I said there’s more to life than a broken heart dear console you

Update on the Guardian's 1000 Books You Should Read. It turns out I calculated wrongly. The pages also have side links, which I thought were just supplementary. But no, apparently they count too.

So firstly a little addenda to my previous post. In addition to those War and Travel that I have already blogged about....


Still On Shelves
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Not really made a whole lot of difference, but it does with some of the categories.

So, next up is Comedy. I didn't hold out much hope for this one either, but it was a little more fruitful than I was expecting. But not much.

Read
Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones Diary
Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews
Graham Greene - Our Man In Havana
Graham Greene - Travels With My Aunt
Mark Haddon - Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night
Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
Jerome K Jerome - Three Men In A Boat
Armistead Maupin - Tales Of The City

Of these, the ones I would put my list would be High Fidelity (which is just one the best books on music ever written, by someone who understands why the question "who would you kill come the musical revolution" is endlessly fascinating.

Still on Shelves
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Kenneth Grahame - The Wind In The Willows

Books I Am Supposed to Have Read
Will Self - Great Apes

I started this, and got about 3 pages in. It was chosen by someone in my book group whose opinion I respect hugely, but we appear to have differing tastes in literature.... But you know, it makes the world go round.

So after two categories, the running total is: 14

You said you couldn’t find anyone to love you

The Guardian newspaper recently published a feature on 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read and it has proved a quite obsessive discussion point for me and my friends The Family Moo, mainly regarding how many we had read and how aghast we were at the low number (Mummy Moo is currently leading with 170 something, but then as her name suggests, she is old enough to be our mother). And also expressing surprise/disgust at the ones they had chosen to omit.

They've split them into sections and I've worked my way through them systematically. While it was interesting to see which I had read, it was just as fascinating to see which of them I had bought but still had on my shelves (having just not got round to them). And then there was the list of those which I was supposed to have read, either at school or university, or for my Book Group.

The first section is War and Travel. I wasn't expecting much from this and this proved true. It broke down as follows.

Read
Nina Bawden - Carrie's War
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong
Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island

2 of these I read at school, and were I compiling a list of books that I think people should read, I would probably include Birdsong. It was one of those books which once I read I bought for quite a few people as presents. Books like these don;t come along that often.

Still on shelves
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Books I am supposed to have read
JG Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur
Irene Nemirovsky - Suite Francaise
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey


Anyway, not exactly the most auspicious start - 6 books read out of a possible 117. And just as many that I was supposed to have read or still had on my shelves, intending to read.

And there is an oddity in this section. There's a book that I think I have read, but I can't actually remember. The book in question is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The reason I think I have read it is complicated. As a teenager I was a goth, and was obsessed with the messages (or run out etchings as they are apparently known) scratched into the centre grooves of vinyl releases by the Sisters of Mercy. On the 12inch of Alice, one of these messages was Im Westen Nichts Neues, which is the original German title of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. It stands to reason that as an earnest goth I would have tried to read it and I vaguely remember borrowing it from the library. But as to whether I read it or not, I have no recollection.

Anyone, first category down. Perhaps I'll do better with some of the other categories. Although given that the next one is Science Fiction and Fantasy, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Do you promise to funk? The whole funk, nothin' but the funk

I haven't blogged in a shockingly long time. 2009 has proved to be a little bit busy, but now I'm back in the room. Some of my time recently has been taken up with chain-watching Season 2 of How I Met Your Mother, which I got fairly recently on DVD. The sensible thing to do would probably have been to limit myself so that it lasted longer, but as anyone who knows me would tell you, that was never going to happen. And in any case, the third season should be with me on Saturday, so my next fix is not far away.

And if I needed any other reason to love it (aside from it being only completely awesome), it's also instructional. While watching the first episode with a friend, we were chuckling
away at a kind of fantasy sequence that Marshall has about Lily and "funk legend George Clinton". Then when the credits rolled and said "George Clinton as himself", she said "Is George Clinton a real person person then?"

You see, without charming and funny US sitcoms, there would be one fewer person in the world unaware of the might of George Clinton.

I thought I'd leave Bootsy Collins for another day.

I want to fly and run till it hurts

The first film of 2009 for my dad was Australia. I was a little worried about this. He's never seen a Baz Luhrmann film before and he doesn't really like films with any kind of magic element.

But it turns out he did quite like it. He thought it was a funny, sweet film, full of old-fashioned cliches, and had a wee bit of a fairytale ending. He has read that it was hoped that it would boost the Australian tourist industry - "if it does that, then I'm a Dutchman" (he was thinking more of the way that it showed Australian men of the time, rather than I presume the scenery, but then I haven't seen it, so I don't know).

His friend didn't like it all. "Just not my kind of film, pal".

Cos there's no compromise when the negative is dry

This is my new favourite blog.

It's hilarious. I can't decide which is my favourite. It might be Sonic Youth. Then again, it might be The Kills. But then again, that Young Knives one...