Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

 

 

I have setup an E-Book library at work.  All the books in the E-Book library are from Gutenberg website.  This offers free E-Books that are out of copyright.  I try to read some classics when I have a break.  I've been reading Peter Pan for awhile now and finally finished today. 

 

I wasn't sure what to expect with this book.  I've watched the cartoon and various movie adaptations over the years.  I didn't think any of them were any good (except this one and I guess I didn't mind this one which had the most beautiful Tinkerbell ever!) so I wasn't sure what to expect with this book.  It is very whimsical.  It made me laugh in parts.  A solid kids book.  Not very dark with enough drama and a pinch of making fun of adults that every child loves. 

 

This book is a great accompaniment to the movies and I would suggest all parents either read or give it to your kids to read. 

 

I give this book 7/10

Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell

 

 

I had a mixed reaction to this book.  The writing was superb and the story itself was entertaining and riveting.  I guess the problem I had was I wanted to know more.  What had happened to Mr. Orwell in 1928 that had him down and out?  It just starts off with him being hard up.  I wanted to know how he got there.  The book is jam packed with interesting characters and mad situations.  The black humour is plentiful, the descriptions of hunger and idleness are exact.  If anything there is too much of it.  By the end of the book you are beat over the head with tales of hunger and the scams that people on the street pull to get a cup of tea and loaf of bread.  You also get the feeling that the author is holidaying as a tramp.  That he could get out when ever it suited him.  The book was released in the early 1930's and the antisemitism is rife.  Not so much from the author but from the people in the book.  Most of the people he encounters in Paris are Russians who have fled from the revolution. That left me a little cold.

 

The weird thing about reading down and out is that the last 30 or 40 pages were read during a 2 day power outage at my house.  Brisbane Australia is currently undergoing its 2nd flood in 3 years and we have been without power.  I thought that it was right and just that this was the book I was reading.....saying that I was reading the book on my Kindle and I also had a book light.  So maybe not so primitive after all.

 

I do wonder if I would have had a better reception to this book if I had just not read a grief observed and the power and glory.  2 very sad and depressing books.  Maybe it wasn't time for me to start another book about being down and out.  Lesson learned for the next time.  Saying that the next book I am reading is - The Crusades through Arab Eyes – Amin Maalouf - I hear that's a laugh a minute.

 

I rate Down and out in Paris and London 7 out of 10.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

 

I have not had the pleasure of reading any books by Graham Greene before I read the Power and the Glory.  What a shame.  This novel has moved me deeply.  The book is considered by many to be his masterpiece and I can see why.  I could not put it down and completed it in just over 2 days.

 

The story follows a priest in Tabasco Mexico that is being hunted down because he is a priest.  In certain states in Mexico in the 1940's the Marxists had come to power and this revolution lead to the violent suppression of the Catholic Church by the "Red Shirts".  Priests were killed and church land confiscated.  I'm an atheist and believe the church and any religion has led man down the garden path and as soon as mankind kicks religion off our pant leg and we swim for shore the world will be a better place.  But I am also a pacifist and reject violence done to anyone for their beliefs to be wrong and disgusting.

 

The most powerful scene in the book is when the priest has to steal a bone off a dog to eat because of hunger.  He is being pursued from town to town by the authorities and in many ways becomes an animal himself.  What I also loved about this book is that the priest was not represented as a perfect character or a saint.  His flaws are on the surface and very human.  There is a unique Judas character that floats through the book that was also pulls you in all sorts of directions.

 

I'm very curious to read more Graham Greene.  If Hemingway is my North Pole and Oscar Wilde is my South Poll then I think Greene can be my equator.  I rate this book 10 out of 10.

 

My next book is Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell.

 



Oscar Wilde and C.S. Lewis

 

 

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis are two of the saddest memoirs I have ever read.  2 modern day literary giants at the lowest points of their lives and its documented in these wonderful reads.

