willoyd

I enjoyed it too - the plotting worked very successfully for me. In terms of characterisation, I said this in a review I wrote at the time: Cleeves tells much of the story through internal dialogue, and we see the story from the perspective of four of the characters....Using their viewpoints also develops their personalities nicely and naturally. Others are drawn in somewhat paler outline, but sufficiently to move the story along. Not just paler, but also harsher. I was amazed at how virtually every parent/child relationship amongst the islanders seemed problematic, and at the lack of any 'normal' adult relationship; you could come away from a book like this thinking that Shetland family life was seriously dysfunctional. And are all Shetlanders so alienated from school, fellow students and their teachers? Or is it that Ms Cleeves is primarily interested in loners? Whatever, this felt a bit heavy handed. In summary, I thought this a well crafted story, good enough that I look forward to trying the next one out in the series. I have to admit it felt perhaps a little bit too heavily crafted, marginally too carefully worked, to rank as a great read, but definitely worth exploring further to see how the series develops.

Some fascinating nominations. Pardon me please if I'm being presumptuous, but is anybody actually going to list the twenty, or does that need doing (I'll do it if nobody else is of a mind).

You have to be careful here! Adding the Greek -ize suffix is perfectly acceptable in British English, and is indeed the original way of writing: -ise is the more recent alternative. The OUP for instance still insists on -ize as a house standard. It's required in American English, but we Brits now have a choice. Personally, I stick to -ise (not least because that was what I was taught, because it's easier not having to work out the times when -ise is actually required, and because I can never work out when it's the Greek suffix and when not!), but don't condemn out of hand -ize as being 'unBritish'! Indeed, it could be argued that Americanize is more British than Americanise, and is dated as Late 17th century in origin in my Shorter OED!

I'm another man who loves Jane Austen. It never ceases to amaze me how modern her writing feels, especially when one considers that the likes of Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope (all writers I thoroughly enjoy) came later. There isn't a word wasted - indeed, there is often a lot more going on than one first realises. And when she comes to her characters, she is a past master at showing not telling - they really come to life. I know that it's three months after the OP posted - but S&S is my favourite Austen, possibly my all-time favourite book, and bears regular re-reading for me, one of the very, very few.

I fully intend to, have it on my TBR shelf, and am waiting for a school holiday in which toget started - I can't ever get any half challenging reading (and certainly no nineteenth century classics, which I love) done during termtime. Perhaps Easter? My 18-year old son has just finished it, having been recommended it by his history teacher, and thinks it was brilliant too - and he's not usually into that type of reading at all.

A really fascinating list. I've only read LOTR and dipped into Herodotus, but this has really made me thing about tackling them. Thanks Vinay.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible - [a lot of it, in parts] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 1984 - 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 [same as The Bible!] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk 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 Hitchhiker’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 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 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 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 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 Dicken- 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 Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Inferno - Dante 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 Total read = 54. Have tried a few others and not finished. Some I have no intention of even trying!

The film is due for UK general release in March. We went to see it as part of the Leeds Film Festival back in November. I had read the book, OH had not, yet we both loved the film. It's inevitably been subject to a bit of simplification, but is an excellent adaptation, and very faithful. Both leads were outstanding. Both of us had forgotten it was subtitled quite early on. Thoroughly recommended - one of the best films I've seen for a while. Made by Yellow Bird, the same people who produced the Swedish Wallander films shown recently on BBC Four (which I've now got all on DVD from Sweden, as they're about one-third the cost here, and they're good too!), with a similar sense of atmosphere. This is one that I simply can't imagine the Americans getting right

A similar list to last year, with just a couple of changes. I'm sticking with non-fiction as, despite the relevance and importance of fiction, the stuff that I see as being genuinely essential reading, is all too real. Long on quality, short on quantity, only one of these (Bad Science) exceeds 200 pages. The pack a lot in! 1.The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith Never was there greater need to learn from history as there is today (Afghanistan anyone?), and Galbraith's history is superbly written, making it very easy to see the connections. I can only agree with Freewheeling Andy that this is essential reading in the current climate. 2. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre Nothing has changed since last year - science remains grossly misunderstood. Remains a toss-up between this and The Tiger That Isn't (Blastland & Dilnot) which does the same thing with statistics. 3. Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne Slim, succinct, and beautifully written. Tackles another of the great misunderstoods. 4. The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Gleick The ultimate harbinger of doom and gloom in some people's eyes, this discusses one of the most important issues of the day, debunking some real nonsense (carbon offsetting for instance). Even if one disagrees, and Gleick does take a somewhat extreme if well argued position in some key areas, this needs to be read. 5. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson Amongst all the 'hard stuff', I thought it important to have at least one book focusing on the human element. As I haven't read Primo Levi yet (see Freewheeling Andy's list), this will stand testament instead to the human spirit, if in a different context. Was a toss up between this and the biography of Shackleton, one of the greatest leaders of men and survivors of all time.

