I've given up on a brief history of time, and have swapped it for 'Godel, Esher, Bach' (currently on the Bach bit )

I just finished reading "My Sisters Keeper". Made me cry haha! Was a really good book though.
Also reading "A Place Called Here": its good as well, just slightly odd!
x

Got them too.

Did you ever read the Drina books?
My (grown up) daughter still loves them and I also re read them from time to time.

I'm reading Derren Brown's book about his mind tricks. It's really boring so I'm going to read a trade magazine tonight and maybe even a supplies catalogue... yumm yummmm

My Best Friends girl - i read this and really quite liked it. are the kite runner and the island by the same author?
A place called here - yeah I thought it was wierd as well, but was good. especially when you read it like the second or third time and there are loads of links, like when shes in the forest bit and a light shines and then he is shining a light done a path into a forest. if that makes any sense? haha


x

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling. Music doesn't feature on the Hogwarts curriculum (bar the School Song and the Sorting Hat); I wonder why?

Just finished reading "A thousand splendid suns" by the same author (khaled hosseini) who wrote "the kite runner".
a very interesting and absorbing read; really made me want to research afghanistan and its history. i can definitely reccommend it, even though it is by no means a light-hearted read.

I think it was his first book I bought then sold on Ebay. I guess it was geared more towards the budding magician.

I was a bit disappointed, although there were some interesting parts. I was surprised that it was quite poorly written Needlessly long winded, and the tone was a bit "self important."

Currently re-reading Northern Lights, when I can find the time

Oh and Of Mice and Men and A View from the Bridge for English Lit.

Yes, I thought the writing quality was poor too. It was supposed to be witty perhaps but would have been patronising if I had given him the platform (you can't be patronised by somebody you don't respect ).
Also, he kept resorting to smut and swearwords when you least expect it.
Boring! I'll be putting it on Ebay next week

i've recently finished "the secret history" by donna tartt. wow. i couldn't leave it alone, both because it was so brilliant and because i was slightly concerned that to prolong reading it would cause me to lose my morality and sanity.

just started "Talking to the Dead" by Helen Dunmore
also the Cambridge Companion to Conducting

and music scores!

I really dont like a view from the bridge. Of mice and men is not bad though.

I have just finished reading this too. Quite gripping, but very bleak. I enjoyed The Kite Runner more.

Here's a couple of musical suggestions:-

An Equal Music (Vikram Seth)
Bel Canto (Ann Petchett)

Both brilliant reads.

At the moment I'm reading Lark Rise to Candleford - because I think they are fictionalising the TV series too much.

Yeah, I don't particularly like A View from the Bridge... and it is rather depressing having two books both ending in death...

Re The Solitaire Mystery: am I the only one who found it strange that Hans-Peter could read the miniature book with a magnifying glass on a long car journey along winding mountain roads and not get carsick?

I read Sophie's World for the first time last year. Don't want to say what I thought of it because it would spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it!


You could always ask me, I have Asperger's (not that I understand myself that well )

This book will save your life.

It's good.

Yep it's a good read and has a particularly yummy cover.... (which is why it caught my eye in the bookshop although I've given all that stuff up with my so-called healthy eating kick for '08.... hahahaha(ironic laughter))

I'm currently reading The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown.

Duma Key by Stephen King

"The Reaper Man", Terry Pratchett

Also reading "Lord of the Flies" for school - HATE it!!!

'At Swim Two Birds', Flann O'Brien

Books currently on my bedside table:
50 ideas in physics you should know
50 ideas in mathematics you should know
The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder
The Lunar Men

I finished 'Space is a Funny Place' by Colin Pilinger (of Beagle 2 fame) last night...so I don't know what I'm going to pick up tonight, it might be something else entirely (my 'unread book shelf' is going to very soon exceed one shelf, so I have to keep ploughing on through the quick reads on there!!)

Titus Andronicus (watched the film in a lecture - scary!)

My son's had that too

I'm reading Temeraire, by Naomi Novik. It's not really my sort of thing - Napoleonic War with dragons (I don't usually do dragons) - but I'm checking it out for my 12-year-old as it came from the adult section.

For myself I've been reading some Pat MacIntosh mysteries, set in 15th-century Glasgow.

Bedside table? Luckily I am under no such restrictions! Sleeping on the floor means that I can have books in stacks of 10, along the entire length of my futon

Recently found...Indivisible by Four, Goodnight Mr. Tom (again again), Master and Commander et. al. (again), dictionary of etymology, Underwood See trilogy (passed on to Viohazard), Hungry Cities set (passed on to Airman), Conspiracy of Paper (David Liss, passed on to Mr. Ears), Moonfleet dug up from some forgotten spot, Tokyo Station, Andrew Murray, Kage Baker...

well... I'm the sort of persion that satrts a book, gets about half way through and starts a new one.
I have 7 books on my bedside table.
just finished The House at Riverton and A history of western philosophy.
and I'm now reading the Iliad (I got boared of the odessy), also trying to finish Bhagavad Gita, miltons paradise lost, shakespere King lear, Othello, winters tale and mid sommernights dream.
and that red book by kate someone about debussy and tarot cards.

there are more but I can't remember them.

I am reading a novel 'Between Each Breath' by Adam Thorpe. Its about a promising young British composer, married to Millie (from a posh family) Adam goes off to Estonia as he is a fan of Arvo Part, however whilst there falls in love with a waitress who happens also to play the violin........

I'm reading 'The Physics of Musical Instruments' by Fletcher and Rossing. It's aimed at 'people with a reasonable grasp of physics'. I have a feeling this just means that they don't expect you to have a PhD in acoustics

Quietly plodding through Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It's all about patterns and systems and advanced physicsy stuff that makes my head hurt, but it's an incredible book. Part of the reason I love it is that it's taking so long to read - I read inhumanly fast (give me a free day with nothing else to do, and I can read Lord of the Rings plus appendices in around 13 hours) and it's actually quite nice to find a book that forces me to slow down

I've just finished 'The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles' by Julie Andrews Edwards.

My two eldest offspring have read it and Daughter said I should check it our before giving it back to my youngest (it's his book in the first place!) as it has some potentially scary bits in it. Found it an entertaining read, although the lessons about life were like water off a duck's back with my daughter - don't think she even noticed them!

And now I've just started 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' by John Boyne...

Also need to go back and finish Alan Paton's 'Cry, the Beloved Country' - had to stop as it got too sad.

Last book I read all the way through was "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink. It was recommended to me by one of the professors at uni in fourth year as we were covering a lot of the issues raised in the book in class, but I never got round to reading it. I really wanted to see the film though, and always like to have read the book first, so read the whole book in about two hours the night before the film came out! It was excellent and I wish I had read it when I was at uni, because the second half really was very relevant to what I was studying!

Am trying to read "Bleak House" at the moment, but not getting very far. I prefer, with a book I haven't read before, being able to sit down and just read big chunks at a time without interruptions (so long as a book is no longer than Harry Potter 5, reading the whole book in one sitting is preferred!); I can't really concentrate on a book if I just read a page here, and then a page there. And at the moment I can't seem to scrape together more than about fifteen minutes at a time for reading!

For those of you who have time, I highly recommend "Les Miserables", though make sure it's unabridged and a good translation - surprisingly difficult to get hold of!). It is one of the most extraordinary and moving books I have ever read. The prose is so, well, poetic...and for a 19th century, 1400 page novel, it's a surprisingly easy read; much, much easier to follow than Dickens, and the characters and their backgrounds are so much more fleshed out than they are on the stage. I'm pretty sure I have the Charles Wilbour translation, but I've seen a number of others, and I can't bear them - the ones with "modernised, easier to read language" are frankly painful! To me a nineteenth century translation is far more relevant and contextually accurate than a modern one! Sorry, random rant over!

I chose to read it for my French A Level coursework, (tried in French, then cheated and got a translation), and it was really amazing.

I'm reading Villette now, for my course, but it's really good, I'm actually enjoying it more than I enjoyed Jane Eyre, oddly.

I enjoyed that too.

Sophie's World is amazing, I was given it by a friend of mine for (if I remember correctly) my fourteenth birthday.

Oh, also has anyone read Kate Atkinson's "Behind the Scenes at the Museum"? It's absolutely superb: very clever and confusing and textured and many-layered, and I get something different out of every time I read it.

I'm reading both berlioz's and rimsky-korsakov's books on orchestration.

I haven't read Cry, the Beloved Country - but if you had to stop because it got too sad, I would suggest not reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I saw the film recently at the cinema, and was a sobbing heap by the end (no exaggeration!) Very embarrassing....

Just begun Crime and Punishment for some light relief!

I am re-reading 'The Bone Collector' (morbid but very clever!!) and am studying Chaucer's 'The Wife of Bath', as well as 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' in English. I'm not very keen on that last play - I can't bring myself to actually like any of the characters!

I've read this book, but quite a while ago but I remember it was good and really enjoyed it.

I'm currently reading The Survivor by Tom Cain. It follows on from his first book The Accident Man.

I'm reading Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - a strange little book about a governess in the 1920s/30s getting caught up in the world of cocktails and nightclubs, but in a lovely unthreatening way. It's a bit dated (naturally) but I really like it, and I've just found out it was made into a film at the end of last year.

And speaking of films of books, I saw a trailer for the film Moonacre last night and I don't think I'm going to like what they've done to The Little White Horse

That bad? Don't think I'll be going to see it in a hurry then!
But I'll be alright with the book Books don't reduce me to tears as much as films can. I really just put Cry, the Beloved Country aside for a while as it reminded me too much of the bad side of a really beautiful country. I read it for school when I was about 16 and didn't fully appreciate what the characters went through. But now that I'm much older (but not really much wiser ) I can better appreciate the injustice of it all. I'll finish it when I've read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but will probably have to read a couple of lightweights first!

I've just finished The Soloist by Steve Lopez which I really enjoyed and am now on to Salvage by Gee Williams - too early to tell how I feel about it.

Just finished " What's it all about? ", by Michael Caine. Very good to read.

Just finished reading John Suchets' "The Treasures of Beethoven".

"Culinary Artist" by Andrew Dornenburge and Karen Page. Not a novel but a book for anybody who is serious about food.

The book I am reading currently is "Alone in the wilderness" by Mike Tompkins. About a guy who left the trappings of London and moved into the Canadian wilderness.

"Calling on the Composer" by Julie and Stanley Sadie

Last Chorus- by Humphrey Lyttelton.

"Amsterdam" - by Ian McEwan
&
"Creative Visualisation" - by Shakti Gawain

'Tiger, Tiger' by the improbably named Galaxy Craze - not very impressed really and longing to finish it

"Goodbye, Mr Chips"
Saw the film when I was little and can't remember any of it:-(