1FF Top 100 Books

[mistermagic]

Maybe I will!

 

[mistermagic]

#12 - Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - 41 points, 3 lists (2012: #52)

Quite surprised at how low this was 3 years ago. Of Mice and Men is an American classic written by Nobel-Prize winner John Steinbeck depicting two migrant laborers looking for work in California during the Great Depression. The two laborers are George Milton, a short intelligent although uneducated man, and Lennie Small, a mentally-disabled but abnormally strong large individual.
Throughout searching for work in a trying economic climate (ding dong), George and Lennie backpack accross California and are forced to flee due to Lennie's attraction of touching soft things. Without knowing it, his strength is such that a mere touch feels like an agression to animals and females he touches which gets the pair of them into trouble again and again.
I don't know if Steinbeck actually came up with the smart little one and the big stupid other lad but if he did he started one hell of a stereotype. I like this book. I read it at a friend's house IN FRENCH!

Here's the image I have of George and Lennie:

 

[mistermagic]

#11 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - 43 points, 3 lists (2012: #26)

Definitely on my to-read list. The setting is the same as Of Mice and Men but bigger, stronger and more intense. A family is forced to move halfway through the United States from Oklahoma to California due to the great depression in the early 1930s. The themes encountered are of course unemployment, poverty, trying to to make ends meet and basically surviving.
I really don't want to comment much more on this one as I really want to read it. I'm reading a book on how 4 men in charge of the world's central banks fucked things up before, during and after WWI which brought the great depression and I think I'll buy TGOW straight after I finish my current book.

AND NOW FOR THE TOP 10!!!

 

[Ginola14]

AND NOW FOR THE TOP 10!!!

 

[This Charming Mike]

Of Mice and Men scored fairly highly on my list. I first read it at School for GCSE English (didn't we all?) and it's been one of my favourite novels since. I think my initial enjoyment of it stems from a really passionate English teacher who attempted to put on all of the Southern American accents but as I have aged, I've really grown to appreciate the book for its prose and themes. In my new job, I even get to study it all over again!

 

[Veggie Legs]

I voted for The Grapes of Wrath, it's significantly better than Of Mice and Men in my opinion. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I think Steinbeck captures the despair of the Depression era, but also the optimism that a better life is just around the corner. Not an easy read, but definitely a worthwhile one.

Also, the South Park parody of it is superb.

 

[IanH]

I voted for The Grapes of Wrath, it's significantly better than Of Mice and Men in my opinion. Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I think Steinbeck captures the despair of the Depression era, but also the optimism that a better life is just around the corner. Not an easy read, but definitely a worthwhile one.

I think Veggie sums up my feelings for The Grapes of Wrath very succinctly there.

I read it while I was commuting almost three hours a day, and was at my most prolific reading-wise, so I don't remember it being a difficult read but I can definitely imagine it being so. Having read Of Mice and Men previously, I was surprised by how rich and full Steinbeck was able to be (and just two years later - Of Mice and Men, 1937, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939).

To give other artistic comparisons (some probably more accurate than others) I would compare it to Radiohead producing Pablo Honey and then The Bends, Tarantino directing Reservoir Dogs and then Pulp Fiction or Patrice Evra having a mare of a debut for United in 2006 and then becoming the world's best full-back for a couple of years.

 

[mistermagic]

#10 - The Godfather by Mario Puzo - 43 points, 4 lists (2012: #13)

I watched the movie quite a while ago (Part One that is, never got to the other two) but still have fond and vivid memories of it. I remember most of the story from the mafia businesses in New York to the assasination, to the transformation of little Michael from shy and ethical to ruthless and scary, finally I especially remember the Sicily violence which makes Michael realise why he is like he is.
I'm not sure if I'm up for reading this one as the film looks like an exact interpretation of the book (the film was made only 3 years (1972) after the book was published (1969)). It really looks like the producer didn't write any script but used the book as his one and only tool helped by a cast of spectacular and competent Hollywood stars like Al Pacino. I don't know how much of what I just typed is true but it certainly feels this way reading reviews. Btw, some people found this sexist which I can certainly understand given that the whole family business focused on pornography (like the other mobs) but not on drugs (unlike the other mobs).
So go on then. The 4 who voted for it, sell it to me. Shall I read it?

