Kell

I've not yet read any of the Bronte sisters' work, but I have The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre on my shelf, waiting to be read for my Classics Challenge. I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of Vilette...

In my coffee break today, one of my colleagues came over to me and said, "You must be really happy in your own company - you always go off and sit by yourself." I replied, "But I'm not by myself - I've got an entire cast of characters sitting right here with me and filling my head with their stories." He laughed at that and recommended the Cross Stitch series by Diana Gabaldon to me when he realised I was reading historical fiction. It's funny the things that happen when you're reading in your coffee break!

I haven't read nearly as many as you have, but I'm trying to read at least one foreign author each month, just to keep myself on track. I'm reading a Philippa Gregory novel at the moment, but I confess I've already read several of hers for my Kenyan entry - I just like her so much I had to read a few more! Some i've been going over old ground a little bit, but I have more waiting on my shelves for other countries. I've promised myself that my next foreign one will be from a country I haven't yet covered... It's definitely making me more aware of where authors come from because each time I hear of a new author, I'm checking up on where they were born to see if they'll qualify for my OC!

WOW! You've been doing a lot of reading! I might have to check some of those out myself for my own OC...

I've read the first one, Raven's Gate - I bought it with birthday money (not my last birthday, the one before) and thought it was pretty good. i kept meaning to get hold of the next one but I haven't yet. You'll have to let us know what you think of them.

I used to work like that too - all new books went to the bottom of the oils and I read them in the order they arrived, but I ended up with so many to choose from and eventually I just didn't fancy the ones that were at the top and I had to switch to random choice. I still have a couple of those ones waiting to be read now as other books take my fancy, but I picked up one of them to start reading today, so perhaps those other ones that have been waiting for ages will get read shortly too...

Hello and Sally - I hope you'll enjoy it here.

Does anyone here have this book? I don't, but I keep hearing about it and went in search of a list of the books included in it and found THIS handy listing. Anyone else care to share? Out of the 1001 books listed, I have already read the following: 1. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro 2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon 3. Life of Pi - Yann Martel 4. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 5. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh 6. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis 7. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 8. Perfume - Patrick Suskind 9. The Color Purple - Alice Walker 10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 11. Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice 12. Chocky - John Wyndham 13. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (currently reading) 14. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey 15. The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham 16. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 17. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham 18. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell 19. Animal Farm - George Orwell 20. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 21. Brave new World - Aldous Huxley (currently listening) 22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 23. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 24. War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells 25. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells 26. Dracula - Bram Stoker 27. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 28. She - H. Rider Haggard 29. King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard 30. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 31. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll 32. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott 33. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 34. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 35. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 36. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen 37. Emma - Jane Austen 38. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 39. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 40. Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe (unfinished) And I have these ones on Mount To-Be-Read: 1. Disgrace - J M Coetzee 2. Captain Corelli's Mandalin - Louis de Bernieres 3. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood 4. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje Drag me to re-order 5. The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger 6. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence 7. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells 8. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 9. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 10. The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy 11. Ben-Hur - Lew Wallace 12. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte 13. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Drag me to re-order 14. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë 15. Vanity Fair - W M Thackeray 16. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 17. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 18. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos 19. Candide - Francois Voltaire 20. Fanny Hill - John Cleland And I rather fancy reading these ones: 1. Saturday - Ian McEwan 2. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters 3. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides 4. Atonement - Ian McEwan 5. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood 6. Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters 7. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver 8. The Hours - Michael Cunningham 9. Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho 10. Silk - Alessandro Baricco 11. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood 12. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides 13. Hideous Kinky - Esther Freud 14. Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard 15. The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi 16. Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson 17. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 18. The Trick is to Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway 19. The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy 20. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe 21. Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard 22. Schindler's Ark - Thomas Keneally 23. The Na,e of the Rose - Umberto Eco 24. The World According to Garp - John Irving 25. The Shining - Stephen King 26. Crash - J. G. Ballard 27. The Godfather - Mario Puzo 28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick 29. The Graduate - Charles Webb 30. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 31. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov 32. The Prime of Miss Jean Brode - Muriel Spark 33. To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee 34. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak 35. The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith 36. The Story of O - Pauline Reage 37. Lord of the Flies - William Golding 38. Casino Royale - Ian Fleming 39. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 40. The Third Man - Graham Greene 41. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 42. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 43. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier 44. Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen 45. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell 46. Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell 47. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller 48. Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller 49. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald 50. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 51. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett 52. Orlando - Virginia Woolf 53. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster 54. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan 55. Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs 56. A Room with a View - E.M. Forster 57. Kim - Rudyard Kipling 58. A Turn of the Screw - Henry James 59. The Island of Dr Moreau - H.G. Wells 60. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman 61. The Adventures fo Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 62. Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne 63. Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne 64. The Waterbabies - Charles Kingsley 65. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 67. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 68. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 69. La Reine Margot - Alexandre Dumas 70. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo 71. The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper 72. Persuasion - Jane Austen 73. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen 74. The Monk - M. G. Lewis 75. The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe 76. The 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis de Sade 77. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift 78. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe 79. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