 

De Profundis finds Oscar Wilde in prison serving a 2 year sentence for gross indecency.  Meaning he was in prison for being gay.  De Profundis released in 1905 (5 years after his death) is a letter written to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas.  Wilde is defeated in this memoir.  The world has broken him.  Gone is the witty and humorous Wilde.  He has been replaced by a sad beaten man.  Still present is his genius.  He weaves his magic and we see inside his soul.  If only Wilde lived in an age where his sexual preference mattered little.  How many more works of brilliance would we have? 

 

 

A Grief Observed has C.S. Lewis devastated after the death of his wife to bone cancer.  Lewis married later in life and the death of his wife had him question his relationship with God.  In the early chapters he wonders if God actually exists.  I found this fascinating.  C.S. Lewis one of the greatest modern Christian apologists is at the cross roads.  This made me love Lewis even more.  I like writers that have dirt under their fingernails and this sad lament was moving.  As the book draws to a close the writer renews his relationship with God and we see a hopeful Lewis look forward to his future.

 

If you want to see two masters at work pick up De Profundis and A Grief Observed.  You will not be disappointed.

 

The next book I will be reading is The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

 



The 501 must read books (the ones I have read are in red)

Complete List of 501 Must Read Books

Children’s Literature

1.Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
2.Fairy Tales – Hans Christian Andersen
3.Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie
4.The Wonderful World of Oz – L. Frank Baum
5.The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle
6.The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
7.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
8.Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
9.Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
10.Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder
11.The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – Alan Garner
12.The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
13.Children’s and Household Tales – Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
14.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
15.Emil and the Detectives – Erich Kästner
16.Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
17.The Complete Nonsense Books – Edward Lear
18.A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
19.The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
20.Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
21.Dr Dolittle – Hugh Lofting
22.At the Back of the North Wind – George Macdonald
23.Nobody’s Boy – Hector Malot
24.Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne
25.Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
26.Five Children and It – E. Nesbit
27.Tom’s Midnight Garden – Philippa Pearce
28.The War of the Buttons – Louis Pergaud
29.Fairy Tales – Charles Perrault
30.The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
31.The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett
32.Northern Lights – Philip Pullman (aka. The Golden Compass)
33.Swallows and amazons – Arthur Ransome
34.Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang – Mordecai Richler
35.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
36.The King of the Golden River – John Ruskin
37.The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
38.The Human Comedy – William Saroyan
39.The Misfortunes of Sophie – Comtesse de Segur
40.Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak
41.And To Think That I Saw It On Mulburry Street – Dr Seuss
42.Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
43.The Golem – Isaac Bashevis Singer
44.Heidi – Johanna Spyri
45.Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
46.The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
47.Mary Poppins – P.L. Travers
48.Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
49.The Sword in the Stone – T.H. White
50.Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – Kate Douglas Wiggin
51.The Happy Prince and Other Tales – Oscar Wilde

Classic Fiction

52.The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
53.The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
54.Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55.Old Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
56.Vathek: an Arabian Tale – William Beckford
57.Lady Audley’s Secret – Mary Elisabeth Braddon
58.Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
59.Wuthering Heights – Emil Brontë
60.The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
61.The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chauser
62.The Collected Stories – Anton Chekhov
63.The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
64.Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure – John Cleland
65.The Moonstone: a Romance – Wilkie Collins
66.The Hound of Baskerville – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
67.Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
68.Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
69.The Christmas Books – Charles Dickens
70.Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
71.Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
72.Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life – George Eliot
73.Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
74.The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
75.Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
76.Howards End – E.M. Forster
77.North and South – Elisabeth Gaskell
78.The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79.The Vicar of Wakefiled – Oliver Goldsmith
80.The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
81.King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
82.Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
83.The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
84.Moby Dick – Herman Melville
85.The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
86.The Iliad – Homer
87.Les Misérables (The Wretched) – Victor Hugo
88.Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
89.Kim – Rudyard Kipling
90.Bliss and Other Stories – Katherine Mansfield
91.Utopia – Sir Thomas More
92.Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque – Edgar Alan Poe
93.In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
94.A Silician Romance – Anne Radcliffe
95.Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
96.Waverley – Sir Walter Scott
97.Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
98.The Red and the Black – Stendhal
99.The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
100.Dracula – Bram Stoker
101.Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
102.Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thakeray
103.War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
104.Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope
105.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
106.Candide, or Optimism – Voltaire
107.The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
108.The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
109.The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
110.To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
111.La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola