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

The film is a lot better than the book. Judiciously edits some of Puzo's longeurs, and he was no great prose stylist. Does a better job of the tale as metaphor too, the American experience and all that. My other main memory is that that the edition I owned had typos every other page.

I'm not sure about the sexism. There is a character arc (removed in the film) about a woman with a massive vagina. It's a little odd, more than anything else, but she's a major character and given quite a bit of introspection about the nature of her womanhood and sexuality and so on, albeit fairly ineptly. But it also portrays a milieu that had some pretty... well defined... ideas about gender roles. There's lots of interest in what concerns a real man, in literal and figurative terms (Sonny's massive willy is pretty much the star of the show), and I suppose it has a romantic fondness for the world it portrays. But I don't think the novel acts like it was all sunshine and roses either, that all the macho stuff wasn't destructive too.

The wimmens are mostly peripheral, but to criticise it on those terms would be to ask for a different novel altogether, I think. It's about the business of gangsters, and there weren't a lot of women in The Commission. Certainly one could write something else about the experience of the wives and the mothers and the bits on the side, but there's no end to those sorts of arguments, is there.

It's not the 10th best book of all time though.

 

[Son of Cod]

Any chance of an up until the top ten list, mm?

 

[Oaf]

Always sort of consider reading the book, but everything I see always seems to suggest that it's just really worth bothering with. Still... it's always like a fiver around online with two other Puzo books. Always tempting, but I never seem to make that leap into actually giving it a go.

 

[mistermagic]

Any chance of an up until the top ten list, mm?

If you want. Will post it this afternoon.

 

[mistermagic]

List recap pre-top 10 #1 (274-152):

1 point (264-274):
A Feast for Crows (George R.R. Martin)
Fermat's Last Theorem (Simon Singh)
Kill Your Friends (John Niven)
Martin Misunderstood (Karin Slaughter)
Midnight's Children (Salmon Rushdie)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Reconstructing Quaternary Environments (John J. Lowe & Mike Walker)
Saturday Night Peter: Memoirs of a Stand-Up Comedian (Peter Kay)
Small Island (Andrea Levy)
Stig of the Dump (Clive King)
The Black Echo (Michael Connelly)

2 points (251-263):
A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (Ronald Reng)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
Heavier than Heaven (Charles R. Cross)
King Leopold's Ghost (Adam Hochschild)
Life: A User's Manual (George Perec)
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (John Gray)
Shah of Shahs (Ryszard Kapuscinski)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (Sue Townsend)
The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)

3 points (243-250):
A Drink Before the War (Dennis Lehane)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare)
A Place of Execution (Val McDermid)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
Der Zauberberg (Thomas Mann)
Filthy English (Jonathan Meades)
Looking for Alaska (John Green)
Talking Double Dutch (Paul Holland)

4 points (229-242):
Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success (Matthew Syed)
Candy (Luke Davies)
Let the Right One In (John Ajvide Lindqvist)
Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour (Desmond Morris)
Saturday (Ian McEwan)
The Castle (Franz Kafka)
The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the World's Most Unllikely Holiday Destinations (Dom Joly)
The Glory Game (Hunter Davies)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Gunslinger (Stephen King)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
Tripwire (Lee Child)
Zazie in the Metro (Raymond Queneau)

5 points (217-228):
A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Mohammed Hanif)
A Little Lower Than Angels (Helen Travers)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carrol)
Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? (Julian Norridge)
Resurrection Men (Ian Rankin)
The Cimney Sweeper's Boy (Barbara Vine)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness)
The Sign of Four (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Son (Jo Nesbo)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
Wizard and Glass (Stephen King)