I watched Dodo wheel the youngest Conway up and down. She seemed to be doing it for my benefit. Children made me sick. ~ The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I bought it last weekend - am dying to read it, but I've set myself a schedule of certain books I need to read this month - After I finish my reading circle books (the last one is The Bell Jar, which I'm reading now), I need to read Jane Eyre, so I can read The Eyre Affair. Then I need to read a chunk. After THAT, I can read No Humans Involved and Broken Skin (by Stuart MacBride). See how my mojo is well and truly tickled by that line-up!

Lifetime membership is only $25, so I think that's maybe about £12/£13. $10 for a year's membership works out at about £5/£6 roughly (I think). I'll probably be paying up for lifetime membership at the end of this month, or perhaps next - I'm getting closer and closer to the 200 limit for a free membership!

It makes perfect sense, thank you. I thought it lent a great deal to her as a character (I don't think I would have felt so sympathetic towards her had her story been told third person like the others).

I'm suffering from a bit of a wobbly mojo at the moment, but that's due to the fact that the book and audio book I'm currently reading and listening to aren't really grabbing me much. To have two at once is hitting my mojo quite hard. I had a bit of a mojo-loss a while back, but I seem to be back on track again now (apart from this little semi-blip).

Hi Carm, and to the forum! I hope you'll share some of your favourite books and authors with us and enjoy your time here.

I felt very sorry for her - at the start she's always the one who behaves, but doesn't get the attention because Esme "misbehaves", then boy she wants herself is more attracted to her younger sister (albeit in an unhealthy way), so she doesn't get what she wants in love. She marries a man who seems indifferent to any kind of physical relationship with his wife (which must be very frustrating, even if she doesn't know exactly what she's missing), she's denied the chance of having her own baby and so takes on her sister's, and through all this, she never sees her sister at all. She's quite a tragic figure, even if a bit selfish at times, I think. Esme, on the other hand, seems to be a more emotionally strong person - almost like she was just out of her time (or ahead of her time, even!) and that's reflected in what she sees in Iris.

Because of my passing out at inopportune moments, I'm not supposed to lock the bathroom door when I'm in there, in case I pass out in the bath and go under and drown, so I leave the door open too (well, there's only me and Dale there anyway), which means the room doesn't steam up at all, hence no rippled pages. I don't tend to read so much on weekends, as that's when I get out and about and catch up with dull houseworky-type things, but that's where the audio books come in handy. I can't imagine not having books handy on my iPod now that I've started! Also, I was on holiday for a week in April and I did pretty much nothing but read the entire time - that notched up quite a few books. I have a long weekend next week, so I'll probably do a lot of reading then too. I have 2 weeks in August, and we'll be going away to stay with friends for a week, so there'll be a train journey each way and reading at night in bed, then a week of reading in the sun when we get home too - LOADS of reading time. Another week in November will get me through another 4 or 5 books straight (but this time curled up under a duvet!). A lot of my reading seems to get done in bursts like that - LOL!