What a fantastic thread - the most enjoyable I've browsed through so far! It has been so good to find others intensely disliking books that you generally only hear raves about. What a relief! What's could be forgotten, is that these are simply the ones we've read. There are loads of writers who I've dipped into, and just know I wouldn't stick it for more than two minutes (which is about as long as Alice Sebold lasted for instance). For my worst 5, I've limited it to fiction which I've actually made a real go at - finished a book or near as finished. However, for every bad fiction, there are plenty of bad non-fiction, in particular travel books (Tim Moore and pretty much every travel lit book currently in print based on Germany, but also a stream of the 'good life' types, and plenty of others). 1. Justine by Laurence Durrell. Probably the rest of the Alexandria Quartet as well, but couldn't get past the first one. Just felt so pretentious and totally overblown. 2. The Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink OK to start, it completely lost it in the second half. Just about finished, but goodness know why. 3. Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl Complete drivel. Skim read the last half or so, as wanted to check whether I was on the right lines. I was, it was that obvious. 4. Da Vinci Code and Deception Point by Dan Brown. Read the second, just to see if it could be as bad as the first. It was. 5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Being, as a child, rather similar physiologically to Piggy, and having had to suffer this as a class reader in my early teens (the teacher being under the mistaken impression that a book about children was a children's book), I grew to hate this book with an intensity bordering on mania. I hate it so badly, I almost feel the need to try it again, just to see if I might have grown out of it. Yet to gird my loins! I so want to include Jacqueline Wilson in that list, but as that's more to do with work (teaching) and children's literature, I'll leave that be!

About 50-50, which reflects my enjoyment too - like them equally. Last few non-fiction books include: The Water Road (Paul Gogarty - travel), The Secret Life of the French (Lucy Wadham), In Search of Robert Millar (Richard Moore), The Political Animal (Jeremy Paxman), A View from the Foothills (Chris Mullin - political memoir), Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin - evolution), Lady Worsley's Whim (Hallie Rubenhold - history), Churchill's Wizards (Nicholas Rankin). So -fairly varied, but also reasonably representative as most of my non-fiction reading is travel lit, history (incl. biography) and science.

h I think that's quite a common reaction apparently. The biography of Anne that I''ve been recommended, is that by Eric Ives. I'm due to read Anna Whitelock's biography of Mary Tudor in the near future.

The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor The story of a voyage of one of the coffin ships transporting mostly Irish emigrants from Liverpool to New York, leading up to a climactic murder (this is no plot giveaway - the murder is referred to in the first few pages). Much of the book is taken up with the backstory of how the characters got there, using the device of the central narrator, a journalist who made the trip, pulling together various documents and accounts to tell the story. This should have been a 5 star read and felt like a 5 star read, but whilst I thoroughly enjoyed it, this book never totally grabbed me - I never completely engaged with any of the characters, which for me is almost a prerequisite for a great book. Maybe I would have done if we had seen more of it from the viewpoint of the two key women: Laura Merredith and Mary Duane, but all we see of them is what the men say; whilst I can understand why, for me it left the book feeling somewhat unbalanced. All in all, a good read (I read the second half in one sitting), but I'm left with a vague feeling of disappointment. I can understand why others have given it 5 stars, and said it's one of their best reads ever, but personally, it didn't quite make it. Maybe it was just that I expected too much?

Two more books added to this year's list: Crow Road by Ian Banks 4/5 Great read. Not just a mystery, as the central character, Prentice Machoan, does some fairly big growing up in what can only be described as a fairly idiosyncratic family. But then aren't most families? I really felt for Prentice, loved the other characters, and became completely wrapped up in the mystery. I'm off to watch the taped TV version now! One Man and a Narrowboat by Steve Hayward 2/5 Fairly light hearted look at narrowboating from Oxford to Bristol via Birmingham in one of the wettest summers on record. Interwoven with the story of the founders of the Inland Waterways Association (much more interesting than that might sound!) and a somewhat irritating thread about his acquisition and use of a classic car - the book would have been significantly improved without the latter. Doesn't compare with the Gogarty book read further back up the list, but enjoyable enough that will look out for the sequel.

Have just finished The Water Road by Paul Gogarty, on travelling round England on a narrow boat. I enjoy a fair amount of travel writing, but this was definitely a cut (pun intended!) above the norm. Full review on my reading thread: http://bookclubforum.co.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=312054&postcount=7 Glad to see that I'm not the only one that doesn't feel the need to rave about Bill Bryson - enjoy his language/science books, but find his travel writing grates. Not the worst though - for that I'd nominate Tim Moore, or most books about Germany by English writers; amazing how many bad travel books there are on what is one of my favourite destinations. I'd agree with Andy - Jonathan Raban is excellent. Jan Morris is a writer I collect too, although little of her material is travelogue (Coast to Coast is one of the few). I like her Pax Britannica trilogy too, and Conundrum, the story of her change from James to Jan.

