'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Whoops, missed this yesterday

"To post seven books I love, one book per day. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Everyday I'll ask a friend to share the challenge. Let's share the joy of our favourite books and discover new ones!"

Day 6: The Children of Green Knowe, by Lucy M. Boston

Image credit: https://www.encorebooks.co.uk/the-children-of-green-knowe-6

Today I challenge... bunn!

"To post seven books I love, one book per day. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Everyday I'll ask a friend to share the challenge. Let's share the joy of our favourite books and discover new ones!"

Day 4: Lady Knight, by Tamora Pierce

Image credit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135158.Lady_Knight

Today on LJ I challenge... puddleshark!

"To post seven books I love, one book per day. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Everyday I'll ask a friend to share the challenge. Let's share the joy of our favourite books and discover new ones!"

Day 2: The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll with notes by Martin Gardner

Image credit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42288580-the-annotated-alice

And I challenge... pleaseremove!

Right, you've had your week and it's time for the results!

1. But, that armour is just for show...
   You should know by now, Dilaf. Nothing I do is just for show.
   Dilaf and Hrathen, Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
   Guessed by ladyofastolat
2. I need an election adjusted.
   How adjusted?
   As a cautious estimate? I need it rigged from top to bottom.
   Patience and Jean, The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
   Guessed by ariskari
3. What fate? Burn your hearts, what fate?
   To marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons!
   To die and live again, and live once more a part of what was!
   To give up half the light of the world to save the light of the world!
   Mat and the Aelfinn, The Wheel of Time: The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan
   Guessed by rustica
4. But if I change back, it'll take me at least half the night to make a new Charter-skin. We'll miss dinner - and the midnight rounds.
   Some things are worth missing dinner for.
   Lirael and the Disreputable Dog, Lirael by Garth Nix
   Guessed by rustica
5. You were Will's age then, up on your mountain. And you saw me... riding.
   Riding on the wind.
   Merriman and John Rowlands, Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
   Guessed by ladyofastolat
6. To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that. But anyone can find out what will happen.
   Aslan, The chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
   Guessed by ariskari
7. Barbecued billygoats!
   Nancy Blackett, Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
   Guessed by rustica
8. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
   The Red Queen, Through the Looking-glass by Lewis Carroll
   Sort-of guessed by ladyofastolat (you did get it right, I just fail at reading LJ comments)
9. You know, Lieutenant, I've seen the summary of the Board of Inquiry. The final paragraph specifically notes that you are not to be in command of any combat vessel until such time as you have demonstrated competence in relevant training exercises. Yet I find that your citation says you took command of the vessel Antberd's Axe which subsequently engaged enemy vessels in a hostile encounter. Your commander praises your initiative, when I would think he should condemn your blatant disregard of the findings of that Board of Inquiry. Do you have anything to say, Lieutenant?
   Well, sir, my recollection is that the Board said I should not command any R.S.S. combat vessels until further training... it didn't say anything about Bloodhorde ships.
   Admiral Foxworth and Lieutenant Suiza, Once a Hero by Elizabeth Moon
10. That sentry ship attack a few minutes ago. You were able to tell from that that those were Elomin ships?
    Learn about art, Captain. When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.
    Captain Pellaeon and Grand Admiral Thrawn, Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

And now to see who guessed the most:

ariskari: 2 points
ladyofastolat: 2.5 points 3 points (I fail at reading LJ comments)
rustica: 3 points

Well, the joint winners are ladyofastolat and rustica! Congratulations, you both win at the internet!

I'm surprised at how few people I've seen around wearing poppies this year. There were a reasonable number of people wearing them in town at the weekend, but at work I've only seen one other person wearing a poppy. I do feel a little bit like the odd one out.

On a semi-related note, I've recently found a new book series to read: The Pendragon Adventure. In the series there's multiple worlds, linked by hidden magic gates. Each of these worlds is approaching a turning point which will radically alter the fate of not only that world, but all the worlds. Fortuantly each world has a Traveller who's jobs is to help guide the world to the good outcome, and can use the gates to get around between worlds. Unfortuantly there's a resident bad guy in the form of Saint Dane, who basically wants chaos. The books alternate between the viewpoint of Bobby Pendragon (a young Traveller from earth), and a couple of his friends back on Earth. The series was written by an American with the back-on-Earth segments set in New York, so it's chock full of Americanisms.

