Browsing Tag

Pride and Prejudice

Writing Now

Miki and Ana’s Twenty Questions

In Songs to Get Over You, Ana suggests that she and Miki get to know each other better by playing Twenty Questions. Now I don’t know the actual questions you’d find if you get this game, but as Ana said, the rules are pretty simple: 1. You answer all the questions, and 2. The questions don’t have to end at 20.

So here I’m sharing with you Miki and Ana’s version of the game. I’ve put down my own answers (feel free to ignore them, haha), and I thought it would be fun if you answer them too. Tag me?

Okay, GO!

Continue Reading

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:

Continue Reading

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

Wet Shirt Mr Darcy Immortalized

This is probably the most obscure title I have to type. And I haven’t even gotten to the pictures.

Any fan of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice would probably have a working knowledge of the wet shirt scene, a.k.a. sexy Mr Darcy scene, a.k.a. sexy lake scene. Although in the book in its consistent theme of strict prudence when it came to the man who owned half of Derbyshire, this scene never happened, the BBC mini series adaptation thought it fit to install a few minutes wherein the dapper Colin Firth falls off his horse into his own lake, just when Elizabeth Bennet was taking a walk. Continue Reading

Book Review Movie Review

Pride and Prejudice: The real dream British gentleman

Dream Asian man is Hanazawa Rui, but if I am to cross to the Caucasian side of the earth, hands down winner is always Mr Darcy. I have always heard his name crop up in movies and books, and never being as widely exposed to English literature as I would want, the only occasion for me to finally meet him is only when I dared buy the book.

Pride and Prejudice was the first classic I’ve read in years, and out of school at that, and I am eternally in love with it. And this movie version helped. Critics and fans are keen to point out that the Colin Firth version is still above it. But as I have never thought Firth as darkly sexy, and as I have believed every second of subtle, restrained and at times ironic English romance in the film as portrayed by Keira Knightley and Matthey MacFadyen, I hone no intentions of watching the BBC mini-series.

I am happy with the Lizzie and Darcy images that live inside my head. It just pains me to realize every time I re-watch and re-read though, that all ideal men seem to exist only in fiction. But thanks to Jane Austen, for the sliver of hope, and the experience of reading true love win over imperfections.