Hayley

Added to wish list! I need to hear more about the telepathic Irish wolfhound .

No it’s not done yet! We’re close though. I ended up going in circles for ages, essentially because our current hosts said they couldn’t give the new hosts a file they needed. So, after many very frustrating conversations, I reached out to a local company I’ve used before (not for the forum but for pc repairs) and they (to cut a very long story short) are going to help the new hosts get what they need. They did warn me that they’re very busy at the moment, so they’d have to fit it in between other things, but they’ve been working on our files behind the scenes for the last week now and, when I spoke to them a couple of days ago, said they are 90% done. I will post an update here, as well as on Twitter and patreon, when the actual server transfer happens.

I wish I could tell you it was! (We’re making good progress towards the move though, I spoke to the person who’s working on it earlier and he said we’re 90% there!)

Well at least I know that should be something to look forward to I agree, it would be great to have this list by someone who really knows/ cares about books! (I think it would be great to have genre specific ones too). I know you’re not negative, you’re one of the funniest people I know . And anyway it’s not like I wrote or bought this list / poster. The friend that sent it to me isn’t a reader but knows how much I love books, so it was very thoughtful of him and I will try to get the most out of it

I do have both so I’ll take your advice. I’m still hoping I won’t totally hate The Time Machine though! Well the box just says ‘Gift Republic’ with a note that you can also get ‘100 films’ and ‘100 albums’, so I don’t think there was any particularly deep thought about which books made the list. It’s more of a novelty thing. I think it’s pretty likely that they just looked at existing ‘top 100’ book lists and merged them together. Exactly this

Oooh good mix! I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan too I'm reading The Fourteenth Letter by Claire Evans (but finding it quite difficult to get into!)

I looked up Noughts and Crosses (I do recognise the plot now) and it has actually been on a couple of other ‘top 100’ lists (‘most inspirational’ by the BBC and ‘best books of the 21st century’ by the Guardian). The author was children’s laureate and was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature. There are a couple of other children’s books on the list so I can see why they included this one. I wonder whether they actually used various ‘top 100’ lists to make this one, which is why it seems oddly disjointed.

There are a few non fiction books on there, ‘A Brief History of Time’, ‘Notes from a Small Island’, ‘The Selfish Gene’, ‘The Complete Art of War’ and ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ (there might be more, there are some books on there I’ve never heard of). I really don’t know how they compiled the list though, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of of theme. (I like your new profile picture by the way!) I feel like I should also point out that I don’t think these lists matter in any way. The only books you ‘should’ read are the books you want to read, because everyone has different tastes and interests. My friend just thought this would be fun for me and that’s what I’ll be treating it as. There’s a very good chance I’ll never complete all of these these books, even if I manage to try them all.

I loved those books! The Amber Spyglass was the first book I ever cried at (although I think I was about 13 at the time...). Oh dear... two of the books I was most looking forward to! The size of the Game of Thrones series too! I actually liked 1984 but I haven’t read Animal Farm. I agree that’s a strange one to include! I’m glad you liked all the ones you read, apart from The Time Machine! I have heard of it but I don’t know a lot about it. I think it was made into a film or tv series recently? Why don’t you think it should be on the list?

It sounds like part of the general slow loading problem. Someone is working on it at the moment so hopefully it will be fixed soon!

Hi Katrina, welcome to the forum! What are your favourite books?

Part of me really wants to read this but the film made me so sad as a child that I don’t know whether I’m prepared to deal with it emotionally! I just finished The Frightened Man by Kenneth Cameron (which was okay but not fantastic) and now I’m going to stick with the murder mystery theme and start The Fourteenth Letter by Claire Evans

I'm a bit late with this but I missed it when you first posted. This is exactly how I felt about the one James Patterson book I read, like it had come from a book conveyor belt. I'm really glad you reviewed Vox because I've been tempted to try it a couple of times. Like you, I saw it everywhere. I do think it's an interesting concept but I know, from your review, that I would hate the main character. I thought it would be about a woman fighting back, finding new ways to get her voice heard in the face of this sexist new law, but it sounds like she's mainly just angry that nobody else saved her. There's definitely irony (intentional, perhaps?) in the fact that she wants her husband to be more violent and aggressive in order to protect her. Looking down on a man for not being violent is toxic masculinity at its finest.

