rach.at.the.disco
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Posts posted by rach.at.the.disco
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Read in 2011
January:
Two's Company - Jill Mansell
Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
The Ivy Chronicles - Karen Quinn
From Notting Hill With Love Actually - Ali McNamara
The Nanny Diaries - Nicola Kraus & Emma McLaughlin
Keeper of the Bride - Tess Gerritsen
The Breaker - Minette Walters
February:
A Mother Like Alex - Bernard Clarke
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I didn't exactly keep my 2010 reading blog up to date. Let's hope I can manage it this year. And make a dent in my To Be Read pile along the way.
To Be Read:
1. A Hopeless Romantic - Harriet Evans
2. Going Home - Harriet Evans
3. The Breaker - Minette Walters
4. The Chameleon’s Shadow – Minette Walters
5. Airs and Graces - Erica James
6. Watermelon - Marian Keyes
7. Rachel's Holiday - Marian Keyes
8. Angels - Marian Keyes
9. Everyone Worth Knowing - Lauren Weisberger
10. The Queen's Fool - Philippa Gregory
11. The Virgin's Lover - Philippa Gregory
12. The Other Queen - Philippa Gregory
13. Songs of the Humpback Whale - Jodi Picoult
14. Haunted - Chuck Palahnuik
15. Lullaby - Chuck Palahnuik
16. Choke - Chuck Palahnuik
17. Invisible Monsters - Chuck Palahnuik
18. We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
19. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
20. Perfume - Patrick Suskind
21. The Child In Time - Ian McEwan
22. Saturday - Ian McEwan
23. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
24. The Secrets She Keeps - Helen Cross
25. Body Surfing - Anita Shreve
26. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D Salinger
27. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
28. Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov
29. Dracula - Bram Stoker
30. Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
31. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
32. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
33. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
34. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
35. Emma - Jane Austen
36. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
37. Persuasion - Jane Austen
38. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
39. Selected Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
40. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
41. Double Cross - Malorie Blackman
42. Ash - Malinda Lo
43. Dreaming of Amelia - Jocelyn Moriaty
44. Highland Fling - Katie Fforde
45. Living Dangerously - Katie Fforde
46. Wild Designs - Katie Fforde
47. Artistic License - Katie Fforde
48. Size 12 is not Fat - Meg Cabot
49. Size 14 is not Fat - Mag Cabot
50. It Had To Be You - Sarah Webb
51. When The Boys Are Away - Sarah Webb
52. Take A Chance - Sarah Webb
53. Moab Is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
54. Babyville - Jane Green
55. The Dead Girls Dance - Rachel Caine
56. Midnight Alley - Rachel Caine
57. Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain - Charles R. Cross
58. Mr Darcy, Vampyre - Amanda Grange
59. The Ivy Chronicles - Karen Quinn
60. The Self Preservation Society - Kate Harrison
61. Brown Owl's Guide to Life - Kate Harrison
62. Forget Me Not - Isabel Wolff
63. Flowers In The Attic - Virginia Andrews
64. Interview With The Vampire - Anne Rice
65. Just Another Kid - Torey Hayden
66. Misery - Stephen King
67. Lisey's Story - Stephen King
68. Carrie - Stephen King
69. The Green Mile - Stephen King
70. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee - Rebecca Miller
71. The Wedding Day - Catherine Alliott
72. Going Too Far - Catherine Alliott
73. The Real Thing - Catherine Alliott
74. The Golden Compass - Phillip Pullman
75. The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pullman
76. The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman
77. Too Close To Home - Linwood Barclay
78. The Bay At Midnight - Diane Chamberlain
79. A Million Little Pieces - James Frey
80. A Mother Like Alex - Bernard Clarke
81. Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
82. Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley - Peter Guralnick
83. How To Talk To A Widower - Jonathan Tropper
84. Notes on an Exhibition - Patrick Gale
85. Captain Correlli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
86. The Flight of Swallows - Audrey Howard
87. Making Your Mind Up - Jill Mansell
88. Girl With A Pearl Earring - Tracey Chavalier
89. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
90. The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
91. The Other Half Live - Sophie Hannah
92. All The Things We Didn't Say - Sara Shepard
93. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
94. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
95. Walking On Glass - Iain Banks
96. The Book Theif - Markus Zusak
97. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
98. Girlfriend In A Coma - Douglas Coupland
99. Memoirs of A Geisha - Arthur Goolden
100. The Host - Stephanie Meyer
101. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows
102. Ghost World – Daniel Clowes
103. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkein
104. I’ll Be There For You – Louise Candlish
105. The Nanny Diaries – Nicola Kraus & Emma McLaughlin
106. Keeper of The Bride – Tess Gerritsen
107. From Notting Hill with Love Actually – Ali McNamara
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Pictures of You - The Cure
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Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang. I say watched, I mean I watched as much as I could when being distracted by two giddy kids.
