Cross out what you've already read. Six is the average. →

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - read the first book, part of the 2nd; gave up.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Council of Nicea
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 - own
14. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - own
15. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
16. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
17. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
18. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
19. Middlemarch - George Eliot
20. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - own
21. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
22. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - own
25. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
26. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
28. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
29. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
30. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
31. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
32. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
33. Emma - Jane Austen
34. Persuasion - Jane Austen
35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini — own
36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - own
37. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
38. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
39. Animal Farm - George Orwell
40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
43. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
45. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
46. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
48. Atonement - Ian McEwan
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - own
50. Dune - Frank Herbert
51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - own & really want to read
52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
53. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
54. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - own
55. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - parts; own
56. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
58. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - own
59. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
60. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
62. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
63. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - parts of it, but can’t    remember if I read it all.
64. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
65. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
66. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - gave away w/o reading…
67. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - own
68. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - own, but doubtful I’ll read it.
69. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
70. Dracula - Bram Stoker
71. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
72. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses - James Joyce  
74. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
75. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
76. Germinal - Emile Zola
77. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - own
78. Possession - AS Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
80. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
81. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - own
83. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
84. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
86. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - own
87. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
88. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
91. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
92. Watership Down - Richard Adams - own
93. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - tried
94. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
96. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - parts. It’s freaking long!

_____

Wow, read 48!! Almost half the list, and parts of some of the others. Plus  I own a bunch of them and intend to read them, too.

…Pretty sure I’m a piece of outlying data.

(Source: antoinetheswan, via )

Yay, me!

I recently hit 4,000 subs on youtube AND THEN 250,000 views. So I thought I would celebrate, and I like to celebrate by giving away all teh things!! 

CLICK HERE!!to enter to win 10+ books out of my pool of 26!! (Basically, however much I can fit in the largest flat rate box… ;P )

AND GOOD LUCK!!

elizziebooks:

Bookstore GPOY

^^

(via ambells)

i am the beast of old
and you will look upon me and tremble

I just finished reading this, so this is pretty fricken cool.

(Source: gigglemonster, via )

I organize my books my color. Most people think this is bananas. I think it’s awesome.

Here’s the first video in my Shelf x Shelf segment, delving into the pretty deep red books on my shelves. A full list of the books shown can be found here.

thesignaturething:

alexbracken:

After months of work, I’m SO happy to finally launch thedarkestminds.com!  I’m hosting a giveaway to celebrate—and an  easy way to enter is to just reblog this post.

Let me know what you think!

I want to enter! I am bananas excited to re-read THE DARKEST MINDS, and the website is gorgeous, too. And you know I love a themed prize—the winner gets:

• A Black Betty meal of delicious candy, chips, junk food, half-drunk bottles of water (just kidding on that last one (but seriously, this is a lot of junk food))
• A first-aid kit
• Chubs’ reading collection, which includes: Watership Down, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Howard’s End
• Zu’s gloves, on the off chance you find yourself with the ability to control electricity

I demand everyone go visit Alex’s website, enter her contest, pre-order the book, and then prepare to have your life ruined (in the best possible way) by Ruby and her friends.

(via alexbracken)

gabriellezevin:

Because It Is My Blood Favorite Blogger Roundup, Part One

It has been a rather nice couple of weeks. My just completed adult book, The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, recently sold to Simon and Schuster in the US and has already closed ten foreign rights deals. I’m super proud of this book and I’ll tell you more about it as we get closer to the pub date, Spring 2014. Fikry will be my eighth published novel — hard to believe — and it will be published precisely ten years after I sold my first novel, Elsewhere.

Onto the bloggers! I am incredibly appreciative of all the bloggers who have written kind and intelligent words about Because It Is My Blood. If I could send you all a verrine from my favorite Los Angeles bakery, Bottega Louis, I would. (Verrines don’t do that well in the mail, unfortunately.) 

Let us begin with Birth of a New Witch, who totally gets it: 

…I love this world, these characters, and this series….“Because It Is My Blood” is not for the dystopian crowd that demands constant action and ridiculous love triangles, but instead, I’d say it’s a quieter, sneakier, and more thoughtful book than many of the YA dystopian books out there at the moment. This one will sneak up on you when you least expect it and hit you right in the feels. There was so much in this one I wasn’t expecting, and it was a pleasant surprise.

She also mentions “the sort-of metaphor for chocolate being equivalent to marijuana the way it is now with medical dispensaries” — it’s funny how few people have noted this, but yes, that indeed is what I was thinking. 

In an incredibly smart review, The Book Rat writes a great many insightful things about Anya, Win and the series. I was most intrigued by this paragraph: 

I REALLY loved where this went with Charles Delacroix. I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, but it actually went where I was hoping it would go, and even though I was expecting it, it was still really nice to see it happen (but also unsettling). A lot of YA authors wouldn’t have dared. And while we’re being cryptic - the same is true with Kipling/Yuji, etc. Zevin didn’t pull punches with the relationships, and they had me feeling all turmoily and anxious and FEELS.  I’m curious to see where things stand in the future in with all of the characters/relations, as many are very open and very tenuous. But I loved the handling for now. It was very adult, very unforgiving, and yet another sign of Anya’s development that I both liked and bought.

The Insatiable Reader calls Because It Is My Blood “a fabulous follow up to all the greatness that was introduced in book one.” The part of her review that made me laugh out loud: “Honestly Win, the road was clear for you!  Lighten up on the ‘leave it behind business’, get on the ‘yay chocolate’ bus, and step up to the plate already!” Oh, IR, I cannot wait to read what you make of Book Three! 

