List love 3.2: BBC’s Big Read list, books No. 51-100

Continuing from where I left off last time around.

Green means I have read it and so does a link to a review.
Blue means I plan to read it.
The others I am either not interested in or simply don’t know enough about them to decide if I am interested in reading them.

Status abbreviations:
PC = it’s in my Permanent Collection
WL = it’s on my Wish List

The Secret Garden: by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Status: WL
Of Mice And Men: by John Steinbeck.
The Stand: by Stephen King.
Anna Karenina: by Leo Tolstoy.
A Suitable Boy: by Vikram Seth.
The BFG: by Roald Dahl.
Swallows And Amazons: by Arthur Ransome.
Black Beauty: by Anna Sewell. Status: PC
Artemis Fowl: by Eoin Colfer.
Crime And Punishment: by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Noughts And Crosses: by Malorie Blackman.
Memoirs Of A Geisha: by Arthur Golden.
A Tale Of Two Cities: by Charles Dickens.
The Thorn Birds: by Colleen McCollough. Stus:
Mort: by Terry Pratchett. Status: PC
The Magic Faraway Tree: by Enid Blyton.
The Magus: by John Fowles.
Good Omens: by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Status: PC
Guards! Guards!: by Terry Pratchett. Status: PC
Lord Of The Flies: by William Golding.
Perfume: by Patrick Süskind. Status: PC
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: by Robert Tressell.
Night Watch: by Terry Pratchett. Status: PC
Matilda: by Roald Dahl.
Bridget Jones's Diary: by Helen Fielding.
The Secret History: by Donna Tartt.
The Woman In White: by Wilkie Collins. Status: Owned
Ulysses: by James Joyce. Status: Owned
Bleak House: by Charles Dickens.
Double Act: by Jacqueline Wilson.
The Twits: by Roald Dahl.
I Capture The Castle: by Dodie Smith. Status: PC
Holes: by Louis Sachar.
Gormenghast: by Mervyn Peake. Status: PC
The God Of Small Things: by Arundhati Roy.
Vicky Angel: by Jacqueline Wilson.
Brave New World: by Aldous Huxley.
Cold Comfort Farm: by Stella Gibbons. Status: PC
Magician: by Raymond E Feist.
On The Road: by Jack Kerouac.
The Godfather: by Mario Puzo.
The Clan Of The Cave Bear: by Jean M Auel.
The Colour Of Magic: by Terry Pratchett. Status: PC
The Alchemist: by Paulo Coelho.
Katherine: by Anya Seton.
Kane And Abel: by Jeffrey Archer.
Love In The Time Of Cholera: by Gabriel García Márquez.
Girls In Love: by Jacqueline Wilson.
The Princess Diaries: by Meg Cabot.
Midnight's Children: by Salman Rushdie.

This makes 26 in the top 51-100 I have read, or just over half this half of the list. 9 are on my TBR list.

As with the first part of the list, I would be interested to hear what you think and how many of the books you have read or want to read. If you want to, you can also leave a comment telling me why I should consider reading the rest.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Reading in Reykjavík

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