History
112.London The Biography – Peter Ackroyd
113.Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life – John Lee Anderson
114.The Hour of Our Death – Philippe Aries
115.Berlin The Downfall – Antony Beevor
116.The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II – Fernand Braudel
117.The Pleasures of Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century – John Brewer
118.Frozen Desire: An Enquiry Into the Meaning of Money – James Buchan
119.Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives – Alan Bullock
120.The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy – Jacob Burckhardt
121.Daily Life in Ancient Rome – Jerome Carcopino
122.The Accursed Kings – Maurice Druon
123.The Age of the Cathedrals – Georges Duby
124.The Stripping of the Altars – Eamon Duffy
125.Rites of Spring – Modris Eksteins
126.The Wretched of the Earth – Franz Fanon
127.Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire – Niall Ferguson
128.Millennium – Felipe Fernández-Armesto
129.Pagans and Christians – Robin Lane Fox
130.The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama
131.The Naked Heart – Peter Gay
132.The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
133.The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy – Martin Gilbert
134.The Cheese and the Worms – Carlo Ginzburg
135.God’s First Love – Friedrich Heer
136.Histories – Herodotus
137.Hiroshima – John Hersey
138.The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes
139.Pandaemonium – Humphrey Jennings
140.A History of Warfare – John Keegan
141.A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies – Bartolomé de las Casas
142.Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Thomas Edwards Lawrence
143.Islam in History – Bernard Lewis
144.Chinese Shadows – Simon Leys
145.The Crusades through Arab Eyes – Amin Maalouf
146.The Defeat of the Spanish Armada – Garrett Mattingly
147.The Story of English – Robert Mccrum, William Cran, Robert Macneil
148.The Ornament of the World – Maria Rosa Menocal
149.The Women’s History of the World – Rosalind Miles
150.Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire – Jan Morris
151.Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade – Henri Pirenne
152.Parallel Lives – Plutarch
153.Flesh in the Age of Reason – Roy Porter
154.Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution – Simon Schama
155.Leviathan and the Air-Pump – Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer
156.The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler
157.The Trial of Socrates – Isador Stone
158.Annals of Imperial Rome – Tacitus
159.The Origins of the Second World War – A.J.P. Taylor
160.A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara M. Tuchman
161.A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn

Memoirs

162.Paula – Isabel Allende
163.Journal Intime – Henri-Frédéric Amiel
164.Aubrey’s Brief Lives – John Aubrey
165.Confessions – Augustine
166.Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter – Simone de Beauvoir
167.My Left Foot – Christy Brown
168.The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini – Benvenuto Cellini
169.The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus – Cyril Connolly
170.Boy: Tales of Childhood – Roald Dahl
171.My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell
172.An Angel at my Table – Janet Frame
173.The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
174.Journals 1889-1949 – Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
175.Poetry and Truth: From My Own Life – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
176.Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments – Edmund Gosse
177.Ways of Escape – Graham Greene
178.Black Like Me – John Howard Griffin
179.84, Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff
180.Pentimento – Lillian Hellman
181.Childhood, Youth and Exile – Alexander Herzen
182.The Diary of Alice James – Alice James
183.Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections – Carl Gustav Jung
184.Diaries 1919-23 – Franz Kafka
185.The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
186.The Book of Margery Kempe – Margery Kempe
187.I Will Bear Witness – Victor Klemperer
188.In the Castle of My Skin – George Lamming
189.A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
190.The Towers of Trebizond – Rose Macauley
191.Journal of Katherine Mansfield – Katherine Mansfield
192.The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
193.The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
194.Borrowed Time – Paul Monette
195.My Place – Sally Morgan
196.Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited – Vladimir Nabokov
197.Reading Lolita in Teheran: A Memoir in Books – Azar Nafisi
198.Memoirs – Pablo Neruda
199.Portrait of a Marriage – Nigel Nicolson
200.Running in the Family – Michael Ondaatje
201.Down an Out in Paris and London – George Orwell
202.Autobiography of a Yogi – Paramahansa Yogananda
203.Diary – Samuel Pepys
204.Letters – Pliny The Younger
205.Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
206.Words – Jean-Paul Sartre
207.Journal of a Solitude – May Sarton
208.Walden – Henry David Thoreau
209.De Profundis – Oscar Wilde
210.Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
211.Autobiographies – William Butler Yeats

