Books Wonderful Books

Reading is great. One of my favourite things in the world to do is settle down with some tasty snacks and a book. This is why I'm such a geek with occasional antisocial tendencies/difficulties when interacting in a social situation but it's also why I have a sizeable vocabulary.

The thing is though, you need the time, to find the books in the first place, and then to read them. Fortunately, I've got a glut of reading time at the moment -- in the past month I've read Kafka's The Trial, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Woolfe's Mrs Dalloway. There is SO much great literature out there. Two great sites for bibliophiles who want to read some old school literature are:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://gutenberg.net.au/

You could read an entire life time and not get through it all, much less remember it all. I read fairly continuously through my childhood (probably too much -- I'm sure a little fresh air, exercises or even socialising with my peers wouldn't have gone astray) but only a couple of books really stand out in my memory, one about a bunch of kids who travel back and forth in time and eventually invent the very device that allows them, in their past, to time travel; another about a boy who could go into the fourth dimension and reverse himself like you do with an image in Photoshop. And then there are vague memeories of a series of books about a plump girl called Al (Constance C. Greene, I think) and then of course Beverley Cleary and Judy Bloome books. I wonder why I remember those authors particularly?

When I was a bit older, anything fantasy/science-fictiony, particularly Isaac Asimov. I really enjoyed May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy and god, ANTYHING by Sherri S Tepper. Although I wonder as a more critical reader these days, how much of it I would enjoy now ... I did start reading a fantasy tome a year or two ago and found it utterly predictable and dull. Terry Pratchett continues to amuse though!

Lastly ... ugh, don't talk to me about Coelho's The Alchemist -- if you're in a bad place in your life then it's kind of uplifting with what appears to be folksy wisdom, but when you look at it objectively, it's nothting more than a fairy tale for adults, simplisitcally told and unfortunately obvious.