simplest explanation for recent world events. After reading this book and doing a little research online, I beg to differ! There is nothing at all simplistic about Bowers’ ideas. They are extremely complicated and confusing. I personally believe that the generally accepted explanation for world events is actually the least complicated or at least a lot less complicated than his explanations. His 5th point is “We don’t have to worry about an evil conspiracy in the last days, because all we have to do is live the gospel, go to church and listen to the prophet.” He says that this thinking is wrong. I don’t even understand his reasoning here. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The rest of the book is all about the different groups that are involved in the conspiracy and their plans for the future. If Bowers is to be believed, you’d better watch out because EVERYONE is part of the conspiracy. Any politician with power, the Queen, the UN, anyone with money, the entire media, the Jews, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and of course the Catholics. (This list doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the people and groups he says are involved. Any group that any other conspiracy theorists has ever mentioned is included by Bowers.) He says that the regular members of these organizations and churches don’t realize it, but all the people at the top are secretly devil worshippers that are gradually leading the people to the same.
He claims that income tax and all social programs are evil because they are part of the plan of the conspirators. He says that this is the way they are going to control us. I’m sure that he thinks Canada is super evil because of our education and health care systems.
He makes these outrageous claims about who these people are and what their plans are but he never has a source for his information. He quotes a few books that other conspiracy theorists have written but he really has absolutely nothing concrete. I am amazed that he can make these accusations without even citing and references or sources for his information. For example “On October 4, 1965, Pope Paul IV addressed the United Nations. After the speech, Pope Paul went to the meditation room in the United Nations room and was initiated into the Illuminati.” That’s it. He makes a bold statement, claiming that the pope was a member of the conspiracy and then nothing. No source. And don’t think that there is a references section at the back, because there isn’t.
Another thing that really bothered me about this book, is that he obviously didn’t have an editor. There are so many spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, missing words etc. I think I’ve mentioned before that it bothers me when people can’t spell… He’s also not a great writer, but then again, neither am I. At least I’ve never charged anyone money to read what I’ve written!
I have not yet covered the reason I wouldn’t reccomend this book and the reason I wish I’d never read it. I did not like the feeling this book gave me. It was very dark and depressing. Even though I don’t believe anything he wrote, I still find myself watching a TV show or reading something online and wondering how it might be connected to the conspiracy. I just can’t get it out of my head. I’ve been reading Wuthering Heights to cheer me up!