Modern Fiction

212.Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
213.Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands – Jorge Amado
214.Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
215.Take a Girl Like You – Kingsley Amis
216.Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
217.Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
218.The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
219.Tales of Odessa – Isaak Babel
220.Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
221.The Sweet Hereafter – Russell Banks
222.The Regeneration Trilogy – Pat Barker
223.Herzog – Saul Bellow
224.Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
225.Nadja – André Breton
226.The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
227.The Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
228.Possession – A.S. Byatt
229.If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
230.The Outsider – Albert Camus
231.Auto da Fé – Elias Canetti
232.Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
233.The Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
234.The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
235.What We Talk about When We Talk about Love – Raymond Carver
236.The Horse’s Mouse – Joyce Carey
237.Journey to the End of Night – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
238.Soldier of Salamis – Javier Cercas
239.The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever
240.Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
241.Chéri – Colette
242.Victory – Joseph Conrad
243.A House and Its Head – Ivy Compton-Burnett
244.Fifth Business – William Robertson Davies
245.Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
246.Underworld – Don Delillo
247.Seven Gothic Tales – Isak Dinesen ( also known as Karen Blixen )
248.Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Doblin
249.Once Were Warriors – Alan Duff
250.Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
251.The Lover – Marguerite Duras
252.The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence George Durrell
253.The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
254.The Neverending Story – Michael Ende
255.The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
256.The Wars – Timothy Findley
257.The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford
258.Wildlife – Richard Ford
259.A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
260.The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
261.Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
262.The Blue Flower – Penelope Fitzgerald
263.From the Fifteenth District – Mavis Gallant
264.One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
265.Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet
266.Lord of the Flies – William Golding
267.July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
268.FerdyDurke – Witold Gombrowicz
269.The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
270.Hunger – Knut Hamsun
271.The Blind Owl – Sadegh Hedayat
272.The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
273.The Glass Bead Game – Hermann Hesse
274.Lost Horizon – James Hilton
275.A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes
276.The World According to Garp – John Irving
277.Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
278.The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
279.Ulysses – James Joyce
280.The File on H – Ismail Kadare
281.The Trial – Franz Kafka
282.It – Stephen King
283.The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
284.The Leopard – Guiseppe Di Lampedusa
285.The Diviners – Margaret Laurence
286.Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
287.The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
288.The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
289.Changing Places – David Lodge
290.The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – J.M. Machado de Assis
291.The Cairo Trilogy – Naguib Mahfouz
292.The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
293.God’s Grace – Bernard Malamud
294.An Imaginary Life – David Malouf
295.The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
296.Embers – Sándor Márai
297.Life of Pi – Yann Martel
298.Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
299.The Group – Mary McCarthy
300.The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
301.Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
302.The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
303.A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
304.Cold Heaven – Brian Moore
305.Beloved – Toni Morrison
306.The Progress of Love – Alice Munro
307.The Sea, the Sea – Iris Murdoch
308.Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
309.A House for Mr Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
310.The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brian
311.A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
312.The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
313.Where the Jackals Howl – Amos Oz
314.The Messiah of Stockholm – Cynthia Ozick
315.Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
316.Mr. Weston’s Good Wine – T.F. Powys
317.The Nephew – James Purdy
318.Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
319.Barney’s Version – Mordecai Richler
320.Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
321.The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
322.The Human Stain – Philip Roth
323.The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
324.Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
325.Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan
326.Short Stories – Saki
327.Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
328.Staying On – Paul Scott
329.Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
330.Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr.
331.Unless – Carol Shields
332.The Magician of Lublin – Isaac Bashevis Singer
333.The Engineer of Human Souls – Josef Skvorecky
334.The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
335.The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
336.The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
337.Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
338.Perfume – Patrick Süskind
339.The Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
340.Declares Pereira – Antonio Tabucchi
341.The White Hotel – D.M. Thomas
342.The Master – Colm Toibin
343.Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
344.The Palm-Wine Drinkard – Amos Tutuola
345.The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler
346.Couples – John Updike
347.The Time of the Hero – Mario Vargas Llosa
348.In Praise of Older Women – Stephen Vizinczey
349.Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
350.Voss – Patrick White
351.Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar