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Took An Education - Lynn Barber back to the library at work (me and my friend found it in the Customer Centre on our Friday lunch break
) as I read it over the weekend. Started Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger on the tram. I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm only about 60+ pages in so that could change.
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500 Days Of Summer. For the millionth time.
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I read some of Petite Anglaise - Catherine Sanderson on the tram to work. Im re-reading it as I was struggling to get into a book yesterday.
Been shopping and Dead and Gone - Charlaine Harris and Confetti Confidential - Holly McQueen fell into my shopping basket
. I'm not happy though because the cover of Dead and Gone does not match the rest of my series -
The Lovely Bones
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Mock The Week
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42. Call After Midnight
Tess Gerritsen
Synopsis from play.com:
They'd said her husband was dead...
A ringing phone in the middle of the night shakes newlywed Sarah Fontaine awake. Expecting her husband's call from London she hears instead an unfamiliar voice. Nick O'Hara from the US State Department is calling with devastating news: Geoffrey Fontaine, Sarah's husband of two months, died in a hotel fire... in Berlin.
So why was she sure he was still alive?
Sarah forces a confrontation with Nick that finds them crisscrossing Europe on a desperate search for Geoffrey. Trying to stay one heartbeat ahead of a dangerous killer, they become quarry in the clandestine world of international espionage, risking everything for answers that may prove fatal.
Started: 12th June
Finished: 15th June
250 pages
Rating:7/10
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41. Lucy In The Sky
Paige Toon
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Settling down for a 24-hour flight to Australia, Lucy finds a text message on her phone - not from her boyfriend James, as she fondly hopes, but from a woman claiming to have slept with him four times in the past month. Trapped on the plane, she questions everything about her relationship with James. She finally calls him and he reassures her: it was only his mates playing a silly joke. James is a lawyer, persuasive and gorgeous and Lucy adores him. So why, at the wedding in Sydney of her best friend Molly, does she have niggling doubts, and find herself attracted to Molly's brother-in-law Nathan? The sooner she gets back to her regular life in London, the flat she shares with James, her job in PR, the better. Nathan is a happy-go-lucky surfer boy, with no prospects, no place to live, an almost-girlfriend in tow. And the other side of the world...Lucy - a girl caught between two distant continents - and two very different men...
Started: 9th June
Finished: 12th June
387 pages
Rating: 7/10
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40. Silent Boy
Torey Hayden
Synopsis from Waterstones:
When special education teacher Torey Hayden first met fifteen-year-old Kevin, he was barricaded under a table. Desperately afraid of the world around him, he hadn't spoken a word in eight years. He was considered hopeless, incurable. But Hayden refused to believe it, though she realised it might well take a miracle to break through the walls he had built around himself. With unwavering devotion and gentle, patient love, she set out to free him -- and slowly uncovered a shocking violent history and a terrible secret that an unfeeling bureaucracy had simply filed away and forgotten. Torey refused to give up on this tragic "lost case." For a trapped and frightened boy desperately needed her help -- and she knew in her heart she could not rest easy until she had rescued him from the darkness.
Started: 5th June
Finished: 8th June
425 pages
Rating: 7/10
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39. The Good, The Bad and The Dumped
Jenny Colgan
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Now, you obviously, would never, ever look up your exes on Facebook. Nooo. And even if you did, you most certainly wouldn't run off trying to track them down, risking your job, family and happiness in the process. Posy Fairweather, on the other hand...Posy is delighted when Matt proposes - on top of a mountain, in a gale, in full-on romantic mode. But a few days later disaster strikes: he backs out of the engagement. Crushed and humiliated, Posy starts thinking. Why has her love life always ended in total disaster? Determined to discover how she got to this point, Posy resolves to get online and track down her exes. Can she learn from past mistakes? And what if she has let Mr Right slip through her fingers on the way?
