books what I have read…

Thanks to farli for the list and the inspiration:
Books in bold are ones I’ve read.
Any in bold with an asterisk (*) are ones I’ve tried to read but failed so far.
Books in italics are ones already on my to-read list before today.
Books in normal print are ones I’m not interested in (perhaps some of you can convince me one of these is a must-read!)

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown) – I will never read this book!
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) – first proper book I read
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) – had to read it at school
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)*
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)*
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) Known as ‘Cross Stitch’ in the UK.
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) – no more about Dan Brown please
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling) – now the films are out I have lost inspiration for Harry Potter reading.
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell) – one of my fav’ books
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible – still doing this one
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)*
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) – love it
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling) – I think I read this one – lost track now
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)* – never going to try read it again
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) – read this when I had insomnia
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)* – great musical (got stuck on the book – perhaps I should have tried to read it in English?)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timoth Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

book of common prayer

Tonight I am making my debut on the floor of Trinity College Chapel as the Deacon for James Steven at the college communion. This week we are using the Book of Common Prayer, common worship, order one. Oh Joy. As I am dyslexic and I go on panic mode with words I don’t know this has meant that I have had to learn by sight the entire service. It has been a long night and morning. I am still not sure I have all the words in the right order. However, I will have the sheet to guide me – so it’s not like learning Shakespeare from scratch without a script (oh yes, those were the days).

I have checked the clerical wear cupboard and found a snazzy cassock and surplus that fits (shame they don’t come in other colours). I look a bit of a pudding in it though – what I look like in my head bears no relation to reality: inside I think I look kinda cool, bit rugged and am someone who can carry clerical wear; the reality is I am chubby and slightly physically overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of material involved. I will see if a picture can be taken so that I can get some feedback on my look.

To add to anxiety the speaker this evening is the director of Christian Aid – Daleep Mukarji who is a bit of a hero. Hey ho. I am sure all will be fine.

glam rock

As you know I am writing a PhD on music hall. So, I need to read books about popular music as well as theology stuff for my work at Trinity. Lately this work has been held up by a minor scuffle with the University of Liverpool about my fees and status – they wanted more money (which I don’t have), and hadn’t moved me to ‘thesis pending’. It is nearly all sorted now but it has been a bit of a hassle.

Meanwhile my super supervisor (Sara Cohen) and I have been able to get down to some proper work. I have written a new introduction which has shifted the thesis into another place and hopefully on to another level. I am planning to get a load more work done after Trinity 1/2 term and over Easter (as long as I get all my theology essays done efficiently). So, my hard work should start to bear some good fruit soon. With this in mind I had renewed energy to do some additional reading. Yesterday I read Auslander’s Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music which may appear to be not about music hall but actually is all about the theatricality of popular performance. It ties so well into my work – not only in terms of the way he discusses the performative of the popular but also the way in which popular performers create stage personae. It really is a cracking book. Well worth a read.

Unfortunately, I think I have put too many ideas in my head again. Stuff is swimming around. Mad dreams about the psalms, Walter Brueggemann, glam rock and Bob Marley. Hey ho!

england’s dreaming

http://www.youtube.com/v/BrG_-V6_KaU

Just got on a bit of a Clash tip this week. So, I have been searching out punk stuff and remembering some MA Popular Music Studies seminars where we argued the toss over The Sex Pistols vs The Clash (the Clash always won – on account of their moral high ground – though respect was always given to Johnny Rotten for forming PIL). Well, whilst on my trip around the world of punk I discovered that Jon Savage (of England’s Dreaming fame sold his collection of punk memorabilia – which is cunningly referred to as England’s Dreaming Punk Archive to none other than John Moore’s University, Liverpool. I would love to get my hands on this lot. It is described as:

This eclectic collection – fanzines, ephemera, posters, original letters and documents, photographs, notebooks and much more – covers the history of the punk phenomenon. Purchased from Jon Savage in 2002, this collection has only basic contents listings available.

The archive is just sitting there and no-one seems to have done much with it. It hasn’t even been archived electronically. Please please could someone follow this up and get it out in public. Just because Jon Savage did such an amazing job of documenting, summarising and commenting on the impact of punk in England doesn’t surely mean the story should end there. I would love to do this job myself but I am afraid I am a bit busy just now writing a PhD about music hall and doing a Theology degree.

Billy Bragg has signed my book!

I have just realised that my copy of Billy Bragg’s book has been signed by the man himself! What a pleasant surprise…

Little England. My lovely home

I have just finished reading Billy Bragg’s Progressive Patriot. I wrote my MA thesis on Bily Bragg’s music and the way in which he mixed pop and politics (I did my MA in Popular Music Studies and the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool – which is now supervising my PhD). This thesis focused very much on Billy Bragg’s music and the way in which lyrically he mixed his ordinary experiences with the struggles of political living.

What I found facinating in Bragg’s book is the way in which he weaves his-story around music and politics, family and notions of nationhood. He deals with the microcosm of people’s every day experiences in relation to the the macrocosm of the society within which they exist: His response to seeing the Clash at the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, 9 May 1977 in relation to the rise of the BNP; the contextualising of his family life with the events recorded in is grandfather’s war diary. Bragg emphasises this sense that the individual’s story is history and each tale makes up the bigger picture of nationhood history. Perhaps until quite recently the domination of meta-narratives have meant that us ‘little peolpe’ haven’t been able to shape the recorded history of our nation. The rise of ‘people’s histories’ (e.g. the bbc’s People’s War) might have gone some way to change this. But I wonder how many of us actually feel empowered by our own history and the way in which we relate this to the big story of our nation?

In this book I think Billy Bragg has attempted to reclaim his story and the way in which he relates this to his sense of himself as an Englishman. But his is not a lazy imprint of common notions of patriotism, he is attempting to search for new ways of identifying with nationhood. Not necessaily finding answers but certainly asking some relevant questions.