Science Fiction

352.The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Noel Adams
353.Hothouse – Brian Aldiss
354.Brain Wave – Poul Anderson
355.I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
356.The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
357.The Crystal World – J.G. Ballard
358.The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
359.Who Goes There – John W. Campbell
360.The Invention of Moral – Adolfo Bioy Casares
361.Planet of the Apes – Pierre Boule
362.The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
363.The Sheep Look Up – John Brunner
364.A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
365. Erewhon – Samuel Butler
366.Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino
367.2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
368.A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder – James De Mille
369.The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
370.To Your Scattered Bodies Go – Philip Jose Farmer
371.Neuromancer – William Gibson
372.Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A. Heinlein
373.Dune – Frank Herbert
374.Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
375.Two Planets – Kurd Lasswitz
376.Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
377.Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
378.Shikasta – Doris Lessing
379.Stepford Wives – Ira Levin
380.Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis
381.I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
382.Dwellers in the Mirage – Abraham Merritt
383.A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter Miller
384.Ringworld – Larry Niven
385.Time Traders – Andre Norton
386.Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
387.The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket – Edgar Allan Poe
388.The Inverted World – Christopher Priest
389.The Green Child – Herbert Read
390.The Laxian Key – Robert Sheckley
391.City – Clifford D. Simak
392.Donovan’s Brain – Curt Siodmak
393.Lest Darkness Fall – L. Sprague De Camp
394.Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
395.More than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
396.Slan – A.E. Van Vogt
397.A Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
398.Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade – Kurt Vonnegut
399.The Island of Dr Moreau – H.G. Wells
400.Islandia – Aistin Tappan Wright
401.The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

Thrillers

402.More Work for the Undertaker – Margery Allingham
403.Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly – John Franklin Bardin
404.Trent’s Last Case – E.C. Bentley
405.Trial and Error – Anthony Berkeley
406.The Poisoned Chocolates Case – Anthony Berkeley
407.The Beast Must Die – Nicholas Blake
408.Psycho – Robert Bloch
409.Double Indemnity – James Cain
410.Thus Was Adonis Murdered – Sarah Caudwell
411.Farewell, My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
412.No Orchids for Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
413.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
414.The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
415.Unnatural Expousre – Patricia Cornwell
416.The Moving Toyshop – Edmund Crispin
417.In the Last Analysis – Amanda Cross
418.Rose at Ten – Marco Denevi
419.Vendetta – Michael Dibdin
420.The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest – Peter Dickinson
421.He Who Whispers – John Dickson Carr
422.The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing
423.Blood Sport – Dick Francis
424.Quiet as a Nun – Lady Antonia Fraser
425.The Sunday Woman – Carlo Fruttero, Franco Lucentini
426.Death in the Wrong Room – Anthony Gilbert
427.Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
428.Suicide Excepted – Cyril Hare
429.Bones and Silence – Reginald Hill
430.A Rage in Harlem – Chester Himes
431.Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – Peter Hoeg
432.Malice Aforethought – Francis Iles
433.Hamlet, Revenge! – Michael Innes
434.The Murder Room – P.D. James
435.The Sleeping-Car Murders – Sebastien Japrisot
436.Death of My Aunt – C.H.B. Kitchin
437.The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – John Le Carre
438.The Mystery of the Yellow Room – Caston Leroux
439.The Last Detective – Peter Lovesey
440.Final Curtain – Ngaio Marsh
441.An Oxford Tragedy – J.C. Masterman
442.The Steam Pig – James McClure
443.The Seven Per Cent Solution – Nicholas Meyer
444.How Like An Angel – Margaret Millar
445.The Red House Mystery – A.A. Milne
446.A Red Death – Walter Mosley
447.Deadlock – Sara Paretsky
448.Dover One – Joyce Porter
449.The Chinese Orange Mystery – Ellery Queen
450.The Man in the Net – Patrick Quentin
451.A Judgement in Stone – Ruth Rendell
452.Gaudy Night – Dorothy L. Sayers
453.Mr Hire’s Engagement – Georges Simeon
454.The Laughing Policeman – Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
455.The Red Box – Rex Stout
456.the Man Who Killed Himself – Julian Symons
457.A Pin to See the Peep-Show – F. Tennyson Jesse
458.The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
459.Above the Dark Circus – Sir Hugh Walpole
460.Born Victim – Hillary Waugh
461.The Bride Wore Black – Cornell Woolrich

