10. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond, 1997 (first-time reading)
   One-tenth of the way through my hundred books! Excellent. So this one was recommended to me by a couple of people, mostly family members, and having finished it I've immediately started recommending it to everyone else, because it's absolutely fascinating. As someone who takes a ( Read more... )

9. The Other Side of the Story - Marian Keyes, 2005
   Great book. It's one of those where you pick it up and instantly feel deeply invested in the characters - I've read a lot of Marian Keyes books, and they're far superior to most of the chick-lit out there, which is in large part because she's so good at creating characters with warm, believeable ( Read more... )

8. Persuasion - Jane Austen, 1816
   I suppose this was part two of my I-can-read-whatever-I-want-now kick. I think it was literally the first pre-twentieth-century novel I've read in a year. I think it's my second favourite Austen, after Pride and Prejudice, which I have actually studied in school and so feel that I understand and appreciate better ( Read more... )

7. Kraken - China Miéville, 2010
I read this when I was on holiday last year and enjoyed it, and shortly afterwards was thrown, with the advent of my AS English course, into a world where to be prepared for my exam I had to spend the preceding year reading the maximum possible amount of twentieth-century-minority-rights-literature possible and ( Read more... )

6. The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler, 1985
   I read this years ago and ended up rereading it after being disappointed by Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, to see if I'd enjoy it again as much as I did then. Which I did; I like The Accidental Tourist much better. It has the same quiet, insightful feeling but it also feels so much more colourful ( Read more... )

5. The Pianist - Władysław Szpilman, 1946 (first-time reading)
   One of my friends gave me this for my birthday (I asked her for it, after renting the film, liking it, and being intensely irritated when halfway through the DVD suddenly refused to cooperate and I didn't get to see the end) and I enjoyed it very much. The film, as far as I could ( Read more... )

I'm going out with my family tonight and my friends on Monday, and on Tuesday I'm hitting the road for my first driving lesson. After a year of watching all my friends turn seventeen and learn to drive this cannot come soon enough.

4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith, 1943
   Great book. It reminded me of The Help and I Capture the Castle - ( Read more... )

3. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler, 1982
   I don't know. I didn't love it. I could see that it was good and I could see complexity and skill in how it was written, I could see the themes and the character exploration, but I just didn't really care about any of it. I didn't care about any of the characters or their lives or their ( Read more... )

2. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini, 2003 (first-time reading)
   This was a really lovely book with a great narrator - I found Amir a complicated and engaging protagonist. And it dealt so well with Afghanistan, in a way that came across, at least to someone as ignorant as myself, as nuanced and well-informed. It was particularly interesting ( Read more... )

I've been thinking recently that I should be getting more into posting here again, especially since I'm not writing much at the moment (I still use my livejournal all the time for looking at communities and so on, but I haven't posted for ages. And the last post I made wasn't even an interesting one; given the heavily left-wing bias on this site it ( Read more... )