There's also the fact that although Esme was physically locked away, her mind was free and she seemed to wander off into her own world at the drop of a hat - the reverse of Kitty in her later life. Actually, with Esme being confined when she's young, and Kitty being confined when she's old, that makes them exact opposites!

I just started with the books I had read from the start of this year (since I started around the end of February) so I wouldn't have the stress of putting all my other books on, but I may well upgrade shortly to the Lifetime Membership and list them all eventually...

I just finished this last night, so this is the first I've been on the thread since setting it up, so as to avoid any spoilers! there seemed to be something inevitable about events throughout the book. I found I could see exactly what was going to happen from very early on, but for once it didn't spoil my enjoyment of it at all, as I desperately wanted to hear the story from the point of view of Esme, Kitty and Iris. I also found it very interesting that it was all written third person for Iris and Esme, yet first person for Kitty, who's thoughts were muddled and kept jumping about due to her dementia. I also found it quite ironic that although Esme was locked away for 60 years, Kitty lost more than 30 years of her memories and was locked away in her mind...

I don't watch much TV, so reading is my main source of entertainment. I read during my tea breaks and lunch hour every day at work, and every night while I'm soaking in the bath for between 30 mins and an hour. I also occasionally read in bed for about half an hour before sleeping (I have a dandy little book light so I won't disturb Dale, who falls asleep within 5 minutes of his head hitting the pillow most nights). Occasionally, if Dale's watching something I'm not bothered about, i'll sit on the sofa next to him and read a book. I also listen to audio books every day whilst walking to and from work (about 1/2 an hour each way) and when i'm walking about town at the weekends.

It doesn't have to be the main character for me - so long as I can identify with one of the characters that features quite heavily (it's quite often the best friend or sidekick that makes it for me). When it comes to writing styles, I often have difficulty with present tense, whether it's first or third person, but if I "get on with" the characters, and am enjoying the story itself, then I can sometimes get past that (like I did with Esme Lennox). I'm also not one for swathes of description - I like to know what things look/taste/smell/sound/feel like, but if it's pages and pages of it (like with Tolkien), I lose the thread of the story and end up not persevering with it - it's just too much. On top of all that, if characters don't get given names (as with Moll Flanders and Unspeakable Things - or whatever that book was called again), I get really angry. Possibly because I hate it when people don't remember MY name - it's like the author couldn't be bothered giving their characters names - almost as if they felt it wasn't worth it, and therefore the characters themselves are unworthy of my attention. If relationships are "real" and don't run smoothly, that's a bonus for me - when things go perfectly and everything works out where they "all live happily ever after", I always feel that's a cop-out, as nothing is ever perfect - relationships always need work. A writer who can make that work will always engage my interest.

Are they very similar to the Anita Blake series? I was planning on trying some AB stuff, but if they're anything like the Kim Harrison books I'll not enjoy them - I really didn't like Harrison's style, although I liked the basic idea behind the books (I only read the 1st two and didn't bother with the third).

Do yours register that someone else has a copy? I can't figure out why mine doesn't!

Hi Maggie - welcome to the forum. I've been avoiding the thread till I finished Esme Lennox (which I did last night - I very much enjoyed it too!), in case I hit any spoilers, so a belated indeed! I was wondering about one of the choices you made in the writing style of Esme Lennox - What made you go with third person present tense for Iris and Esme, but first person present tense for Kitty?

I have six listed that show as me being the only holder: 1) Broken Skin by Stuart MacBride (but it's brand new, so not surprising) 2) The Crystal Chalice by Debora Hill & Sandra Brandenburg 3) Daughters of the Doge by Edward Charles (another brand new one) 4) Karma by Holly A Harvey (although I borrowed this from PP) 5) An Open Vein by J M Warwick 6) The Spur on the Plate by Maureen Rylance No's. 2, 3 ad 6 were all reviewed either for the author, the publisher or for another site.