Travel Writing

462.Travels – Ibn Battuta
463.The Scorpion-Fish – Nicholas Bouvier
464.The Road to Oxiana – Robert Byron
465.In Patagonia – Bruce Charles Chatwin
466.The Voyage on HMS Beagle – Charles Darwin
467.My Journey to Lhasa – Alexandra David-Neel
468.On the Narrow Road to the Deep North – Lesley Downer
469.The Traveller’s Tree – Patrick Leigh Fermor
470.Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer
471.Kon Tiki – Thor Heyerdahl
472.The Purple Land – W.H. Hudson
473.The Last Place on Earth – Roland Huntford
474.Video Night in Kathmandu – Pico Iyer
475.Journey to the Hebrides – Samuel Johnson, James Boswell
476.Eothen – A.W. Kinglake
477.The Seasick Whale – Emphraim Kishon
478.A Rose for Winter – Laurie Lee
479.Golden Earth: Travels in Burma – Norman Lewis
480.The Cruise of the Snark – Jack London
481.Arctic Dreams – Barry Lopez
482.The Danube – Claudio Magris
483.The Snow Leopard – Peter Matthiessen
484.Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone – Jan Morris
485.Never Cry Wolf – Farley Mowat
486.Among the Believers: an Islamic Journey – V.S. Naipaul
487.A short Walk in the Hindu Kush – Eric Newby
488.Roads to Santiago – Cees Nooteboom
489.La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West – Francis Parkman
490.Into the Heart of Borneo – Raymond O’Hanlon
491.The Travels – Marco Polo
492.Dead Man’s Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson – Nicholas Rankin
493.Sailing Alone Around the World – Joshua Slocum
494.Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile – J.H. Speke
495.Travels with Charley: In Search of America – John Steinbeck
496.Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – Robert Louis Stevenson
497.The Valley of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels – Freya Stark
498.The Great Railway Bazaar – Paul Theroux
499.Southern Cross to Pole Star – A.F. Tschiffely
500.A Tramp Abroad – Mark Twain
501.On Fiji Islands – Ronald Wright

The Sword in the stone by T.H. White

 

 

Right now I am reading the Sword in the Stone by T.H. White.  I'm really enjoying this book.  It's the story of a very young King Arthur who meets the wizard Merlin for the first time.  The reader follows along as Wart (Arthur's nick name in the book) gets into all sorts of scrapes and adventures.  He meets Robyn Hood and goes into battle.  Meets a very comical King Pellinore who searches for the Qeusting Beast.  As part of his education Merlin turns the young Wart into a fish, snake and an Owl. 

 

I wish I had read this book when I was a kid.  It's exactly the type of book that I would have loved.  If you have a young child who loves reading adventure books pass this one onto them.  They will enjoy it. 

 

I rate this wonderful book an 8 out of 10.