My First Blog Ever!

Hello Everyone,

So you have all heard Daniel's point of view.  I'm still reading my first book from the list and will rate that once I'm done, but first I just wanted to write my first post.  This was my idea and I'm really excited to read some of the books that I have always heard about, but just never got around to reading.  I'm also excited to read others again.  Especially those that I didn't care too much for and those that I really remember hating.  Most of those books were due to school deadlines and having to read them, rather than picking them myself.  Since there are no deadlines, and time to read about the authors, with faster internet research, and being older, I'll get to see if my opinion changes at all.  I also plan to watch the movies for all the books, if they exsist.  Sometimes I find that helps me get through a really long book.  For my reviews I'll grade on a 0-100 Scale and give a letter grade like Daniel- except that I don't have a list of my 50 top books.  A few other things, I'm not the most objective person when reading things.  Happy endings, good stories, books that I just can't put down and have to read every available moment can help sway my attitude towards a book.  I'm looking forward to reading all these books and will continue reading fun lighter books on the side. If anyone else starts reading this blog, feel free to recommed any books.  That's about it for now, my next post will be my first book review.

 Lucinda

Book # 71 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

When Lucinda first suggested this website part of the idea was that we would also have to research a little about the author of each book. Nothing big, just a reading of the author’s Wikipedia page or something like that. Another purpose was to force each of us to read books out of our usual comfort zones and broaden the scope of what we read. So with that in mind I chose Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as the next book to read. Well what did I learn? That I won't be counting myself as a fan of Virginia Woolf. This book will NOT be making my top 50.

Basically the book is about the day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway as she gets ready to throw a big party. That’s it. Not much exciting happens except that one of the people she runs into earlier in the day commits suicide. From what I read about Virginia Woolf, she and Mrs. Dalloway have many similarities... both are unhappy society types that don’t have any major problems that are interesting to me.

I will say that the style of the book is interesting but also quite frustrating. The narrative continually shifts between characters and gives the reader insight to everyone’s inner thoughts and opinions. However, these thoughts are usually uninteresting, stuck up and boring. Plus everything is told in the most complicated way possible. A sample sentence:

“People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.”

That’s one sentence. Now just imagine 200 pages of that where nothing happens and rich people just complain about their lives. Snooze…  There is one character, Septimus, that is interesting and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome while doctors keep telling him that nothing is wrong with him. If the novel focused on him a bit more I’d probably have enjoyed the book, but overall I just couldn’t connect with Mrs. Dalloway (much like how I couldn’t connect with the movie The Hours which is sorta related to the book). Anyway, the style is innovative for the time and specific passages are nice, but really nothing happens… B-

Book # 47 Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

After reading a 1100+ page horror novel I was in the mood for something a tad different and just a bit shorter... So where do I start with Winnie-the-Pooh? First off, it is hard to read this book without constantly comparing it to the Disney cartoons. I couldn't read Pooh's lines without thinking of the voice from the cartoons. For the most part the cartoons are accurate adaptations of the tone and characterisations from the book (however this book doesn't include Tigger).

The book has its charms and is nice and pleasant, but doesn't really offer that much to adult readers. There are no dramatic stories or moral dilemmas  here... just Pooh wanting honey, Rabbit being sorta mean, Owl being a know-it-all and Piglet being cute. I would say though that the chapter in which Rabbit wants to kidnap Roo because Kanga and Roo are new to the woods and wants to scare them off is a bit weird. It really made me wonder why Rabbit is so mean sometimes, and why Pooh and Piglet just blindly go along with his plan. Maybe Milne was trying to say something about xenophobia, but without Rabbit learning some type of lesson, I'm not sure what that point would be.

As a children's novel it gets an A. Does it make my personal top 50? No.

-Dan

Book # 78 The Stand by Stephen King

Finally... twenty years after beginning The Stand I finished it. Way back in my high school years I had started reading it and got about 300 pages or so through it and for some reason didn't continue on. I really can't remember why I would ever have put it down except that it is 1141 pages long. Oddly, I remembered very little from that first failed reading. I did remember the prologue in great detail... and then for the next 250 pages it all seemed brand new to me. After a while I was beginning to doubt that I had ever really read part of it before... until I got to a short passage where a character is thinking about the rabbits in Watership Down. That I totally remembered. Then 30 pages later a different character remembers what happened to his childhood pet rabbit. That part I also remembered and have also thought about from time to time. So I must have a good memory for horrible things happening to rabbits.

