Jilly Cooper - Jump

I am not ashamed to say that I am a Jilly Cooper fan. It started with me buying Riders when seeing it on sale at Maxi Mellbystrand. And the choice was a simple one - I love books an dI love horses. After that first book, I was sold. I fell in love with the characters (some) and consequently wanted to name my child Rupert. Meeting Boyfriend put a stop to that as he vetoed it - I may have given in but it's still one of the best names ever!!

Anyhow, Jump is the latest Jilly Cooper and was just recently released and because I am busy, I haven't actually finished it yet but 1/3 of the way - they're very thick and heavy - and I love it!

You know you're on to something good when it takes 15 minutes to read through the character- and animal list.

I don't think you have to be into horses to appreciate her books but it helps, and all you really have to get over is the horrendous 80's hairstyle Jilly Cooper is sporting on the sleeve. But it's a minor thing. You can always remove the dustcover when reading it.

I'll do an update when I've finished it.

Dear Lord...

...forgive me for I have sinned. I have read about 1000 books since I last posted and I have not yet "reviewed" a single one. What can I do?

Solution- start writing! And say 2 "Hail Books" before going to bed.

Will do.

Books waiting to be mentioned

I haven't "not been reading". Reading never stops. I've just not had the 'mojo' to write about them but trust me, they're a'coming.

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani
Finding Monsieur Right by Muriel Zagha
Chocolate Wishes by Trisha Ashley

and quite a few more...

It's back with a list!!

I found this list at Miss E's book blog What You Readin? It appears BBC estimates most people to have read 6 books of the list below. Let's see how well [badly] I've done...

x is for the ones I've read and o for the ones I've seen the dramatisations of.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x o
2 The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien x o
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë x o
4 Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling x o (half of them and then I got bored)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible x (The Old Testament)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë x o
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x o

11 Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien x (half of it)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x o
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh o
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x o
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x o

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x o
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen x o
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis o
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - A. A. Milne x

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x o
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x o
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery x o
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x o
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x o
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan o

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons o
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x o
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck o
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x o
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x o
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x o

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x o
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante x
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 x o
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x o
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro o
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E. B. White o
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x o
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute x o
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas o
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo o

I admit some of them were a looong time ago and I should probably read them again to "validate" it but this is it for now and to be honest there are some that I'll never read just for the simple reason that they do not appeal to me - at all - no matter how good they're supposed to be.

No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay

Cynthia Archer, 14 years old, is discovered in a car with an older boy by her father and she and her father argues and Cynthia screams that she hates her parents. When she woke up the next morning she discovers that she is all alone, her father, mother and brother have all disappeared.

25 years later Cynthia is trying to find the answers to what happened all those years ago and agrees to do a dramatisation for TV, hoping that someone will have the answers and to get her family back. Once aired it becomes clear that someone does not want Cynthia to investigate the disappearance of her family and she, and her own family, comes under threat.

...
At first this was a very exciting book and I liked the way it was written and the suspense was built up in a very thrilling way, urging me to read on. Sadly, this was not kept for the second part of the book and it sort of died on its arse becoming very predictable and all the excitement just vanished, very much like Cynthia Arher's family. All in all it wasn't a bad book - it just became one of the others, the ones that are all alike and one that I will have forgotten in a not too distant future. Read it if you fancy something familiar but be warned - bring another book to read as soon as you finish No Time for Goodbye.

Without A Backward Glance by Kate Veitch

The McDonald family were just about to celebrate Christmas when mother of 4, Rosemarie, told her children that she had to go out to buy some lights for the tree - she never came back. The lives of the four children changed forever as they had to adjust with a life without their mother. The family all moved on with their lives without speaking about the pain cased by the abandonment and how it affected them and the choices they made.

40 years later one of the children, James, encounters their mother by chance and everything that was kept under wraps surfaces again. Secrets kept for almost 40 years threatens all their relationships and they all have to face their past whether or not they want to.
...
This was a book that I picked up by chance as I'd finished all the books I'd brought with me for our holiday and as I left those books at the "leave one - take one" shelf at the hotel I had a quick glance at Kate Veitch's book and decided to take it.

I had no particular expectations as I'd never heard of it before and it was a decision made within 1 minute. It's an easy book to get in to and the characters are described in a very refreshing, honest way, I can see parts of myself in their traits and those of my own siblings. The characters as real as fictional characters can be and I found myself engrossed in their lives, feelings and decisions. I agreed and disagreed with their behaviour towards their mother and sometimes thinking "that was harsh" or "don't make it easy for her" etc etc.

Without A Backward Glance is Veitch's first novel and it's certainly one of the better "first novel" I've ever read and I'm looking forward to finding other books by her. This is not the type of book I usually read/pick up for a holiday but it was a good choice and I'd like to thank whomever put it on that shelf for allowing me to find Kate Veitch.

Aaaarrrghh!

Am still lazy and the panic continues to rise along with the pile/s of books that I haven't written about. I have started to write about most of them but it gets kind of blah, blah blah...bland and if I can't do a good book justice then I'd rather leave it.

I think I'll get a little notebook to jot down little ideas and things to say [write] about different books. Hopefully that'll help.