First off, sorry for the recent blog weirdness. I made the mistake of writing this post on my phone and that seems to have upset some things. If you first saw this post a couple of days ago and then it vanished, that’s why. I’m still working on getting everything back to normal. Until then, here’s a post about books!
If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time then you’ll know I love to read. If you haven’t then welcome! I’m Becky and I love to read.
Ok, now everyone’s on the same page (see what I did there?) let’s get on with it. It was World Book Day on Thursday and, as is often the case with the things, I realised too late. My bad. I also happened to finish the novel I was reading but I normally save my book reviews for Sundays so that just might have to wait for tomorrow. Spoiler alert: I loved it.
In any case, I wanted to do a book-themed post today. So far this year I’ve been doing a good job of reading, on average, one book per week. That’s high for me, usually, I get through about 20 books in a year. There’s definitely time for my reading rate to slip back to that but so far I’m pretty pleased with my progress.
Fortunately, I’ve no shortage of reading material. For some reason introducing yourself with “Hi, I’m Becky and I love to read” has that effect. Even if I stop buying books for myself, which ain’t easy, others tend to give or lend them to me. Which is great.
So my booky post for today is to share with you my Most Urgent to-read list. A book counts as Most Urgent if I already own a copy, or if it’s already in my flat. Or on my Kindle. It doesn’t count if I just read a great review and now I simply have to read it.
Ok? Great. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have an Opinion about what I should read next. This is not currently in any particular order. Here we go:
1. House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski
2. Dreamwords, Paul Story
3. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
4. Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway
5. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
6. Naked Lunch, William Boroughs
7. Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa
8. The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa
9. A Woman In Your Own Right, Anne Dickson
10. The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brookes
11. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
12. The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
13. Moonfleet, J. Meade Falkner
14. Paradise Lost, Milton
15. Marabou Stork Nightmares, Irvine Welsh
16. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh
17. The Tiger’s Wife, Tea Obreht
18. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafron
19. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K Dick
20. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
21. Collected Poems, T. S. Eliot
22. The Autumn of the the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
23. Samurai Wilson: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan, Giles Milton
24. South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami
25. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
26. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
27. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond
28. What If?, Randall Munroe
29. The Origin of Species and the Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
30. The Girl in the Red Coat, Kate Hamer
31. Collected Poems, William Wordsworth
32. New Arabian Nights, R. L. Stevenson
33. Neuromancer, William Gibson
34. How Late it Was, How Late, James Kelman
35. Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
36. When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro
37. The Long War, Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter
38. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
39. The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux
40. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
41. Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
42. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
43. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susana Clarke
44. Decipher, Stel Pavlov
45. Under the Dome, Stephen King
46. Too Far, Rich Shapero
47. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
48. Short Stories, Hemingway
49. The Double Helix, James D Watson
50. The Golem, Gustav Meyrink
51. The Miss Marple Stories, Agatha Christie
52. Relativity, Einstein
53. Leave it to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse
54. The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien
55. The Egyptians, Alan Gardiner
56. The Hittites, O. R. Gurney
57. The Persians, J. M. Cook
58. The Babylonians, H. W. F. Saggs
59. Life, Richard Fortey
60. The Greek Myths, Robert Graves
61. The Nude, Kenneth Clark
62. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
63. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka
65. Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally
66. The Black Tulip, Alexander Dumas
67. Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love PeacockNightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock
68. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
69. Complete Tales of the Unexpected, Roald Dahl
70. Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas
71. Introducing Postmodernism, Richard Appignanesi & Chris Garratt
72. Introducing Philosophy, Dave Robinson & Judy Groves
73. Introducing Quantum Theory, J. P. McEvoy & Oscar Zarate
74. A Little Book of Language, David Crystal
75. Civilisation & Capitalism, Fernand Braudel
76. Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose
77. In Search of Time, Dan Falk
78. The Great Naturalists, Robert Huxley
79. The Great Explorers, Robin Hanbury-Tenison
80. Earth: The Power of the Planet, Iain Stewart & John Lynch
81. Mad Science, Theodore Gray
82. The Road to Reality, Roger Penrose
83. Human Universe, Brian Cox
84. Hostile Witness, Rebecca Forster
85. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano
86. Dubliners, James Joyce
87. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe
88. Candide, Voltaire
89. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
90. The Waves, Virginia Woolf
91. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
92. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Wow. I have a long way to go. I’m slightly bitter that it’s not a nice, round 100 titles, but maybe that’s a good thing.
How many of my reading list have you read? Do you have any favourites among these?
In Becky's Head 
I have a history with Swansea, and they love their poeet, so I might urge you to read Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood – but that is an entirely based on that city’s love of their one claim, as I have never read it myself.
I do think, though, that Roger Penrose’s Cycles of Time might be his inflation-busting theory, put into print. It’s kind of whacky.
I fell in love with a book once – Italo Calvino’s work Invisible Cities – a collection of cities described each in 100-300 words, all framed in a discourse between Marco Polo telling tales to Kublai Khan. It feels as though there is no substance to it, only atmosphere, and I found it a pleasure to read- certainly something that you can drop in and out of with a moments notice.
And with a book called The Night CIrcus. But I’m sure you don’t actually need any more suggestions!
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Italo Calvino is amazing. Have you read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by him? I try to make everyone read it. If you haven’t I’ll lend you a copy when you get back.
The Night Circus is on my “Slightly Less Urgent To Read List” in that I definitely want to read it but I’m not allowed to buy it until I read more of the books I already own.
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I love your list. This is how I know we should be friends in real life, Becky. I have What If by Randall Munroe on reserve at the library now. I own Tale of Two Cities but haven’t read it yet – it’s on my list of books I already own that I plan to get around to reading this year 😀
But Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favorites. I think anything he’s written should be interesting. I haven’t read the one on your list but I’d start there, especially if it’s a short one. The last book of his that I read was a novella, short and well written – Chronicles of a Death Foretold.
http://Runwright.net
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Isn’t Marquez wonderful? The Autumn of the Patriarch is short-ish so I might read it soon. Have you read Of Love and Other Demons? That’s a shorter one by MArquez that I read recently and it was one of the most perfect novels I’ve ever encountered.
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I just read Agatha Christie for the first time not too long ago. It was really good. I have to get her other books.
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One day I just woke up and realised that somehow I had never read any Agatha Christie and it make me sit back and wonder what on Earth I thought I was doing with my life. I’ve read a few now but not nearly all of them. She’s brilliant, isn’t she?
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She is, her books are very good. I’ve only read one book from her so far.
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Good to know, I am not the only one with a huge list, lol…..In the picture at the top it shows a book by C.S. Lewis…have you read that one? Was it good? If not, read that one and let me know how it is!
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Oh, that’s the Screwtape letters! I’ve never read it but apparently it’s nothing like Narnia. I’ll get to it soon (I hope) 🙂
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In spiked an interest! Loved Narnia
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You have to read The New York Trilogy. I even quoted the first paragraph on my blog. I would go further. If you can read the first page without continuing, it is the literary equivalent of eating a doughnut without licking your lips.
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That sounds like a challenge 🙂
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined from the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.
You should definitely try a doughnut though 🙂
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Ok, it’s piqued my interest. I do love a good doughnut.
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How spooked would you have been had the phone rung at that moment? ha
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You have a jukebox style blog 🙂 I’m glad you found mine as I’m not sure I’d have found yours. Need to improve my searching techniques.
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I recommend doing lots of clicking around.
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