Lexin

If there's a single word that puts me off a book in double-quick time, it's 'zany'.

I just had my BookBub suggestions for the day, and one of them was 'zany detective story'. I wouldn't read it if it were fanfic and I'm not reading it in profic, either.

To talk about something different than my impending retirement, I’ve been drawn in by the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. I think several people on my friends list already read these, but for those who don’t at the start of the stories she’s a thoroughly modern Victorian lady, married to an Egyptologist, who has adventures in Egypt and on one occasion in London and Kent.

I was drawn in by the first story, Crocodile on the Sandbank where Amelia meets her best friend Evelyn in Rome, and they travel to Egypt to fall in with Radcliffe Emerson (the Egyptologist) and his philologist brother Walter. Shenanigans of a detective nature ensue while Amelia and Evelyn chase a mummy around the Armana plateau – I forget exactly why, I’ve slept since then.

Amelia is great fun – she’s a feisty heroine who deserves the term and yet doesn’t annoy you – feisty is so often a cover for bad manners and the only bad mannered thing that Amelia does is poke people with her parasol in order to get past. I think she can be forgiven that. Having said that, her habit of dispensing medicines to the Egyptians without a licence rather bothers me, but I suppose it may be something that people did in those days. Thoughts?

I also like the cat Bastet. Doesn’t behave much like a cat, but I like her.

Highly recommended. And there are nineteen of them, so enough to keep one occupied for a long time.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2.) Italicize those you intend to read.
3.) Underline those you LOVE.
4.) Put an asterisk next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.

I reckon that my friends list isn't composed of 'average' adults. For one thing, from the school of 'I read it somewhere' studies, I read somewhere that the average home has about six books – and those design programmes on the TV seem to bear that out. I've rarely seen a shelf on "Cowboy Builders", let alone a book. I have about 2500 books, which would pose a big problem for any designer.


01. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
05. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06. The Bible
07. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
08. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
*12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (See below for my views on Hardy.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (The Hobbit is my #1 'I don't feel very well and want to read something undemanding but loads of fun' book. I must have read it 70 or 80 times, to the point where I can recite bits of it.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (I enjoyed reading it, but when I grew up and realised some of the meaning behind it, I really resented feeling that I was being manipulated.)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
*39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I tried. I failed.)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Never again. "This is not a book to be put away lightly, it should the thrown…")
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
*47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy(I never want to read this book again. I hate Hardy and all his works.)
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Like Hardy, I never want to read this again. Or any of his other works.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (I enjoyed it, but won't read it again.)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
*67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
*75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I read it because I thought I should. Boy was that a bad decision. Crap book. That Joyce is good is a joke played on the reading public.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (Supposed to be a good book, but I can't remember much about it.)
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
*83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
*85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
*91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (As venivincere said, "Please God, never again.")
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
*93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (I tried, I failed.)
*94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The boss is back – which means the new head honcho's attention is no longer fixed on me like an Exocet missile. Hurrah! On the other hand, work has become unexpectedly rather busy, which we could have done without.

In other news

There is no other news, except that clare_nce, gloria1 and I are getting together over the weekend to watch SGA, which should be brilliant. I'm looking forward to it very much. SGA and me is an odd one – I love the show, but don't ever read the fic.

As for reading, I'm still reading ebooks from Fictionwise - I choose them because they allow you to pay by PayPal and have the books in a wide variety of formats, including for the Sony ebook reader that I've got.

I've been reading a lot of gay mysteries; I think we're up to four gay PI's now. I didn't know it was such a trope.

Write what I want to read, damn you!

I've noticed that it seems like about a third of all gay ebooks seem to be about (one or more of): vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts/about ghosts, paranormals of one variety or another, or werewolves. What is it with that? None of the above do anything for me at all, though there are so many of them I assume they sell well. Write more gay Regency stories! Neckcloths are where it's at.