I’m way behind on my reviews and I think at this point it’s probably just easier to give up and face that I won’t get around to writing about all the books I’ve read this month. At least I haven’t read very much this week—only about half a book—as I’ve simply not had time. I spent the last three days in London, and boy, do I love that city! We had good weather too, which is always nice. Actually, all the times I’ve been in London, I don’t think I’ve been rained on more than three times.

Anyway, I came back with a sunburn (I forgot the sun block, being a bit of an idiot and all), a few new books, English snacks, Jelly Belly jelly beans and some new clothes. A good trip, in other words!

While I was away, Eva tagged me for a meme.

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Ten years ago I was on summer holidays. A friend and I house-sat my aunt’s house while she and her partner were away on vacation. We looked after the chickens, read a bunch of books, went for swims in the lake and generally had a good time.

Five Snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:
1. McCoy’s salt and malt vinegar crisps
2. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Dublin Mudslide especially. Yum!
3. mini mozzarella pizza
4. chocolate-covered coffee beans
5. cheesecake, Swedish style (but only Vrigstad’s), with whipped cream and jam

Five Snacks I Enjoy in the Real World
1. slices of fresh pineapple
2. dried apricots (but only the dark kind), dates and figs
3. apple slices with peanut butter
4. frozen green peas
5. ice lollies

Five Jobs I Have Had
1. instruction manual folder
2. manual labourer (mostly digging and painting)
3. pharmacist
4.
5.

Three of My Habits
1. I’m obsessive about recording what I read. I write it down in an Excel spreadsheet, a notebook and this blog, as well as in a wall calendar.
2. Every morning, before going to work, I check my e-mail, Livejournal friends list and the feeds I subscribe to.
3. I scratch at my scalp. I can’t seem to stop, and as a consequence I almost always have one or two scabs I keep picking at. Disgusting, but true.

Five Things I Would Do if I Was a Billionaire
1. Donate to charities.
2. Give presents to family and friends.
3. Buy a house.
4. Pay off my study loans.
5. Quit work and spend most of my time travelling and/or reading.

Five Places I’ve Lived
1. Umeå, Sweden
2. Eskilstuna, Sweden
3. Flahult, Sweden
4. Bordeaux, France
5. Lund, Sweden

Five People I Want to Know Better: (i.e.: the tags!)
T Y, Kim L, Banquo, Stephanie and Iliana (but only if you want to, of course).

I have been tagged for two memes.

The first one is from T Y and seems to be about books in general.

*A book that made you laugh: Apocalypso by Robert Rankin. The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived by same.

*A book that made you cry: Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb. About three quarters of the way to the end the pages in my copy start showing signs of water damage. That’s all I’m sayin’. ;)

*A book that scared you: Cujo by Stephen King

*A book that disgusted you: Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley

*A book you loved in elementary school: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (though I’ve later realised that the one I read was a highly edited version)

*A book you loved in middle/junior high school: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Emily’s Quest, by same.

*A book you loved in high school: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson.

*A book you loved in college: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann. Mélusine by Sarah Monette

*A book that challenged your identity: Faghag by Linda Leopold (maybe. Or it confirmed it. I don’t know)

*A series that you love: the Farseer/Tawny Man trilogies by Robin Hobb. The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L Sayers

*Your favourite horror book: Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) by John Ajvide Lindqvist

*Your favourite science fiction book: Making History by Stephen Fry. A Strong and Sudden Thaw by RW Day (I’d classify it as fantasy myself, but the cover says it’s sci-fi, so I guess I’ll have to trust it).

*Your favourite fantasy book: either The Golden Fool or Fool’s Fate, both my Robin Hobb

*Your favourite mystery book: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers

*Your favourite (auto)biography: A Liar’s Autobiography by Graham Chapman

*Your favourite “coming of age” book: Duktig pojke by Inger Edelfeldt. Leave Myself Behind by Bart Yates.

*Your favourite classic: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

*Your favourite romantic novel: A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson

*My favourite book (non-fiction): The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow

*My favourite short story(ies): I hardly ever read short stories, so I’m afraid I can’t think of a favourite.

The second meme is from Word Lily and is Read-a-thon related.

If I had 24 hours to read, be my goals would be:
To read as much as I possibly could and see how many books I might be able to finish in that time.

This is what I am going to have to do to get 24 hours of reading:
I haven’t decided yet if I will stay up the full 24 hours, as my time zone makes it a little tricky, especially coupled with the fact that the Euro 2008 final is played on the evening of the 29th and I go back to work on the 30th. But to keep myself up for as many of those 24 hours as possible, I expect I shall load up with caffeine and snacks, and maybe go for a short walk now and then to get fresh air.

If someone asked me for recommendations of “can’t put down” books for the read-a-thon, I would recommend:
It’s so hard to recommend books to others, I always find, because I’m never sure they’ll like a book as much as I did. However, a couple of “can’t put down” books for me, personally, are Mélusine by Sarah Monette, Now & Then by William Corlett, Leave Myself Behind by Bart Yates and A Strong and Sudden Thaw by RW Day (the latter which I’m going to write a review on in a tick).

If you participated in the October 2007 read-a-thon:
I didn’t, so the last two questions don’t apply to me. I wish I’d known of it when it took place, though, because I would have loved to participate in that one too.

For you, what was your favorite part of the October read-a-thon and why?
How many hours/ books/ pages were you able to read in the Read-a-thon?:

I won’t be tagging anyone, because I figure most people participating in the Read-a-thon have already done that meme. Also, I’m lazy. So anyone who wants to do either of these memes, but haven’t been tagged by anyone, can consider themselves tagged by me. ;)

I’m sorry I haven’t tallied the scores for the quotation contest yet (I expect to do it later today). First my internet was down (I hate when that happens), then I sort of got so caught up in watching old episodes of Scrubs that I forgot everything else.

As there were only two entrants, counting up the points isn’t going to be terribly hard. Basically, if you entered, you’re going to win a gift card, but it still remains to be seen which one goes to who.

Obviously, I will also post all the quotes again, but this time with title and author so you can see who wrote what and so on. I have a nagging suspicion it was a little too hard. Damn me for liking so many books relatively few other people have read and enjoyed (though there were some proper classics in there as well, actually).

And now, a book meme!

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school and put in italics the ones you started but haven’t finished

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (got about three pages in and decided I couldn’t stand the writing style. My friend whose taste in books is often the exact opposite of mine loved it, so I should’ve known)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex (I got it from the library along with a bunch of other stuff and didn’t have time to finish it before I had to return it. One day, though. One day)
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (it wasn’t terribly good, though)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo (I’ve started on this so many times, but I’ve never read the whole thing through. I need to do so soon!)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons (never!)
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Because I love numbers: there are one hundred and six books on the list. I have read twenty-seven and started, but not finished, seventeen of them.

(I removed the test that was here because it really messed up the layout. Sadly enough. Basically, I was apparently 91 % book nerd.)

I got some bad news this morning, so I don’t know if I’ll get much reading or blogging done in the next few days. But I’ll be back eventually, you can count on that.

I was tagged for a meme by Kim L and it’s the first time in my book blogging life I’ve been properly tagged, so now I feel all special (even though I probably shouldn’t ;D). The idea was to write your own memoir, using no more (or less) than six words.

At first I thought that it sounded terribly hard and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I would pick. Then Elvis jumped up on the bed and suddenly it wasn’t so tricky any more.

Voluntary solitude with cats and books.

And here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4 .Tag five more blogs with links

• Banquo
• Mikey
• Caroline
• Eva
• TY
• (and anyone else who wants to do it, though ::shhh::, I’m not supposed to do that…)

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!