High praise from Minion’s Review, who reports that “she may may now like [Anya] more than Katniss!”, and closes her review by writing, “I’ve always felt that The Godfather was the perfect film and it looks to me from the two books so far in the Birthright series that it may become the perfect Young Adult book…I CANNOT wait for the third book.” I cannot wait for you to read it either because book three is my absolute favorite in the series. 

Ex Libris Kate gives the book 5 out of 5 birds and makes several salient points about Anya’s character:

Anya is almost selfish in her desire to keep bad news and situations from those she loves; not wanting to expose them to harm, she ends up shutting out the very people she needs.  This extends to Win, as well, who is just as charming and appealing as ever.  The irony of this situation, that Anya would alienate the very people she loves and wants to protect, is not lost on her and her funny, quirky and honest voice is, again, the perfect narrator for this story.

Amber at The Reading Addict writes more things I want people to write about Anya’s character: “Anya is an incredible character. I’d forgotten how utterly awesome this protagonist is. She’s headstrong, brave, self-sacrificing, everything I admire in a lead character. Her love for her family and friends is evident as she takes great lengths to protect them from her corrupt family and ruthless enemies….I pitied and respected her, even when I didn’t agree with her decisions.” Princess Bookie concurs: “Oh, Anya, how I love you as a character. You are so strong and smart.”

Over at Book Brats, Megan writes that “I read the last 200 pages in one sitting, hooked and desperate to know more. And now that book two is over, I am salivating for book three.” Megan also writes that she “hopes Theo is there.” He will be and he is important, I promise.

In a delightfully Yuji Ono centric review, Aeropapers is rooting for — what else? — more Yuji Ono in book three: “If they are fighting and forming teams with Theo’s and Win’s banner. I got my flag raised with Yuji’s name on it.” Aeropapers, there will be A LOT of Yuji Ono in book three. I don’t even know if you will  be able to handle how much Yuji Ono is coming at you. 

At Michelle and Lesley Book Picks, chelleyreads reports that she “LOVED” Because It Is My Blood. She also observes of Win and Anya’s romance, “But when the romance was brought up, it continued to be lovely and sweet. Although not the most heroic love interest, Win continued to be a great companion for Anya (companion, as in it’s Anya, and her alone, who is carrying the series—another thing I like about it)….He and Anya are one of my favorite YA couples.” Chelleyreads, this is so true. Win is a “companion”; Anya is the show. The series is not a book about a girl who falls in love with a boy. 

Let’s hop over to Teenreads, where Norah Piehl, who is not really a blogger, remains as sympathetic a reader as ever:

“Anya’s flaws are what make her a complicated, thoroughly human character, one whom readers will enjoy continuing to try to understand. Anya, who often tries to do the right thing but fails, who genuinely wrestles with huge moral dilemmas, who wonders continually about the role of heredity and upbringing on her own character and on her future, is hardly perfect, but she is believable. Readers will love her, flawed as she is.”

Finally, we have the perceptive Miss Print, whose reviews I always enjoy: “Zevin keeps the story original with her surprising turns and Anya’s wry, eloquent narration. Readers will also notice Anya’s continued growth as she moves out from her dead father’s shadow (and advice) to begin making her own decisions.” You can also read Miss Print’s interview with me here. 

Finally, finally, the novelist/blogger Presenting Lenore gives Because It Is My Blood her coveted Zombie Merit Chicken Badge for Writing and writes that Anya seems like an “old friend.”

Thanks again, everyone! I know it takes a long time to read these books and write these reviews and that most of you do it just for the money. I’m kidding! You do it for the love. Thank you for the love and the smarts.

P.S. I only got through about a third of the reviews I could have put here, but this post was starting to become unwieldy. Part two coming in a couple of weeks, I promise

P.P.S. Obligatory reminder that I have a contest up with a pathetically small number of entries and a ridiculously high number of prizes. Chances to win = very good. Come and enter. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

(wednesday narcissism no. 12)

Hey. That’s me up there… =D

mothereffingbooks:

thinkingoflolita:

Penguin Clothbound Classics.

How I wish I had more of these… I’ve got a few, but not enough!!!

Sources

1. http://virigooddesign.com/?p=47

2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/7329345@N06/5666674589

3. http://thepenguinpress.tumblr.com/post/12478188961

4. http://kidcrave.com/entertainment/clothbound-penguin-classics-for-children/

5. http://hiddenlantern.com/a-visual-feast-part-ii

6. http://fiddlesticksandnonsense.squarespace.com/posts-old/2010/1/19/object-lovepenguin-classics-a-mantel.html

(For even more pretty books, go here http://www.adoseofthedelightful.com/blog/books/ )

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here LICKING MY SCREEN.

I want them ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

A ‘strong female character’

dealanexmachina:

drshebloggo:

DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN

• a character who is physically strong
• a character who is mentally strong
• a character who is emotionally strong

ABSOLUTELY MEANS

• a character who makes her own choices, even if they’re mistakes
• a character whose point of view is explored at least briefly
• a character who is the hero of her own story whether she knows it or not

And that’s just a strong character, really.

And amen.

(via dustgoesinadustbin)

My interview with (the awesome) Rachel Hartman, who wrote (the even awesomer) SERAPHINA, about which I said a lot of stuff, like:

“Seraphina is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. Hands down, without a doubt, straight-up adored it.”

and

“this has one of the best-written YA romances I’ve read in ages. “

and

“You add in everything - the world-building and the fantastic concept, the characters and the maturity and engaging finesse of the writing, and a strong romance to boot - and folks, we have a winner….in Seraphina, Rachel Hartman has built a great foundation for furthering what looks to be a very promising series….

Also, the cover is a woodcut. I mean…can it be made of any more win?”

I said a bunch of other stuff, too, which you can read if you’d like.