Iluvwords: A BOOK A DAY? The Lists...

Friday, 13 February 2009

A BOOK A DAY? The Lists...

I'll update this list every week. Any recommendations, suggestions or comments and emails with ideas are very welcome - share the love! Information about short books or novellas to read will bring you virtual cake and sparkling champagne.

My only guideline for what I read is that the books and films have to be free, or as near as dammit (library books, borrowed, second hand). Because all you need is love. And money can't buy you love.

BOOKS LOVED SO FAR:
The challenge started on February 14th 2009.
Day 1: Book 1: Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star(1977, 1986 in English)
Day 2: Book 2: Hamlet 2, The Movie (2008)
Day 3: Book 3: Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (1915)
Day 4: Book 4: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Movie (2009)
Day 5: Book 5: Muriel Spark: The Driver's Seat (1970)
Day 6: Book 6: Chris Killen, The Bird Room
Day 7: Book 7: Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber
Day 8: Book 8: Altered States, Film, 1980
Day 9: Book 9: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), the film
Book 10: Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
Day 10: Book 10
Day 11: Book 11:W.H. Auden: Selected Poems

BOOKS I'D LOVE TO READ: a list that will be expanding. please do feed the list, 365 days is a long time, and weeks are hungry things...

BOOKS I HAVE AT HOME TO READ...

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot
Anne Michaels: Fugitive Pieces (re-read, for my course)
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

BOOKS TO BEG, BORROW, OR STEAL...(and recommendations - thank you!)
Lydia Davis: short story collections (EKR): Everything, anything. Why oh why do Waterstones and Borders Glasgow not stock her? Or any of the Glasgow libraries! I may have to break my cheap as chips rule to buy some second hand books off amazon...and while I'm at it@

Anne Carson (NM and EKR): is also illegal in Glasgow, from the look of it.

D'Agata: The Next American Essay.

James Joyce: The Dead
Erland Loe: Naive. Super
Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost
Rebecca Solnit: A Feild Guide To Getting Lost (EKR)
Anton Checkov: The Cherry Orchard (MS)
Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other stories - 1886(MS)
Elizabeth Reeder & James Meek: Surveillance and the Fremont Inheritance
James Dickey: Metaphor as Pure Adventure (NM)
Anne Carson: Eros the Bittersweet (NM)
Lampedusa's The Leopard (MS)
Natalia Ginzburg's The Things We Used To Say (MS)
Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (MS)
Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (MS)
Baldwin's Another Country (MS)
Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Mirror In The Well (Stewart @ booklit)
Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention Of Morel (booklit)
Gilbert Adair: The Death of the Author (booklit)
Gilbert Adair Buenas Noches Buenos Aires (booklit)
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (robaroundbooks).
Jen Hadfield: Almanacs, Bloodaxe, Tarset, 2005
Jen Hadfield; Nigh-No-Place, Bloodaxe, Tarset, 2008: I have just got this today (10.03.08) - yay!
John Berger: 'And Our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos', 'Keeping A Rendevous', 'The Shape of A Pocket', 'I Send You This Cadmium Red', and 'The Look of Things'. (NM)

Recommended Novellas (term 1)

Aphra Behn Oroonoko (1688) - re-read
Voltaire Candide (1759)
Samuel Johnson Rasselas (1759)
Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Thomas Love Peacock Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)- re-read
Herman Melville Billy Budd (1856)
Gustav Flaubert Trois Contes (1877)
Henry James The Aspern Papers (1888)
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1902)
Gertrude Stein Three Lives (1909)
Thomas Mann Death in Venice (1912)
James Joyce The Dead (1914)
Virginia Woolf Jacob's Room (1922) - re-read
D.H. Lawrence The Fox (1923)
Ronald Firbank Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926)
Vladimir Nabokov Laughter in the Dark (1932)
Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
Raymond Chandler Trouble is my Business (1939)
William Faulkner The Bear (1942)
George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)
John Steinbeck The Pearl (1945)
Samuel Beckett First Love (1946)
Carson McCullers Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)
Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) - re-read
Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
Gwendoline Riley Cold Water (2003)

A clutch of short story collections: One More Year by Sana Krasikov is published by Portobello in June; Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin is published by Bloomsbury; The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by Fourth Estate; An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah is published by Faber later this month and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower is published by Granta.

FILM ADAPTATIONS
With the help of a Cineworld Card, I might as well start with the latest Oscar nominees! I saw Slumdog Millionaire last week, so that leaves...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on the short story of the same name by F Scott Fitzgerald (13 nominations including best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay). EDIT - WATCHED!
The Reader, based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink (five nominations including best picture, best director, best actress and best adapted screenplay).
Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates (five nominations including best picture, best director, best actress and best adapted screenplay).