6 points (204-216):
A Cambodian Prison Portrait (Vann Nath)
A Dark Adapted Eye (Barbara Vine)
Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Doctor Faustus (Christopher Marlowe)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
The Dark Tower (Stephen King)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (Stieg Larsson)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)
The Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell)
The Sound of Laughter (Peter Kay)
Wool (Hugh Howey)

7 points (189-203):
Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Before They Are Hanged (Joe Abercrombie)
Crimini - The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction (Various (8 authors))
Fallen (David Maine)
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Herbert P. Bix)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Post Office (Charles Bukowski)
Second Foundation (Isaac Asimov)
The Devil Rides Out (Dennis Wheatley)
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Where Eagles Dare (Alistair Stuart MacLean)
White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)

8 points (176-188):
Alternative Comis: An Emerging Literature (Charles Hatfield)
Asterix (René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo)
Charlottes Web (E.B. White)
How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life... and Still Love It (Dagmar O'Connor)
King of the World (David Remnick)
Noughts and Crosses (Malorie Blackman)
On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
The Ascent of Man (Jacob Bronowski)
The Drawing of the Three (Stephen King)
The Fourth Protocol (Frederick Forsyth)
The Partner (John Grisham)
The Way We Live Now (Anthony Trollope)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver)

9 points (164-175):
A Perfect Spy (John Le Carré)
AGI Annals (F.H.K. Henrion)
El Macca (Steve McManaman & Sarah Edworthy)
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
The Blade Itself (Joe Abercrombie)
The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
The Catcher and the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
The Gospel According to Judas (Jeffrey Archer & Frank Moloney)
The Hiding Place (Trezza Azzopardi)
The Ka of Gifford Hilary (Dennis Wheatley)
The Leopard (Jo Nesbo)
The Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh)

10 points (152-163):
A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
David Jason (David Jason)
Duckworth Lewis: The Method and the Men Behind It (Franck Duckworth & Tony Lewis)
Every Dead Thing (John Connolly)
I am Legend (Richard Matheson)
Maus (Art Spiegelman)
Odyssey (Homer)
On Beulah Height (Reginald Hill)
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (Douglas Adam)
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
Your Erroneous Zones (Wayne W. Dyer)

 

[mistermagic]

I hope you appreciate my doing this, Cod. This is a pretty thankless task.

 

[mistermagic]

List recap pre-top 10 #2 (151-11)

11 points (138-151)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
Along Came a Spider (James Patterson)
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Meat Pies & Microphones - Adventues of a Football Reporter (Simon Mapletoft)
No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai)
One Night In Winter (Simon Sebag Montefiore)
Past Imperfect (John Matthews)
Romea and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts)
Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris)
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solshenitsyn)
What Dreams May Come (Ricard Matheson)
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks)

12 points (124-137):
American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
Doctor Zhivago (boris Pasternak)
Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
One Day (David Nicholls)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Ooh Ah Stantona (Phil Stant)
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Eduardo Galeano)
Red Dragon (Thomas Harris)
Smiley's People (John Le Carré)
The Damned Utd (David Peace)
The Green Mile (Stephen King)
The Magician's Guild (Trudi Canavan)
The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
The World of Ice and Fire (George R.R. Martin)

13 points (111-123):
Deliver Us From Evil (David Yallop)
I'll Go To Bed at Noon (Gerard Woodward)
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)
Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
Lord Loss (Darren Shan)
Soccernomics (Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski)
The Lies of Locke Lamora (Scott Lynch)
The Odessa File (Frederick Forsyth)
The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Shock of the New (Robert Hughes)
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (John Le Carré)
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
Warlord of the Air (Michael Moorcock)

