Robynettely

When I was at band two nights ago, one of the flute players was lamenting that she'd be way better if she'd just take her flute out and practice it for an hour every day. Except that's totally unrealistic. Nobody who is a normal adult and has normal adult responsibilities (I believe this woman has a business contracting to sew home decor items, which she sometimes does until 2am, and has a child, etc.) has time to practice for an hour per day. I don't manage to practice for an hour per week (though that may be partly because I don't want to wear out my reeds). So I mentioned that back when I took oboe lessons, my teacher told me to practice for 15 minutes a day. And that was good, because it got me to take the instrument out and put it together every day, with a minimal time commitment. Who doesn't have 15 minutes? And in fact, once the instrument was out, I used to often practice far more than 15 minutes some days. And then I said "In fact, this is somethi...

Why I read it: In May 2007, I attended a Q&A with Tim Wynne-Jones (that name keeps popping up...) where in passing they talked about how adult literature has moved away from plot. They held this book up as an example of a book with no plot. But the movie had a plot. And apparently MO said to the screenwriter, upon seeing the movie, something about how amazing it was that he had managed to find a plot in there. So, at Christmas, when I saw that my dad had this on his bookshelf, I picked it up. I read it over the Christmas break, but I wanted to watch the movie before I wrote anything about it. What I liked: The four characters in the house had so much history behind them. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it was probably good that I read it over a two-day period, because I would have lost track of the characters and thread if I had put it down for, say, a week or a month. My guess, before watching the movie, was that the stuff in the house in Italy would be a framing device...

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Anna Karenina Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion Life of Pi : a novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby Dick Ulysses Madame Bovary The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre The Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler’s Wife The Iliad Emma (read this for school, I don't seem to have an underline option) The Blind Assassin The Kite Runner Mrs. Dalloway Great Expectations (I'll probably still finish this one) American Gods A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Atlas Shrugged Reading Lolita ...

Haven't done any rewrites, but I wrote a short story. I guess that counts for something. In this case, I guess I'll call it a month of rewrites. There, I'm up to what, mid-March?