Books I've read in 2009

Just for the records:

Original titles in brackets

- HdR: Die Gefährten (LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring)
- The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
- Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen
- The Blade Itself
- Der Hüter der Finsternis (The Lamplighter)
- 13 Little Blue Envelopes
- Twilight
- Uglies
- Pretties
- Specials
- New Moon
- Eclipse
- Breaking Dawn
- Die Hand des Teufels (The Hand of Devils)
- Die Sünde der Brüder (The Brotherhood of the Blade)
- Das Meer der Lügen (The Private Matter)
- Peeps
- The Last Days
- Der Wunschzettel (Be Careful What You Wish For)
- Märchenmond
- Die Chroniken von Narnia: Das Wunder von Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew)
- CvN: Der König von Narnia (CoN: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- CvN: Der Ritt nach Narnia (CoN: The Horse and His Boy)
- Extras
- totgepflegt
- abgemurkst
- umgenietet
- All Quiet on the Orient Express
- Romeo&Juliet
- A Great and Terrible Beauty
- Rebel Angels
- The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
- Stardust
- The Sweet Far Thing
- Acadian Star
- A Caribbean Mystery
- The Walrus and the Carpenter
- Echo der Hoffnung (An Echo in the Bone)
- Thirteen reasons why

Book giveaway

Susan is celebrating her 500+ Twitter followers. Celebrate with her and have a chance to win a book!
(Who doesn't want to win a book??)

Contest can be found here.

New blog

No, not mine.

But four writers friends of mine joined together. So GO CHECK IT OUT! :) All the World's Our Page

And they are even giving books away already!

It's *really* official now

Diana's new book, An Echo in the Bone will be out on 22 September 2009.

Go here to see the statement on her homepage, where you can also have a look at the cover*.

Yai, can't wait! :)



*I'm wondering what the colour for the German edition will be. The last one was black already and Diana originally wanted a very dark purple for this one. Well, wait and see as Diana is wont to say :)

Books I've read in 2008

Just for the records:

Original titles in brackets

- Spymaster's Lady
- Tintenherz
- Tintenblut
- Tintentod
- Die Tore der Welt (World Without End)
- The Silmarillion
- Der Erlöser (Frelseren)
- Eine Tüte grüner Wind
- Der Illuminator (The Illuminator)
- Mein fast perfektes Leben (How to Talk to a Widower)
- The Hobbit
- The Smoke Thief
- Rache und Rosen (Pirate's Price)
- The Dream Thief
- Die Glasbücher der Traumfresser (The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters)
- Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows
- Everything is Illuminated
- My Lord and Spymaster
- Ein Mann wie Mr. Darcy (Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating)
- Vermiss mein nicht (A place called here)
- Unfinished Tales
- Tod auf dem Jakobsweg
- Tales from the Perilous Realm
- Bis(s) zum Morgengrauen (Twilight)
- The Eyes of A King
- Midnight Sun - Official Partial Draft
- Roverandom
- Bis(s) zur Mittagsstunde (New Moon)
- Die Bücherdiebin (The Book Thief)
- Die Wunschliste (The Next Thing On My List)
- Bis(s) zum Abendrot (Eclipse)
- Unendlichkeit (Revelation Space)
- Cost of Freedom
- Breaking Dawn
- Im Aufruhr der Gefühle (Smuggler's Bride)
- Beedle the Bard
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- Tree and Leaf

Why you should be buying books

The first reason you can find here.

The second here. Yai Carol!

I've already bought Carol's book (about 10 seconds ago *g*) and I'll be on a book shopping spree on Saturday (although I have to admit that I don't know how the situation is in Germany. But buying books can NEVER be wrong :) )

The Big Read

Found this on Tara's blog:

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

I've only read 16 of the books. That's above average but well... I haven't read too many of the classics (Like Dracula). It's just that most of the books listed below are nothing that I'd enjoy to read (of course you never know until you have read them, but still).

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. 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 (Close enough, anyway)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

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

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

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

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

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

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

A book I found

If anyone of you speaks German and is interested in The Historical Grammar of the English Language, I'd recommend this book from 1863:

Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache

Pillars of the Earth

Production firm Tandem Communications, located in Munich, has bought the tv-rights for "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett.

They want to make an eight hour series out of it.

I'm crossing my fingers here, as the book is one of my all time favourites (I re-read it about once a year) and hope that they will be able to adapt it well.
As is always the case with books made in to film, they will not meet the expectations of some and will meet the expectations of others.

I just hope for the best...

Stairs

Oh, look what Beth found!

Stairs Bookcase

How great is that? And I've been wondering how to expand my bookcase (at the moment books are all over the place in my living room. I really need more boards), this would be the perfect solution. Alas, I lack the stairs.
Clearly I need to win the lottery and buy a house :) Although, then, I'd have the most wonderful library. :)

The Essentials

Jen posted this over at the Forum:

If you were stranded on an island, what five books would you want with you?

I could come up with hundreds of books I couldn't live without, but here are the five I posted:

1. Lord of the Rings in one book
2. Brotherhood of the Blade
3. Harry Potter - Deathly Hallows
4. It's a draw between Pride&Prejudice and The Pillars of the Earth
5. The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Ode to Jo

Ok, before I post my review, here's the Ode to Jo, curtesy of Pam:


Ode to Jo

There once was a scribe named Jo Bourne,
Who embarked on a fruitful sojourn.
A novel completed,
That achievement, repeated,
Then an agent and deal, blow your horn!

In the forum, she helps each new crop,
without ego or guile, not a drop.
Sometimes semantic,
but never pedantic,
she’s our sesquipedalian cop.

And the third stave by me:

She has the greatest way with words,
Whoever said writers are nerds?
We’re all now waiting,
For the world she’s creating,
In the second of hopefully three thirds.

Books I've read in 2007

Just for the records:

Original titles in brackets

- Illuminati (Angels and Demons)
- Sakrileg (The DaVinci Code)
- Zwischen Himmel und Liebe (If you could see me now)
- Der Notar von Avignon (The Notary)
- Schlösser im Loiretal (Les châteaux du Val de Loire)
- Ms. Zephyr's Notebook
- The Fiery Cross
- Der magische Steinkreis (Ourlandish Companion)
- A Breath of Snow and Ashes
- Die Gegenpäpstin
- Quidditch im Wandel der Zeiten (Quidditch through the ages)
- Samt und Säbel (Captain Sinister's Lady)
- Woher weiß die Seife was der Schmutz ist (What Einstein Didn`t Know)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Glennkill (Glennkill)
- Die Sünde der Brüder (Brotherhood of the Blade)
- Ich bin dann mal weg
- Fünf Freunde wittern ein Geheimnis (Five on a secret trail)
- Golden Hours - Die goldenen Stunden des Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien at War - Myles na gCopaleen 1940-1945)
- Faulheit ist das halbe Leben
- Das Buch der Namen (The Book of Names)
- Das letzte Konzert (Jack, Knave and Fool)
- Was wäre gewesen, wenn? (What if?)
- Das Gold der Kreuzfahrer (Crusader Gold)
- Schwarze Themse (Shifting Tide)
- Der Spion der Königin (Galleon's Grave)
- Stolz und Vorurteil (Pride and Prejudice)