14 points (98-110):
A Dance with Dragons (George R.R. Martin)
A Kestrel for a Knave (Barry Hines)
Agent Zigzag (Ben Macintyre)
As You Like It (William Shakespeare)
Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
Cirque Du Freak (Darren Shan)
Jude The Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Richard Flanagan)
The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (Bruce Robinson)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adam)
The Subtle Knife (Philip Pullman)

15 points (86-97):
Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins)
Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (John Dickie)
Disordered Minds (Minette Walkers)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
Teach Yourself Christianity (John Young)
The Bible (The Illuminati)
The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The Wind in the Willows)

16 points (76-85):
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (Loung Ung)
Henry IV (Part 1) (William Shakespeare)
Iliad (Homer)
Lanark (Alasdair Gray)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kasey)
Police (Jo Nesbo)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (Alfred Tennyson)
The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer is Wrong (David Sally & Chris Anderson)
The Sculptress (Minette Walters)
The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)

17 points (67-75):
Glue (Irvine Welsh)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Northern Lights: Oxford Pt. 1 (Philip Pullman)
Stag Party: the Inside Story of Mansfield's Return to the Football League (Matt Halfpenny)
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (Stieg Larsson)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
The Shining (Stephen King)

18 points (57-66):
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Shehan Karunatilaka)
Dark Fire (C.J. Sansom)
Pioneers of Modern Typography (Herbert Spencer)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Crow Road (Iain Banks)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The Spook's Apprentice (Joseph Delaney)
The Trial (Franz Kafka)
This Lonely Incubus (Mark England)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

19 points (48-56):
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
Dancing with Strangers in Dark Places (Mark England)
I Am Pilgrim (Terry Hayes)
In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong)
The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
The Magician's Nephew (C.S. Lewis)
The Princess Bride (William Goldman)

20 points (42-47):
Insularfield (Mark England)
Kicked Into Touch (Fred Eyre)
Mr Nice (Howard Marks)
The Red Tree (Shaun Tan)
The Snowman (Jo Nesbo)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis)

21 points (40-41):
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
The Hunt for Red October (Tom Clancy)

22 points (38-39):
Othello (William Shakespeare)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

23 points (32-37):
All My Friends Are Superheroes (Andrew Kaufman)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Hunter S. Thompson)
Last Argument of Kings (Joe Abercrombie)
Matilda (Roald Dahl)
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy (John Le Carré)

24 points (31):
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)

25 points (30):
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

27 points (29):
Dracula (Bram Stoker)

28 points (28):
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

29 points (27):
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

30 points (25-26)
Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby)
The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

32 points (24):
Lolita (Vladimir Nabakov)

33 points (23):
Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)

34 points (20-22):
A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth)

36 points (19):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adam)

37 points (17-18):
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling)
The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)

38 points (16):
The Stranger (Albert Camus)

39 points (15):
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azbakan (J.K. Rowling)

40 points (14):
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

41 points (12-13):
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

43 points (11):
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

 

[Ginola14]

Shit, I didn't realise that The Princess Bride and The Red Tree had already come and gone. That's my top books out. Did anyone else vote for them? The Princess Bride is one of those rare books when it's just as good as the film version...which may give you a clue where it appears over in the Top 80's films thread. It's a story about true love entwined with pirates, sword-fighting, giants, ROUS, 6 fingered men and a while heap more. It obviously goes into more detail than the film and takes the mickey out of old romances but it's a brilliant brilliant novel.

The Red Tree however is stunning. It's a picture book by Shaun Tan - check his other stuff out too - and deals with a young girl who has lost her way and feels like she has nothing to live for. It's about hope. The pictures are beautiful and the words are powerful. There is also a small red leaf on each page hidden away - a'la Where's Wally - indicating that hope is everywhere. Here's some of the pictures:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/63/95/c9/6395c90f0f888bf72b69c801b98ffe27.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RfJMKsfD5ko/TzR6AdLJF9I/AAAAAAAABEY/jk1c1P_9fLo/s1600/red-tree3.jpg

It's a truly amazing book and it'll be the best £7.99ish that you'll ever spend. You won't regret it.