I was going to post this on my own book log because I got this list as a Christmas present (it's actually a 'scratch off' poster by Gift Republic) but I thought I'd post it here instead, just in case anybody else feels like joining in the challenge! (Sorry that the picture is terrible, it's very springy so I had to weight it down with books so it didn't roll back up) I've actually read about a quarter of the books before but I still haven't decided whether to scratch off the ones I've already read now, or to re-read them before scratching them off. I do think it's cheating a little that they've included entire series/trilogies as one entry! (Listed in the order they appear on the poster, by rows running right to left, although I can't see any actual purpose to the order they're in...) 1. American Gods - Neil Gaiman 2. Lord of the Flies - William Golding 3. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse 4. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder 5. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking 6. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott FItzgerald 7. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 8. Matilda - Roald Dahl 9. The Complete Art of War - Sun Tzu 10. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick 11. Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela 12. Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie 13. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks 14. Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman 15. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote 16. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 17. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol 18. The Secret History - Donna Tartt 19. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 20. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell 21. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 22. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami 23. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey 24. The Man in the Iron Mask - Alexandre Dumas 25. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker 26. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson 27. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 28. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 29. Harry Potter (series) - J.K. Rowling 30. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman 31. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway 32. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 33. The Road - Cormac McCarthy 34. Ulysses - James Joyce 35. Bad Science - Ben Goldacre 36. I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith 37. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson 38. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo 39. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger 40. Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 41. Wild Swans - Jung Chang 42. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 43. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré 44. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 45. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver 46. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 47. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift 48. The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells 49. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 50. Freakonomics - S. Dubner S. Levitt 51. A Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin 52. The Help - Katheryn Stockett 53. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes 54. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou 55. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis 56. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson 57. Macbeth - William Shakespeare 58. The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) - J.R.R Tolkien 59. A History of Venice - John Julius Norwich 60. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins 61. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 62. A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami 63. Schindler's Ark - Thomas Keneally 64. London Fields - Martin Amis 65. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 66. My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse 67. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje 68. The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot 69. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 70. The Commitments - Roddy Doyle 71. Gladys Aylward: The Little Woman - Gladys Aylward 72. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 73. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 74. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne 75. Hamlet - William Shakespeare 76. Goodnight Mister Tom - Michelle Magorian 77. Dissolution - C.J. Sansom 78. The Time Machine - H.G. Wells 79. Winnie the Pooh (complete collection) - A.A. Milne 80. Animal Farm - George Orwell 81. The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank 82. The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton 83. Dracula - Bram Stoker 84. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque 85. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding 86. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 87. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 88. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf 89. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 90. Misery - Stephen King 91. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis 92. Watership Down - Richard Adams 93. The Odyssey - Homer 94. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 95. Bird Song - Sebastian Faulks 96. Tell No One - Harlan Coben 97. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 98. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 99. Middlemarch - George Eliot 100. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

I was telling my sister about this series (because I knew she’d love the sound of it too) and she just surprised me with the full set of books! The condition being that she gets to read them afterwards . I’m so excited to get stuck into them based on your reviews!

I love that community library box! The fact that someone took time to paint it with all the vines really makes it seem like something that’s appreciated. I saw that too, it was an absolutely ridiculous argument. I’m not even sure that many people can genuinely have been angry about it. I think some people just really enjoy taking part in ganging up on someone online. Similar mindset to a playground bully but with added self-righteousness and anonymity. I have a library very close to me, no more than half a mile. It’s hours were reduced a few years ago, when we had all the library cuts, but I don’t think it’s in serious danger of closing. The computers are used all the time and it’s also the neighbourhood office. If it did close the nearest one is only a couple of miles further away. I suppose that’s one upside of living in a busy city!

No, I’ve been talking to Marc and Lindy but they have been great. I didn’t realise that happened at BGO, and I’m so sorry to hear it. If there are memorial posts or anything you’d like to keep please do feel free to move them over here before BGO closes.

Yay! Safari has been misbehaving for me too today actually but I use it on my phone and just thought it was that being stupid. The link issue isn't to do with your browser though, we do have a problem with them at the moment, it's one of the things I need Invision to look into but they can't do it until we're properly moved over to them. You can post the links but they won't be embedded, so they don't look as nice. We did have some slow loading issues around the same time the link problem appeared (which still happen on occasion now) which is what I was thinking of when I asked about how the forum was loading generally for you. On the positive side, we've finally made some good progress towards moving to Invision over the weekend, so hopefully it won't be much longer before we can iron out all these annoying issues! There's really no need to apologise, I'd much rather people let me know as soon as they notice a problem, just in case it indicates a more serious issue. If it turns out to be something simple that's even better

Well that is very weird. Are you getting slow loading when you try to post? Or does everything else seem fine apart from your profile page?

Sorry about that. What happened when you tried to edit it? I've just checked it with my own profile and it did work for me.

That's good to hear because it's the book I particularly wanted to read! I have to admit I don't think I've heard of "S is for Space" or "R is for Rocket" before but I looked them up after seeing them on your list and they sound amazing! I don't mind a book that's hard going initially, as long as it has features that make it worth the extra effort!

I've never thought about it like that before but I think you're absolutely right, it is like meditation!

I found A Tale of Two Cities the most difficult Dickens book to get into as well. Like you though, I loved it once the threads of the story started to come together. I think that’s my favourite thing about Dickens actually. I love the way he weaves the different threads of of stories and peoples lives together. David Copperfield is great for that, one of my favourites .

Hi Paul, welcome to the forum . That looks like a really varied list! I really want to read some more Ray Bradbury and ‘In a Glass Darkly’ has been on my list for ages!

I only managed 4 chapters in the end. I was hoping I might finish the whole thing! I had a bit of a busier weekend than I expected, plus the book just didn’t grip me like I hoped. I’m not loving it so far. Still, I read more of it than I think I would have on a non read-a-thon weekend. (Also got no snow but it is snowing today!)