Anyway, book three of the series is actually about a turning point back on Earth, in 1937. The thing that surprised me is that while the Nazis are the obvious opponent of the book, it takes the main characters (who have travelled back in time from the present day) quite some time to realise this. Now in a British book with the same premise it'd be immediately obvious to them.

It got me wondering a bit about the impact of WW2 in different countries. In Britain you don't have to go far at all to find some sort of reminder - the countryside is littered with concrete pillboxes, every village has a war memorial, and they're *still* finding unexploded bombs every few months. But what about in other countries? Are there any physical reminders, or is it all just ancient history?

The only downside to being a bookworm and a fast reader is that good, easy-to-read books don't last long. That and I surface from the book to find that the day has suddenly vanished and I've not eaten yet.

This brought to you by Ali Sparkes' Shapeshifter series, which I recommend you all go and read right now. I should warn you that the rest of this post is me musing about the series, and contains massive spoilers.

( Consider yourself warned )

Anyway, having read that I'm now in search of the next series to read. (I'm also reading the Wheel of Time series, but I picked up Shapeshifter as well as I was always waiting for one or the other to make its way to my local library - there's never enough copies!). So, what have you all been reading recently, and do you have any recommendations?

Sharing is Caring: Day three
For one week, recommend/share:

• Day one: a song: Tattered Slippers (by DarkeSword), a remix of Midna's Lament from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess


• Day two: a picture: West pier (taken by me)


• Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic: you get two today, the Zelda fanfic The Mirror's Twin and the Sheikah (by the Aku Soku Zan Syndicate), and the paper book The Time and Space of Uncle Albert (by Russell Stannard)


• Day four: a site


• Day five: a youtube clip


• Day six: a quote


• Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

Guardian 'books you can't live without' meme (courtesy of shewhohashope).


These are the Guardian's 'Books you can't live without'.

Bold the ones you've read.
Italicise the books or series you've read parts of.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (started reading this as part of English coursework. As with other books, I actually enjoyed it)
The Bible (I've probably read the whole Bible by now)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare (it's the sort of writing that grows on you. It helps to see good productions of the plays as well)
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (somewhere I have a sketch of Bag End I did many many years ago)
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ('twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe...)
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (this was one of the main books of my childhood, and is one of my favourite series of all.)
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams (I only actually read this a couple of years ago, in response to a few postings on a forum. Good book)
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (only seen the film)
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo


There's quite a number that I've not read. I'm also suprised at what's not listed - obviously there's a lot more books, but one that stands out to me is Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence. That I think may be my favourite series of all, and Greenwitch possibly my favourite book of all. I have always loved Cornwall, and when reading it I can actually visualise the surroundings. The funny little room in the Grey House, with the little porthole of a window, reminds me of somewhere. If only I knew where...

Dom, let me be among the first to wish you happy birthday.

Yes, I am still up. I'm vaguely considering staying up to see the sun rise, which is something I've not been awake for for many years.

( Long late-night random ramble )

Nabbed from nendil

1. Choose five to ten of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess!

I've censored things where it would be blatently obvious. Oh, and not all are books. About half are computer games. Come to think of it, not all the books are my all-time favourites, since I don't have them with me at uni. So they're whatever I have to hand that I particularly like. But yeah, guess away!

1. I am Doctor Thadeus P. Brain the 3rd. The P stands for Puzzle.
2. These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks.
3. ~ never knew for certain why he started seeing the dead.
4. I don't think my stepfather much minded dying.
5. This is a story of courage, honour and worms. [Worms (the Wormsong) ~ ptristan]
6. Ahhh! There's nothing like a foot massage at the end of a long day....
7. A long, long time ago... when the world was on the verge of being swallowed by shadow... [Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap ~ nendil]
8. ~ was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: [Alice in Wonderland ~ nendil]
9. I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. [Myst ~ ricold]