Book Fair Reading

I’m slated to read at a book far at the university today.

Don’t know what I’ll read yet, but perhaps a little bit of everything.

Watch this space — when I’m done I’ll share.

Books Read (from the BBC)

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.

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 X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee +
6 The Bible – +
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – X (all the sonnets, most of the plays)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Banned Books Meme

From Violette at The Mystery Bookshelf, who commented on the Caribbean Reading Challenge. I thought it was cool, so I stole it. Pass it on!

Look through this list of banned books. If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, *** it.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Africa Reading Challenge

Well, I flunked out of NaPoReMo, so I am not even begin to commit to this one.  And I’ve already blogged about it here, so I’m not going to repeat what I said.

But just note this:  Hedgie’s doing it.  Here’s his first review, for your perusal* and enjoyment.

*yes, I’m a bureaucrat.  All right?

Why I haven’t been reading/writing lately

Oh, come on, you didn’t really think I’d tell you, did you?

I would if I could but I can’t.  Or if I did, I’d have to shoot you.

The simple, all-encompassing, oh-so-tedious-and-boring reason is:  work.

For those who don’t know by now, I am a senior(ish) civil servant in a broken civil service, and so while there are times when I could be fooled into thinking that what I do really matters, it really doesn’t.  I’m like a really athletic hamster on a fairly stable wheel, so that when I’m running on it I can climb halfway, or even, on special occasions, three quarters of the way, to the top — but that just means the cycle to the bottom makes the floor of my tummy drop out.

I can’t share, by law and convention and colonial intention, the details of what my work is.  (And no, I’m not in any secret service; know that everything public servants do is secret, unless otherwise instructed.  Don’t ask.)  But I can say that this week has been a particularly busy week on the hamster wheel.

I am taking vacation starting Monday.  It’s a bad time, but hey.  One of the perks of this job (you really need them — another one is a parking space whoo-hoo) is that you can accumulate your vacation time, but only until you’ve racked up fifteen weeks of it; then you have to take it or lose it.  I found going into this year I had almost ten weeks of it, so I’ve been taking some every now and then.  So tomorrow, I’m heading north to Montreal to see my soon-to-be one-year-old nephew, who’s morphed into a little boy somehow overnight (when I last saw him he looked like Tweety Bird, only not so yellow.  Not a bad thing, in my opinion, as Tweety was my favourite Toon back in the day).  I shall catch up on Hudgins over the week.

And on other reading, too, the audio book kind.  Last year, Ondaatje; this year, Atwood and Eugenides.

I’ll report when I’m done.