PAVEMENTS

January 2011 Reads

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

I just read this now, but well, better late than never. Despite the plot and character inadequacies people might condemn the series for, it’s still a delightful read. I rediscovered why I loved Harry Potter so much when I was a kid.

For me, there’s just no other book which has that kind of magic and pull and hugeness of a world that can envelope me in quite the same way. It’s always enough to make me forget merienda and stay in bed the whole day. Of course, there are countless more insightful and profound books, but this series has an altogether different, definitely special place in my heart.

Also, I just have to say: a) I am glad I never hated Snape in the prequels, and b) I did not cry. Haha!

A Wrinkle in Time, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time, all by Madeleine L’Engle

I liked A Wrinkle in Time best. The parts on the dystopian universe reminded me so much of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, which I also liked.

The planet Sandy and Dennys stumbled into in Many Waters reminded me of the world in His Dark Materials, the one Dr. Mary Malone went to. Well, come to think of it, both books are YA fantasy and retold Bible stories. Hmm.

I didn’t like An Acceptable Time so much, mostly because Zachary Gray is an ass.

Warrior of the Light: A Manual by Paulo Coelho

This is one of my favorites:

“The most important quality on the spiritual path is courage,” said Ghandi.

The world seems threatening and dangerous to cowards. They seek the false security of a life with no major challenges and arm themselves to the teeth in order to defend what they think they possess. Cowards end up making the bars of their own prison.

The warrior of light projects his thoughts beyond the horizon. He knows that if he does not do anything for the world, no one else will.

So he fights the Good Fight and he helps others, even though he does not quite understand why.

The Plague by Albert Camus

Currently reading. Stuck on page 150, thereabouts, for a good two weeks now. I just find disease depressing.

Anyhow, here is a very, very good quote:

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Again:

…the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

This is said so perfectly, I want to cry. I could very well love the book just for this quote alone; never mind the plague and the disease.

5.5 books in 27 days

Which is a pretty good start for my 2011 reading, if I may say so myself. :)

Have you read more than 6 of these books?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your post. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt (or those that you read the kids’ version of).

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 

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 Faulks

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 Berniere

39 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 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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

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

22 out of 100! And 6 unfinished or kiddie ones! Take that, BBC!

A pangram is a sentence that includes all the letters of the alphabet, such as: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(Source: Wikipedia, via ohyeahfacts)

Why hello there, Robinson Crusoe.

Currently reading Robinson Crusoe, in an effort to go back to the classics. After all, this book is supposedly one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Well, I’ve been ‘currently reading’ Robinson Crusoe for a month, and right now I’m just on page 165 of 482 pages.

The plot is really something, because it’s pretty much a life story. I’m not even in the middle of the book and already, the main character has gone through several life crises.

I’ve always been amazed by people who can tell entire life stories in novels because to think up entire lives of entire persons is just inconceivable for me. I just don’t know how to go about it myself.

But beyond that, I haven’t really picked up anything profound or been blown away by a sudden twist in the plot, or at least, not yet.

I’m just hoping this book won’t end up an unfinished read for me.

***

On a happier note, I picked up this book for just 120 php at the St. Francis bookstore. This made me happy as I am really a cheapskate.

One of these days, I’m going to Bookay Ukay to score some books. I’m just liking secondhand books more lately, because I always carry a book with me, and if it’s not that expensive, I feel better when it gets damaged in my bag. Haha. I just realized that I get to enjoy reading more if I don’t mind getting my book rumpled a bit.

More YA, yo.

The Dark Materials Trilogy are probably the most influential books (so far) for me this year. I haven’t read any fantasy and/or YA books for quite a while, and after reading these, I wondered why I stopped.

I loved the ending most of all. It wasn’t too cheesy, too childish, or too heavy. It was just right. Also, having a retelling of the Adam and Eve story as the ending, I think, is pure genius. The entire novel really comes full circle.

So! I’m thinking of reading more YA fantasies— nothing about people in love with dead, blood-sucking creatures though, thank you very much. I’m actually thinking of reading the whole Harry Potter series before the next movie comes out.

My 2010 Reading List (So Far)

Books read:

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
   
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
   
3. The Dark Materials Trilogy, Book 1: Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
4. The Dark Materials Trilogy, Book 2: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
5. The Dark Materials Trilogy, Book 3: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
6. Dream Noises edited by Miriam Go
   
7. Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall
8. The Giver by Lois Lowry
9. The Golden Loom: Palanca Prize Winners for Children
10. How Fiction Works by James Wood
11. Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
12. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
13. Love Gathers All edited by Krip Yuson, Rayvi Sunico, Aaron Lee and Alvin Pang
14. The Abhorsen Trilogy, Book 1: Sabriel by Garth Nix
15. Screen: Essays on Graphic Design by Jessica Helfan
16. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
17. The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron
18. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
20. Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far by Stefan Sagmeister
21. The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

Re-reads:

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
2. Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Currently reading:

1. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
2. Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
3. Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton

To-reads:

1. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
2. The Abhorsen Trilogy, Book 2: Lirael by Garth Nix
3. The Abhorsen Trilogy, Book 3: Abhorsen by Garth Nix
4. Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez