Free Holiday Reading

Just a quickie to recommend that, if you're after some free holiday reading, you point your browser at the newly launched website www.blogaholidayread.co.uk today.

The site is operated by Penguin Books (UK). They say:

Blog a Holiday Read, the perfect excuse to put your feet up, relax, and escape into one of Penguin's Top 500 bestselling fiction titles, guaranteed to get the nation talking, and you yearning for a break to soak up some top reads. Here's how it works:

Sign up and, if you're quick enough, you'll become one of the lucky people to receive a randomly chosen, FREE Penguin in the post. Plus you'll be the first to review it here, enabling the blog, and comments, to begin!

You can see the books being promoted on the website - there's a wide range, from Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years to The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, you don't get to choose which book you receive, but I guess that's part of the fun ;-)

As you may gather from the quote above, if you want to participate in this promotion, you are meant to read the book and submit a review to the Holiday Read Blog within six weeks of receiving it.

As far as I can tell this promotion is open to anyone in the world. In any event, you are asked to enter the country you live in when registering. Don't hang about, though, as this promotion will close as soon as all the free books have been allocated.

Good luck, and I hope you get a book you like!

P.S. I've just heard that I've been allocated Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore - 'A compelling and passionate psychological thriller'. Sounds good to me!

P.P.S. If you apply and are successful, why not add a comment here letting me and other readers know which book you are getting?

P.P.S.S. Just heard they are fully subscribed already, within a few hours of my posting about it. Very sorry if you tried and missed out.

How Well Read Am I?

Linda Jones recently tagged me on a meme about what bloggers have and haven't read. You have to look at the list and:

1) Bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read.

3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

Incidentally, as I understand it the list in question comes from the American Big Read survey of the 100 most popular books there. The list differs somewhat from the UK Big Read list. As you might expect, a few more American titles are included!

Anyway, here's my version...

1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]
4 [Harry Potter series - JK Rowling]
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 [Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 [Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy]
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 MISSING
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 [Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding]
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 [The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro]
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I make that 59, so I still have quite a few titles left to read! Although there may be one or two books in the list I read long ago and have now forgotten about - Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree Collection, for example.

Looking at my list also makes me realise that I seem to have steered away from reading most Russian authors. That's definitely something I shall have to remedy before too long...

I must admit also that there are one or two books in the list I know almost nothing about - in particular, the titles by Rohinton Mistry (86) and Mitch Albom (88). Perhaps these books are better known in the US than in the UK? Anyway, if you've read either of these titles, I'd be interested to hear your opinions on them.

I'm tagging Suzie, Carrie and June next, because they all volunteered when I posted a request on my forum (I didn't like to just nominate people). You can also see Linda's list here. Between us, it seems, we've actually read the great majority of the books in the top 100!