Tag Archives: 100 book challenge

August 3, 2015 · 3:59 PM

14. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (100 book challenge)

I’d never read a book about war. War stories reminded me of history class at school, which I never had much time for. What could you possibly learn from the details of war? I understood that war was bad and that should be avoided, but other than that I really wasn’t interested.

If I’d known Catch 22 was a war story I probably wouldn’t have put it next on my list for the 100 book challenge. I was familiar with the ‘catch 22’ concept – where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t – but I didn’t know its origins. So it was time to take that plunge and I opened to page 1 of the Heller’s classic.

Am I the only person who didn't know Catch 22 was about war?

Am I the only person who didn’t know Catch 22 was about war?

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May 17, 2015 · 7:24 PM

13. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (100 book challenge)

great gatsby

Invite me to your parties, Jay!

It’s the characters that make this story. The narrator, Nick, is fairly plain and uninteresting, but the people around him are such complex, intriguing and entertaining characters that I loved this book from beginning to end.

The story follows the life of the rich on Long Island in the 1920s. They invite themselves to parties, they complain about the heat and are utterly unhappy in their marriages. It’s the perfect recipe for an engaging story where the characters drive the plot, not the other way round.

After a few recent disappointments in my 100 book challenge, this was a refreshing change.

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May 13, 2015 · 8:45 PM

12. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom (100 book challenge)

Five people heaven

Number 12 on the 100 book challenge

Coming off the back of Pride and Prejudice, I needed something that was short, easy to read and straight to the point. This book promised all of these things. It delivered… but I was left with an uneasy feeling that the story could have been so much better. That it was almost a very good book.

The positives are many. For one, it’s a brilliant concept: that, at the moment of your death, you meet five integral people from your life to help you realise things about your life. Two, the characters are interesting. Three, the story is revealed slowly throughout without pages of info-dump.

But I didn’t love it.

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February 15, 2015 · 4:49 PM

10. Lord of the Flies – William Golding (100 book challenge)

A bunch of boys get stuck on a tropical island without any adults. Sounds pretty tame, doesn’t it?

Lord of the Flies (1954) was the 10th book on my 100 book challenge and drew me in from the very beginning. A group of boys are stranded on a desert island. At first it seems like paradise, but just a few pages in you start to see things going terribly wrong. The boys can’t agree on whether they should focus on being rescued (build a fire) or getting meat to eat (hunt pigs). The two main characters, Ralph and Jack, bicker, argue and viciously fight throughout the book. Everything falls apart quickly when the structure and rules of society are taken away.

It’s a beautiful (and at times terrifying) warning of just how fragile the order of civilisation is.

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January 7, 2015 · 10:30 PM

9. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle (100 book challenge)

It was Sherlock Holmes’ birthday yesterday. If he’d been alive today, and more importantly if he’d been real, he would have turned an impressive 161. That shows just how long ago these stories were written.

Yet the detective himself is so well known among people of today. I bet that even my nephew knows that when someone turns up to a fancy dress party with a magnifying glass and a tweed hat that they’ve come dressed as Sherlock.

sherlock holmes

The detective from the 1880s is still well-known today

But Conan Doyle, the author himself, didn’t seem that keen on the adventures of Sherlock. He even tried to kill him off at one stage in a case called The Final Problem, but due to public outcry he resurrected the detective in later books. Sometimes characters just want to write themselves and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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December 27, 2014 · 4:27 PM

8. Charlotte’s Web – E B White (100 book challenge)

Is there a story you read in your childhood that has stayed with you forever? That when you go back and read it, even just a few lines, it brings back a wave of emotions that you thought you would never feel again?

Well for me, unfortunately, Charlotte’s Web wasn’t one of those books.

charlottes web

Some story

The eighth book in my 100 book challenge somehow missed my childhood altogether. I don’t remember reading it. At a stretch I might have seen the movie.

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December 14, 2014 · 9:39 PM

7. The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (100 book challenge)

I used to find the literary technique ‘deep point of view’ pretty annoying. When I first heard it described in our writing workshop by tutor Karen Whitelaw I admit I put it in the I’ll-never-use-that basket. I believed good writing was about showing a character’s thoughts and opinions through their actions, not from spelling out exactly what was going on in their head. I guess I saw ‘deep point of view’ as the lazy way out.

Ahhhhh… but then I read The Catcher in the Rye.

catcher in the rye cover

A simple cover for a book that has well-earned its place on the classics list

This story, written in 1951 and set mainly in New York, is written deeply in the mind of teenager Holden Caulfield. It is written as though he sat down with you – no doubt over a packet of cigarettes – and rambled a story for a few hours, then it was transcribed word-for-word into a book.

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December 9, 2014 · 1:12 PM

6. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (100 book challenge)

Audrey Niffenegger is a genius. The impact of time-traveling on love is such a clever idea. The issues the main characters deal with in their relationship are common (love, lust, guilt, desire, pain) but the reason for the issues is so unique (Clare’s husband keeps disappearing unexpectedly because he’s a time traveller).

This is the 6th book of my 100 book challenge and while I was reading it I felt like shouting from the rooftop that everyone should read this book. Sure, the ending was a bit disappointing. But I’ll get to that.

Time travel is so confusing!

Time travel is so confusing!

I’m the worst audience when it comes to stories about time travel. I always manage to get myself confused. In fact, the characters themselves don’t even have to time travel: a simple flashback in the story and I’m lost.

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October 27, 2014 · 8:58 PM

5. Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (100 book challenge)

I was thrilled to see Bill Bryson on the 100 book challenge list as he’s one of my favourite authors.

Notes from a small island

In saying that, I was surprised to see that they’d chosen ‘Notes from a Small Island’ as the book on the list. I started reading it a few years ago and lost interest, preferring to read his European adventures book (Neither Here Nor There) or the American counterpart (Notes from a Big Country).

I mean, really, what does the UK itself have to offer?

Sure, London’s pretty neat and Stonehenge can be impressive (for the first three minutes at least) but I always saw England as a travel destination from which to take other trips to more exotic places like Prague or Barcelona or Amsterdam.

Could someone really write a whole 265 pages on the England, Scotland and Wales alone?

Because it was on the list, I had to give it ago.

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September 25, 2014 · 10:17 AM

4. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks (100 book challenge)

I’d never heard of this book before I saw it on the 100 must-read book list. It sounded intriguing so I decided to make it the fourth read in my 100 book challenge.

It’s received extreme mixed reviews, and now I’ve read it I can understand why.

It’s a story about a teenager, living with his dad on an island in Scotland. From page one, I was thrown in a bizarre world of murder, cruelty and revenge. Banks’ point of view is set deeply into the mind of the sixteen year old character, which gave the book a layer of innocence and helped me connect with the main character – despite his actions.

The title was intriguing enough to make this my next read

The title was intriguing enough to make this my next read

I always like the idea of telling a story from a different point of view, and this book allowed me to get into the head of someone who, because of his upbringing, interacts with the world in ways that make you sick to the stomach. But it is all hidden beneath the surface – the people who meet the main character and his father probably wouldn’t suspect anything untoward happening on the island.

Which got me thinking. In any given day we pass hundreds of people, all with their own lives and upbringings. I guess we like to assume that most people are not secret cruel murderers, but this book made me question that. At one stage of reading, I was so drawn into this crazy world that I started to wonder whether it was safe to leave the house! I was having dreams of deformed bodies and secluded islands and burning fur…

This book really affected me!

Which, in a way, is every reader’s goal: to cause that emotional response. Continue reading →

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