Faye’s Comments (group member since Oct 12, 2013)

Faye’s comments from the All About Books group.

Sunday total - 127 pages of The Lovely Bones.

This readathon has been great - there were times this weekend when I would have watched TV rather than read, but I forced myself to read to get my page count up, and that felt really good! :)

Saturday total - 148 pages

Mostly The Lovely Bones, but I also started The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within.

Friday's total - 132 pages

Finished We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever, started The Lovely Bones, and read about 25 pages of The Invisible Man.

I'm watching the clock... :D

Maggie wrote: "Love your journey Faye - I loved Thomas Hardy's books."

Thanks, Maggie! He was an amazing writer. :)

Amber wrote: "awesome journey faye!"

Thanks, Amber. :)

Pink wrote: "Brilliant reading journey Faye. I really got a sense of your childhood reading from this and it sounds like you've more than made up for books you missed studying for school.

I'm intrigued by you..."

Thanks, Pink!

Are you enjoying Les Miserables? And yes, definitely try those authors! Between them they wrote a lot of the best literature in the world. :)

Shirley wrote: "Faye, I love your five favourite books - two of them are my favourites too - Jane Eyre and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. And another I plan to read later this year, A Tale of Two Cities...

And you ar..."

Thanks, Shirley! I am a HUGE Dickens fan. Fanatic, you might say, haha! I hope you do read A Tale of Two Cities this year, and that you enjoy it every bit as much as I do. :)

Alannah wrote: "It's been really nice to get to know you through this as I don't think we have really talked on here properly. I love the list of your five favourite books, I love them myself.

I really like the s..."

Thanks, Alannah! Yes, I haven't been as active on this group as I'd like to be. I'll try to work on that. :)

I'm enjoying The Book Thief very much!

Leslie wrote: "Great journey Faye! I love the story of your mother teaching you to read :-)

A Tale of Two Cities is a favorite of mine too! I like Dickens a lot, and am trying to read a few more of his novels ..."

Thanks, Leslie! I'm sure I'll love Trollope and Thackeray, too - I have no idea why I've never read any of their books! It's always nice to discover something new from the Victorian era, though. :)

1. Have you always loved books? Who, if anyone, in your life has most inspired you to read?

I'm pretty sure I loved books even before I left the womb. Which leads to my answer to the second part of the question - my mother! While she was pregnant with one child, she would have Reading Time every afternoon with the others so she could rest, so hearing my mother reading stories was probably the first thing my developing ears picked up on, heh. She taught each of us to read for ourselves as soon as we turned 4, which I remember being a great honour. Every morning I would get up super early and climb into bed with her as soon as my dad left for work, and I would read to her whatever book she was teaching me from at that time. If I got to a word I didn't know, she wouldn't even crack her eyes open to look at it, she'd just mumble, "Spell it," haha! Did wonders for my spelling and vocabulary before I even started school. ;)

2. What was your favourite childhood book?

That changed every week! The Pokey Little Puppy, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, Victoria Plum, Winnie-the-Pooh, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, The Sleepover Friends series, The Babysitters Club series, absolutely everything by L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables series, The Story Girl, Pat of Silver Bush, Jane of Lantern Hill, Emily of New Moon, etc), The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (!!!), anything by Enid Blyton, Tottie (or Story of a Doll's House), Little Women, the Little Town on the Prairie series, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Golden Filly series, The Wombles, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the Mandie series... I know I'm forgetting some!

3. Which books do you remember studying at school? Did you enjoy them?

Roger Red Hat and Billy Blue Hat? Heh. Actually, I didn't really study books at school. I learned to read before starting school, so for the first few years my teachers had to keep searching out books from the higher grades that would challenge me, so I didn't read the books the rest of the class was studying. In the higher elementary grades, we got readers with bits and pieces of a wide variety of books in them, and for book reports we got to pick our own novels. I was homeschooled through high school, and Literature was an elective that I only took once or twice, and for that it was mostly biographies of famous Americans. I'm Canadian, so I didn't really care about famous Americans, and therefore I dropped the Literature elective. I was very sad about that, and I've spent my entire adult life asking people what books they studied in high school and reading those books for myself.

4. Where do you most enjoy reading? Do you need silence to read, or can you read almost anywhere?

Curled up on the couch or in bed, or sitting outside in the shade in the warmer months. I don't need utter silence, but I'm easily distracted by the sound of the television or people talking.

5.Choose five of your favourite books and tell us why you loved them so much!

1. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens - My absolute favourite book in the world. I just love the tragedy of it, and the way it leaves you with such a glowy feeling that it doesn't SEEM like a tragedy. And yet it really is tragic. I don't even know! I adore the characters, especially Sydney Carton and Jerry Cruncher. And every word Dickens wrote is precious to me, so there's also that.

2. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte - The "romance" between Jane and Rochester is so anti-romantic that I just can't get enough of it, haha! I love that Jane stood up for her principles, and that Rochester was so wracked with guilt over the things he'd done throughout his life, and that he was such a good man deep down. I've never read this Sargasso Sea that people talk about, so the story has never been tainted for me with another author's view of events. I simply adore these characters and the tale Charlotte Bronte wove here.

3. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo - This book has everything. Seriously. Everything. One of the greatest stories ever told, period.

4. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Raskolnikov's twisted mind gripped me right from page one and never let me go.

5. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy - Literary perfection from beginning to end, in my opinion. But this is a tragedy that definitely feels like a tragedy.

6. Do you prefer reading fiction or non fiction?

I love both, and often have one of each on the go at the same time. I love learning, so I read a wide range of non-fiction.

7. Are you fond of a particular author and what attracts you to their books? (You can pick a few if you can’t choose!)

DICKENS. He mastered the art of language. Pretty much every sentence he ever wrote blows my mind. Pretty much every character he ever constructed blows my mind, too. They were such caricatures, yet they were REAL. And how he managed to weave so many complex plots together in each one of his novels is beyond my powers of comprehension. One of the few true Genius writers in history.

8. Is there an author you haven't yet tried but you'd really like to?

Lots of them! Too many books, not enough time. This year I really want to try Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray. I can't believe I haven't read them yet, considering how obsessed I am with Victorian literature!

9. Do you rely on goodreads to keep track of your reading or do you have your own method?

I write a review for everything I read, but I don't always post them publicly on Goodreads. I type them up on my computer and print them off for my own records. Goodreads is faster and easier, though, when I'm looking for a book I've read but don't remember when I read it.

10. What's the best book you've read so far this year? What are you reading at the moment? What will you be reading next?

The best book I've read so far this year... Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. It was fantastic, I loved it. Right now I'm reading The Zookeeper's Wife, by Diane Ackerman, and The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, both of which I'm enjoying. Next up will be Black, by Ted Dekker.

Read:

The Divine Comedy
The Canterbury Tales
War and Peace
Heart of Darkness
Infinite Jest
Moby Dick

Want to read:

The Gulag Archipelago
The Castle
Clarissa
Tristram Shandy
Swann's Way

Not sure about the rest. Most I'd never heard of, and the descriptions put me off reading a couple that were on my to-read list. :P

A Tale of Two Cities
The Lord of the Rings
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Catcher in the Rye
Heidi
Anne of Green Gables
Black Beauty
The Name of the Rose
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
War and Peace
The Diary of a Young Girl
To Kill a Mockingbird
Gone With the Wind
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Wind in the Willows
1984
The Poky Little Puppy (!!!!! My fave as a wee'un!)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy
The Outsiders
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Dune
The Plague
The Divine Comedy
Catch-22
The Cat in the Hat
The Kite Runner

26 in all.

Yay, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever made the top 12! I'm giving that to one of my nieces for Christmas. It was always my favourite Christmas book as a kid, and is probably a close second now to A Christmas Carol. :)

I've watched a lot of these as movies, but the ones from the first page of the list that I've read are...

A Christmas Carol
The Night Before Christmas
Little Women
The Gift of the Magi
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
The Cricket on the Hearth
The Chimes

I hope Dickens' The Haunted Man is on the list somewhere, because that's one of my favourites, too.

Leslie wrote: "Faye wrote: "I will have to read about 20 books in December to make my goal for the year. HELP. Stupid November, being all busy and stuff...

However, I'm not above kinda-sorta-cheating. I'll be ch..."

Thanks, Leslie! I had never heard of Book at Bedtime... what a cute idea for a radio show!

Sorry again, everyone - Book 6 discussion is on right now, and Book 7 begins tomorrow.

How is everyone coming along? I find it difficult to pick things like this apart for subtext and hidden meanings, so a lot of the comments here are very interesting for me. :)

I was so busy through the month of November that I almost lost my mind, but now I'm finally freeeeeeeee! Well... for a little while. I'm giving myself today off, which I will spend catching up online and then curling up all comfy with a stack of books, but Monday I'll have to start thinking about Christmas preparations. But that's a fun kind of busy!

Jenny wrote: "Just checking: are we all still there? ;)

I've finished book 4 just now and will mull it over a little more before posting."

Sorry, everyone! I had a monstrously busy week, so I've fallen behind here, but I'll be able to catch up over the next few days. Thanks for keeping the conversation going!

Ohh, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is my brother's favourite book in the world, and he has just loaned it to me to read. I'm looking forward to it!

And Life of Pi is one of the best books I've read this year, too. :)

Wow, I'm having trouble keeping up here! :)

Book 3 discussion can begin today.