So, The Stand is about a superflu that wipes out most of the world's population and what happens afterwards. I'm not one for plot summary so that's all I'll say about that.

What I will say is that I enjoyed it from beginning to end and of the eight or so Stephen King books I've read this one is easily the best. While it is pretty long, it doesn't feel bloated like 11/22/63 or have unnecessary characters like Under the Dome. The set up for the story is so expansive that it could probably have sustained an entire series of books. I almost wish it was longer. Some of the characters really deserved more space (maybe a bit more back story for Tom Cullen? another sequence with the Trashcan Man?). And like any good Stephen King book it has several scenes that are good and scary (like Larry's trip though the tunnel, Harold's bombing, and most any scene with Randall Flagg).

A few quibbles... *spoiler*  The ending was satisfactory but the defeat of Flagg isn't really accomplished by any great plan by the 'good guys'. It is basically that they're willing to sacrifice themselves that gets the job done. Maybe King's message is that evil will ultimately defeat itself or that good will always win out in the end... but I'm not sure if those themes are present enough through the book to really justify that type of ending. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the ending, just that the bad guys basically defeat themselves which is slightly less satisfying. Also, there are almost too many interesting characters here... so much so that there'll be  a great chapter about one character and then we don't see what happens next to them for 400 pages (such as when Flagg rescues Lloyd from prison... and then you have to wait forever for him to show up again).

Overall... The Stand easily gets an A and makes my own personal top 50 list. An easy recommendation for anyone into horror or end of the world stories.

-Dan

Details

Since I'm almost done with the first book I'll be reviewing, it occurs to me that I should try and give some kind of consistent form to each review. So, after discussing each book I will assign a letter grade (I'd hope that all of these books are going to get A's), whether or not the book would make my personal top 50 list (and yes, I realize that as I read more this should be theoretically more difficult to say about a book and yes I have a top 50 list already, and no I'm not posting it), and where the book ranks in comparison to other books I've reviewed. This might be difficult because it isn't just like comparing apples and oranges, it is like comparing apples, oranges, grapes and banannas. You might be able to compare The Stand to The Lord of the Rings, but how would you compare The Stand to Winnie-the-Pooh or Pride and Prejudice?

A few other things... I won't be reading only books on this list, so don't expect posts on a regular basis.  I might decide to give up after a few books (has anyone seen how long Remembrance of Things Past is? Wow!). Comments are welcome. My wife and I won't be reading the books in the same order.  And I do intend to re-read the books I had previously read.  Hmm, I feel like I'm forgeting something...

-Dan

I just got assigned 100 book reports

The name of this blog post says it all... One day last week my wife came home from work and the first thing she said to me was "I have an idea". The way she said it made me feel like whatever it was was going to involve a good bit of work for me.  "Why don't we start a blog where we read the 100 best books of all time and then write reviews of them?" she continued. I was right. My wife is always telling me that she's never wrong about anything, so I must assume that this is the greatest idea ever. So after agreeing with her, I was assigned the task of picking a good list of the top 100 novels of all time and creating a blog to go along with it. Check and check.

Picking the right list was a bit more of a task than I thought it would be.  Google "top 100 books" and the same handful of lists keep popping up; and each of them seemed to have some flaw in them that made me eliminate it. One list was promising except for the fact that it had The Da Vinci Code on it. How could such a list be trusted? Another list created by Time Magazine was excellent but only covered the last 80 years or so. And so on... Finally I found a great list that compiled multiple lists and somehow created a list which was suitable to my needs. The complete list can be found at http://thegreatestnovels.com/top100.htm.

So our ultimate goal here is for both me and my wife to read each of the books on this list and then write a blog about what we thought about it. I had already read 29 of the books listed and will probably re-read each of them eventually even if that means I'll be reading Slaughter House Five for the millionth time. I already know what my first report will be on... so I better go get reading.

-Dan