Of Being Ill, Home, and Other Random Nightmares...

It's not that I've been neglecting my blog. It's not that I've not been reading. It's just that I'm really ill, with an "upper chest infection". It's not swine flu, which is a good thing... but, it does mean I've been on antibiotics, and in bed, and incapable of doing anything. No TV, no internet, no reading - just being in bed, and feeling sorry for myself. I didn't actually get out of my bed all of Tuesday and Wednesday, but to go to the NHS and have them tell me to take meds. I've been working on a very tight deadline for work, at the moment, and obviously falling ill got in the way of that. So, Tuesday night, I was dreaming that the guys I work with decided to dismember me, toe by toe, finger by finger, and dispose of me as I was being unreliable and irresponsible. So, I'm also taking a small break from thrillers that deal with dismemberment, considering I've been reading the Dexter series, as well as Natsuo Kirino's Out. I don't normally get nightmares, and I've stomached some seriously disturbing books, but, I think being ill makes me a lot more vulnerable, and maybe, at a level, I am actually scared of being cut up and thrown away. It's a totally rational fear...

Anyway, I'm home for a week, and while I try and get well (or the course of antibiotics to run out), I'm keeping these on my bedside table, hoping to finish at least a couple...

Oh, and just because I'm home, I'll be catching up on some Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls as well.

Happy days, despite feeling like a truck's run over me, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and do nothing, but sleep this infection off.

Sunday Steals

I haven't gone on a good ol' book-hunt in a long long time. I've always been doing something or t'other over the weekends, so, when I woke up this Sunday realising I was absolutely free, with no commitments whatsoever, I headed to Leicester Square, where there are a bunch of second hand bookshops, and more oft' than not, I've stumbled on some amazing finds. Yesterday was no exception.

1. Margaret Atwood - Oryx And Crake : I absolutely loved The Handmaid's Tale, and was quite eager to read Atwood's new book, The Year Of The Flood. However, it's supposed to be the second book in a trilogy, where Oryx And Crake is the first, so... this was a must-buy!
2. Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway : I haven't read a single book by Virginia Woolf yet, and I intend to change that. I've always been slightly intimidated by her, so, I thought I should pick up a book, and dive in straight away.
3. Angela Carter - The Passion Of New Eve : Yeah, I just can't get enough of Angela Carter. I have no idea how this book is going to be, but, I figured it had to be done!
4. Peter Carey - My Life As A Fake : It's about a poet in the World War II era in Australia. Need I say more?
5. Molly Keane - Full House : Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the blog-o-sphere who doesn't have one of those green VMCs. Plus, this one looked really interesting, and it was a total impulse buy. It doesn't seem to be very popular, but, I am actually looking forward to reading it.
6. Neil Gaiman - Coraline : I didn't end up seeing the movie, and the book's always been so tempting. I always found an excuse to put it back on the shelf though, but, I think the time is right. Also, I haven't read a single Gaiman. Must change that.

My favourite part of this excursion was the below though, just outside a secondhand bookshop:

I can't think of a more inviting sign to a bookshop than this... and it's one of my all-time favourite quotes.

Have you read any of the above? Are there any on your TBR?

Another Top 100 List

Someone just sent this to me via email, so, being the diligent book blogger (ahem) that I am, I decided to re-post it here. Some random source came up with its list of top 100 books, much like every other newspaper and magazine has done. About 65% of the books remain the same, as far as I can tell, but then there's that 35%..... Here's the list. The ones in pink are the ones I've read, the ones in blue are on my to-be-read list. Yay me. (Or, boo me!)

1. 1984 by George Orwell

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

12. Animal Farm by George Orwell

13. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

14. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

15. Ulysses by James Joyce

16. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

17. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

18. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

19. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

20. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

21. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

22. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

23. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

24. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

25. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

26. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

27. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

29. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

30. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

32. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

33. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

34. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

35. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

36. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

37. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

38. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

39. The Stranger by Albert Camus

40. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

41. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

42. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

43. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

44. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

45. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

46. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

47. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

48. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

49. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

50. Watership Down by Richard Adams

51. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

52. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

53. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

54. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman

55. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

56. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

57. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

58. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

59. Middlemarch by George Eliot

60. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

62. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

63. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

64. The Stand by Stephen King

65. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

66. Dune by Frank Herbert

67. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

68. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

69. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

70. Dracula by Bram Stoker

71. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

72. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

73. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

74. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

75. The Trial by Franz Kafka

76. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

77. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

78. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

79. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

80. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

81. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

82. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

83. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

84. Persuasion by Jane Austen

85. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

86. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

87. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

88. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

89. Emma by Jane Austen

90. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

91. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

92. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

93. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

94. Atonement by Ian McEwan

95. Beloved by Toni Morrison

96. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

97. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

98. Siddharta by Hermann Hesse

99. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

100. Light in August by William Faulkner

To Be Read List: 22

Read: 32

Not very impressive, is it? :(

How about you? How many have you read? Or, are you planning on reading any, anytime soon?