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Harry Potter

Book Review

10 Books That Have Stayed With Me

This assignment has been going around on Facebook for a while now. I thought it would be good to put up here as well in case I wanted to go back to it. Because Facebook has no search option haha.

So the task: List 10 books that have stayed with you. Don’t take more than a few minutes. Don’t think too hard. They don’t have to be great works, or even your favorites. Just the ones that have touched you.

I think one true test that a book has stayed with you is if you’ve read it not only twice, but an unfathomable number of times that the book already wears its dog ears like a trophy. I have that kind of relationship with most of the books on this list:

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Movie Review

Harry Holidays to All!

I do realize the greeting above is quite late, because it’s been weeks since Christmas, and it isn’t even properly new year anymore, with 2015 already beyond a day old. My only excuse is the same reason for the greeting – I have been immersed in the best Christmas tradition I’ve only discovered recently, which is to reread all seven magical books (and watch the films) on the life of the Boy Who Lived. JK Rowling‘s masterpiece is nothing short of magic, and I knew that as a kid when I first met Harry (only a couple of years older than his 11), and I know it now, more than a decade later.

Now, my Harry Potter bucket list has extended from 1. ownership of the complete movie boxed set, to 2. exploring the Muggle-made wonder that is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios Japan. A studio tour in the UK sounds awesome too, and this sounds very intriguing. But until then, I’m educating myself with Tales of Beedle the Bard, and watching this one-hour gem below.

Cheers!

Photo and video credits to owners.

 

Book Review

19 out of 100 as of 9/2013

Mia-Wasikowska-Jane-Eyre Michael Fassbender

Mr Rochester pleads his damned cause with Jane Eyre, breaking the good reader’s heart in the process.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I don’t think I will be able to finish this list. A lot of the material honestly seem to be beyond my depth and (to be completely frank) my interests. But I’ve gotten through 19 as of this month, so I guess at the very least I am not most people 🙂

Besides, I also feel that other worthy books are not included in the 100 must-reads. To be fair though, the literary world is an ever changing, evolving space and no list will ever be complete. The magic of books, I daresay, is that the story never quite ends.

Check the list and see how you fare.

1 Pride and Prejudice – 1 

2 The Lord of the Rings –

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – 2

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – 3

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee -4

6 The Bible – 5

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte –

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell –

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman –

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens –

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott –

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy –

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller –

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare –

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier –

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien –

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk –

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – 6

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – 7

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot –

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell –

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald –

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens –

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy –

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams –

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky –

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck –

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll –

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame –

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy –

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens –

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis –

34 Emma – Jane Austen – 8

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – 9

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis –

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini –

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres –

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden –

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne –

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – 10

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – 11

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 17

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving –

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins –

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery –

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy –

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood –

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – 12

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan –

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel –

52 Dune – Frank Herbert –

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons –

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – 13

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth –

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon –

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens –

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley –

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon –

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez –

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck –

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov –

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt –

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold –

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas –

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac –

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy –

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – 14

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie –

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville –

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens –

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker –

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett –

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson –

75 Ulysses – James Joyce –

76 The Inferno – Dante- 15

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome –

78 Germinal – Emile Zola –

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray –

80 Possession – AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens –

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell –

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker –

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro –

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert –

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry –

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White –

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – 18

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle –

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton –

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad –

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery –

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks –

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams –

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole –

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute –

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas –

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare –

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – 16

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – <photo id=”1″ />

Movie Review

Review: Deathly Hallows 2, and Happy Birthday Harry!

I have no idea how old you are in your fictional life, but I wish you blessings and warm tidings. You don’t look very happy in the picture above though…

I spent the day with you by the way (again! cue the eye-rolling of people who will not understand). Watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie 2 today with family. Yours is the ONLY movie franchise we watch together, and that’s saying something, as we are a dysfunctional lot and do not really like spending that much time together as a unit. Makes me even sadder that with the ultimate end of the telling of your life story in movie magic, comes the end of one excuse for genuine family bonding as well. I divert, but I guess that is part of the point I am making.

I’ve seen the movie three times, and if time and money permit that I see it a few more times, I am certain it will not grow old. Not just yet. The film was properly dark and subtle in places, properly dark and exciting where it matters. It will still beg patience of movie-goers who only rely on the films to follow your story, but that is a given, with two-inches thick of words to go through. I still lose it on that final scene of Severus Snape, and I do not stop crying until the credits roll, by which time even my Coke has gone salty with my tears. That last two images before the close–and I quote a fellow geek–were poignant.

This is turning out to be the saddest birthday greeting ever. Sorry! Happy birthday Harry Potter! And JK Rowling too!

Life and Lemons

I thought I was over the loss of the Boy who Lived

But a few minutes into the clip and I’m still crying over Harry. IT IS THE END OF AN ERA, gennemmit. I felt the heartbreak halfway through my first reading of the Deathly Hallows, and my heart is hammered to pieces again now. It’s the end of a magical adolescence, which is much more substantial than a magical childhood, I must say. Because when you have something as brilliant as this story marking the peaks and dips in your troubled journey to adulthood, you find wisdom in spell books and get to know unassuming heroes to look up to. Harry Potter has led me to adulthood. I can explain it in detail, but I will not. Surely, only a fellow geek will understand.

God bless you JK Rowling. I will re-read your books every year, until my last.

After all this time. Always.

Previews

The boy who lived a last time

I miss being a Harry Potter geek. Gone are those lazy summers when I will read all books from book 1. I miss being a bum D:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, July 15.