Started: 2nd June
Finished: 5th June
340 pages
Rating: 7/10
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38. The Tiger's Child
Torey Hayden
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Torey Hayden returns with this deeply-moving sequel to her first book, One Child (the Sunday Times bestseller). After seven years, Torey is reunited with Sheila, the disturbed 6-year-old she tried to rescue. Sheila was a deeply disturbed six-year-old when she came into Torey Hayden's life -- a story poignantly chronicled One Child. The Tiger's Child picks up the story seven years later. Hayden has lost touch with the child she helped to free from a hellish inner prison of rage and silence. But now Sheila is back, now a gangly teenager with bright orange hair -- no longer broken and lost, but still troubled and searching for answers. This story of dedication and caring that began in childhood moves into a new and extraordinary chapter that tests the strength and heart of both Sheila and her one-time teacher. In The Tiger's Child the skilled and loving educator answers the call once again to help a child in need through her difficult yet glorious transition into young womanhood.
Started: 31st May
Finished: 2nd June
359 pages
Rating: 7/10
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37. Things I Wish I'd Known
Linda Green
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Remember when life revolved around what top to wear? Let Linda Green take you on a hilarious, romantic and touching journey back to your teenage years...When Claire Cooper was 15 she'd swear on her Wham! album that: Big hair and rah-rah skirts were here to stay; Spandau Ballet would never split up; She would marry her idol, heart-throb footballer Andy Pailes. Fast forward 20 years and things haven't gone quite to plan. And when Claire discovers the 'dream list' she wrote as a teenager, she realises how far removed her life is from the one she'd imagined. Divorced, stuck in a dead-end job and dating an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, she decides it's time to put her life back on track. But what really happened between Claire and her teen idol all those years ago? And is meeting him again the way to make her dreams come true? Or a huge mistake?
Started: 30th May
Finished: 31st May
470 pages
Rating: 7/10
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36. The Meloncholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Tim Burton
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Twenty-three illustrated gothic tales from the dark corridors of the imagination of the creative genius behind Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish. Burton's lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and tragedy of a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children - hopeful, yet hapless beings.
Started: 25th May
Finished: 25th May
113 pages
Rating: 7.5/10
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35. A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.
Started: 17th May
Finished: 20th May
402 pages
Rating: 7/10
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34. Precious
Sapphire
Synopsis from Waterstones:
This is the story of Precious Jones, a sixteen year old illiterate black girl who has never been out of Harlem. She is pregnant by her own father for the second time, and kicked out of school when that pregnancy becomes obvious. Placed in an alternative teaching programme, she is urged to write down her thoughts in a book. This is Precious' diary, in which she honestly records her relationships and her life.
Started: 14th May
Finished: 14th May
178 pages
Rating: 7/10
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33. Julie and Julia
Julie Powell
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Trapped in a boring job and living in a tiny apartment in New York, Julie Powell regularly finds herself weeping on the way home from work. Then one night, through her mascara-smudged eyes, Julie notices that the few items she's grabbed from the Korean grocery store are the very ingredients for Potage Parmentier, as described in Julia Childs' legendary cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". And The Project is born. Julie begins to cook - every one of the 524 recipes in the book, in the space of just one year. This is Julie's story, as gradually, from oeufs en cocotte to bifstek saute au beurre, from 'Bitch Rice' to preparing live lobsters, she realises that this deranged project is changing her life. The richness of the thousands of sauces she slaves over is beginning to spread into her life, and she begins to find the joie de vivre that has been missing for too many years.
Started: 10th May
Finished: 13th May
307 pages
Rating: 6.5/10
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Oh nr 32 sound good! How was it, did you like it?
It wasn't too bad. Not the best.
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Mock The Week :exc:Russell Howard is so sexy with his specs on:thud:
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Tangy cheese Doritos
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Born of Frustration - James
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500 Days Of Summer
Rach's 2011 Reads
in Past Book Logs
Posted · Edited by rach.at.the.disco
1. Two's Company - Jill Mansell
22nd December - 1st January
438 pages
Synopsis from Waterstones:
Jack and Cass Mandeville are a dream couple, ridiculously happy together and successful to boot - Jack as a journalist and Cass with her own hugely popular radio show. Indeed, almost every member of the Mandeville family is famous in their own right: from stunning Cleo, a supermodel with attitude, to Sean, the rising star of the comedy circuit. Incredibly good-looking and likeable, the family have captured the hearts of the nation - and the nation's press. But on the day that Jack hits the big 40 - the same day that a redhead called Imogen turns up to interview Jack and Cass for Hi! magazine - their proverbial bubble is about to burst...
2. Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
2nd January - 3rd January
82 pages
Synopsis from Waterstones:
A graphic novel, which tells of the adventures of Enid Coleslaw and Beck Doppelmeyer, two bored, supremely ironic teenage girls. They pass the time complaining about the guys they know and fantasising about strange men they see in the local diner.