2010 Persephone Secret Santa Reveal Day!!!

Today is the 2010 Persephone Secret Santa Reveal Day and let me just say how enjoyable this experience has been. It is my second time participating in Persephone Secret Santa and each time round has provided me with yummy treats and a lovely new Persephone title to add to my slim collection of grey colored tomes.  This year I received my gift from Adrienne of the blog, Some of a Kind - a fun and interesting blog about sewing, books and all things Adrienne.  I just want to say, "Thank you, Adrienne. I loved my new Persephone and the yummy treat you included. Merry Christmas to you!!" and "Thanks to Claire over at Paperback Reader for hosting this year's Persephone Secret Santa - Cheers!!".  And now on to the gift.  Here is a picture of my new Persephone, Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, Nancy's Peppermint Pretzels, a pretty bookmark and a sweet card.  (sorry the picture didn't come out too good, but I'm not too clever with uploading photos)

I'm excited to begin reading this new book, which sounds like it will be quite a treat to dive into.  And of course I will enjoy devouring those chocolate/peppermint covered pretzels. Definitely a great way to celebrate the holidays. 

Happy Reading and Happy Holidays!!!

The Reading List

Yes, I am late to the game, but nonetheless, I wanted to find out how many of these books I've read.  According to the BBC,  from this list of 100 novels, most people have only read 6.  Hmmm. Seems like The Beebs doesn't have much faith in us as readers.  Well, let me just say that I'm pretty sure I've read more than 6 of the books on this list.  Here goes:

Bold = I've read it
Italicized = I've started the book, but never finished
And the rest are the books I have not even picked up to read.

The Reading List

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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - 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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 - A.A. 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 Meaney - 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 Dickens
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 - E.B. 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 books read from this list:  40.  Hmmm. That's not too bad, but I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't at least reach 50.  Oh well, I suppose I'll be adding some new titles to my TBR list in 2011.

Happy Reading!!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

From the back of the book:

At once a murder mystery, family saga, love story, and a tale of financial intrigue wrapped into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.
    Harriet Vanger, scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families, disappeared over forty years ago.  All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth.  He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate.  He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.  Together they tap in to a vein of unfathomable inquity and astonishing corruption.

My thoughts:

Sandwiches.  That is what I remember after reading this book - all the sandwiches Lisbeth and Mikael ate.  For some reason, they were described each time they were made and that stuck in my head as being unnecessary.  Of course on the other hand, I kept thinking to myself, "Why was this series so popular?".  I've only read the first book and though I enjoyed aspects of it, there was nothing to differentiate it from a Dan Brown or James Patterson book, in my opinion.  I enjoy suspense thrillers for what they are - something light to whet my reading appetite (or at least that is what they are for me).  And so, on one level I did enjoy reading Dragon - mainly when it came to figuring out who had "killed" Harriet - I found that mystery to be rather intriguing.  Other than that, the book annoyed me with its portrayal of women: they all seemed to either fall in lust/love with Mikael, or were brutally raped, or were killed.  Lisbeth was an exception for her ability to utilize her inner strength to push forward in spite of her extremely crappy circumstances, which I lauded her for (well, in my mind I did - like when she took revenge on her so-called advocate, Bjurman, who absolutely deserved worse than what she gave him considering what he had done to her and I'm sure countless other women).  And though Lisbeth did fall under Mikael's bewitching spell, she didn't allow her feelings to muck up the investigation/her work.  She saved Mikael's life (from Harriet's "killer") and found herself accepting the fact that having feelings for Mikael would not be the end of the world (of course until she realized that no matter what, Mikael would always remain emotionally and physically involved with his magazine partner, Erika). 

Its weird writing about this book, because I read it ages ago and  I wasn't even sure I wanted to review it.  Looking back on the experience, I do recall staying up all night trying to finish the book in order to find out what happened to Harriet - so I must have enjoyed it somewhat.  And yet, there is just something about the book that just does not sit well with me and maybe it is the portrayal of women, except that Lisbeth is pretty kick-ass, so that is hard to object to.  Suffice it to say, I'm glad  I did finally read this book, but I'm not sure it deserved all the hoopla it received.  Of course, I have heard that the second book is the best, so perhaps that will be the one to change my mind about Larsson. 

Until I decide to pick up The Girl Who Played With Fire, I will dive into Stephen King's latest book, Full Dark, No Stars.

Happy reading!!