This is turning into an outstanding year's reading: have just finished Paul Gogarty's The Water Road, and it's my sixth five star book of the year; I normally only get 2-3. It's an account of a solo narrowboat journey round English waterways undertaken in the summer of 2001: a figure of eight, four month odyssey from London up to Birmingham and Wigan, across the Pennines to Leeds and back down to the Thames via Oxford. More than just a journey, the trip turns into a contemplation on the nature of Englishness. The boat people themselves were subject to considerable prejudice in previous times, and this, combined with contemporary events (foot and mouth, race riots in Bradford, rise of the BNP) segues smoothly into a broader discussion of current issues of race, attitudes to Europe, and contemporary life. The main thrust, however, is life on 'the Cut', both modern and historical, as the canal system continues its leisure orientated renaissance: the descriptions are evocative, the reported meetings genuinely interesting. All in all, its an addictive piece of travel writing that shows that one's own backyard can be as fascinating as anywhere in the world. I loved it!

LBTM is certainly mentioned in the first couple of posts on my reading thread. I loved it! Another one I equally enjoyed was Michael Moorcock's Mother London. The reviews listed as the three most helpful on Amazon say everything I would want to say (and better!), so suggest a quick perusal of those.

Favourite series of all time? Probably Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey series. Other favourites include Thursday Next, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Commissario Brunetti, The Barchester Chronicles, VI Warshawski, the Baroque Cycle (including Cryptonomicon), Sherlock Holmes. As a child I adored first of all Paddington Bear, then the Swallows and Amazons, and later the Hornblower series. I don't really think of trilogies as full blown series (although I know they are), especially Lord of the Rings - which has always been one very long book to me, but certainly rate that and His Dark Materials up there too. I can see children rating Harry Potter really highly, and as an adult I certainly found them entertaining, but I have to admit (ready to be shot down in flames), I can't understand adults raving about them to the extent that they feature so highly on must read and favourites lists. Interestingly, in my recent classes (I'm a primary teacher, year 5), Harry Potter has been overtaken in popularity by Alex Rider, Lemony Snickett, Casson family, Hungry Cities and more recently Cat Royal series.

I try to avoid saying anything in a review that will spoil it for anybody else. Primarily comments about style.

I've put up a brief review (rave!) on my reading list thread, but thought I ought to link the comments here too. I love a lot of historical fiction, but this, for me, was really outstanding. http://bookclubforum.co.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=311418&postcount=5

Wolf Hall was brilliant - comfortably going into my all-time great list (5+ stars!). Right from the word go, I loved the way that Hilary Mantel tried to get inside Cromwell's head. Things aren't spelled out, you have to gradually piece together her intepretation of how he might have thought, what he was like as a person and how he made it to the top in spite of all the disadvantages of birth. Certainly gave me a very different perspective on someone who is traditionally portrayed as one of the hard men of British history. It was also the way she integrated his domestic life with the public one, Austin Friars (home) with court, to give such a rounded view that worked so well for me. And her language just kept me entranced the whole way through. To be honest, I find it very difficult to put into words why i enjoyed this so much but what I do know is that it was one of those very rare books where I really didn't want it to end, and where I feel somewhat at a loss now it's finished. So good, it hurt!

How about Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett - a mix of travel and history, where he travels to delve back into 20th century Spanish history? More specifically, Antony Beever's Spanish Civil War has had loads of good reviews - I've not read it, but enjoyed others of his. The Very Short Introductions are usually good, but tend to be just that, so may not be what you are looking for, but there is one on the same subject. More focused than the whole of Spain, I really enjoyed Robert Hughes's Barcelona. Highly readable history of the city, which of course is not exactly representative of Spain as a whole! On a more contemporary note, so may not satisfy your focus on history, a friend of mine recently recommended The New Spaniards by John Hooper, and it has 13 5-star reviews on Amazon. HTH

Ouch - this is difficult. Two are easy: Sense and Sensibility Bleak House but the third???? I suppose it'll have to be To Kill A Mockingbird, but then no Moby Dick or Vanity Fair or Wuthering Heights or War and Peace, all of which are monumental favourites. And where do classics start and end? (I could of course have simply voted for three Austens, including Persuasion).

You sum it up much better than me Bookjumper - that's very much how I feel.

Having used one - you're right, but it's as soulless as a laptop, and feels like a laptop in terms of read, aside from all the other potential problems with yet another electronic gadget. I can see a role, but I must admit that I simply don't like them for reading. One other thing that nobody, as far as I know, has yet considered is long term compatibility. Reading computer files less than two decades old is horribly difficult as both media and file formats keep changing. I have a lot of books a lot older than that. I certainly wouldn't want any e-book collection to become out of date.