 

[mistermagic]

No mate, those were your top two. No else voted for them.

 

[Ginola14]

Losers. They need to enrich their lives

 

[Veggie Legs]

Never heard of The Red Tree before but I'm intrigued.

 

[mistermagic]

#9 - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - 45 points, 3 lists (2012: #7)

Along with The Stranger, I may have to go back reading books in French to give this a read. Second time it has appeared in the top 10, losing only 2 spots this book seems to age extremely well. Written in the 1840s by Dumas, who also wrote the critically acclaimed The Three Musketeers, the book tells the story of a prisoner named Edmon Dantès who is wrongly incarcerated at the If fortress. There he leans the existence of a treasure smuggled in the island of Monte Cristo. Dantès vows to get the treasure and revenge on the people who got him emprisoned at If.
I won't research the book much further as I would like to read it.

 

[Oaf]

I bought that after somebody on here was absolutely raving about it, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

I think that the size of it and the age of it scare me off. The only old books I've ever tried to read are the LOTR books, and as I mentioned earlier, they bored me. And they've kind of scared me off of most books written pre-1950's as a result... and with The Count of Monte Cristo being such a massive book, it's a bloody commitment for quite a while. I'm putting off committing myself to a lot of time with a book that I feel like may bore me...

Which, I know, is totally unfair on it. I'll get around to it at some point, and I'm sure it can convince me that older stuff isn't all as dull as LOTR. And it finishing 7th here only makes me want to read it more.

 

[IanH]

Navier re-reads it every year, which at least suggests it takes less than a year to read.

 

[mistermagic]

And it finishing 7th here only makes me want to read it more.

It finished 9th mate. Finished 7th 3 years ago...

 

[Vanni]

My top two books are out too, The Outsider and Lolita
But I've got an idea. I'll see which book wins this and then vote for it next year. That way I can boast and tell everyone "I voted for it mate" As long as it's not some Michael Moorcock crap or some Harry Spotter book that is

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Moorcock's novels are full of Camus and Sartre and wotnot. He was a child of the Rive Gauche, that was his foundation, his soil. Of course, his writing was always too gauche (oi oi) and too beardy to make the leap into the realm of bourgeois good taste Guardian-dom in the way that a contemporary like Ballard did, for example. So the misapprehension of him as witless genre hack turning out 1000 pages per year* persists.

Cool avatar though, cultural capital Q score +10.

*NTTAWWT

 

[mistermagic]

Next year? I plan on doing this every 5 years!

 

[TomPNE94]

I do a great Lennie impression.

 

[mistermagic]

#8 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling - 46 points, 3 lists (2012: N/A)

The very first HP to have come to life under the Rowling blueprint. This book is more widely known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which is its British title but an American editing company replaced Philospher by Sorcerer as it thought a child wouldn't want to read a novel with the word Philospher in its title. If you want to complain at me going all US on your asses, blame Goodreads.
So this is where it all started back in 1997. Young Harry has lost his parents and lives with his horrible aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, and their just as dislikeable son, Dudley. Harry leads a miserable and forgetable existence with those 3 people as his room consists basically of a closet and his birthday is not celebrated. What happens next is history.
Most reviews say how many, many people put off reading the Harry Potter Series starting with this book as this is essentially the story of a victim little boy who suddenly gets the blessing of an invitation which gets him out of his hell-hole and enables him to meet nicer people in a scholar environment. Don't say it too loud but this plot reminds me an awful lot of Dickens' Great Expectations. But I won't point and name Rowling a plagiarist before reading the book.
Truth is, adults and avid readers of serious literature thought this series would be too childish for them but were hooked as soon as they started reading this book. Ah, fuck it, I'll probably read it before I die I dunno.

Anyway, 6 HP books down, 1 to go...

 

[Oaf]

God damn it. I was going to moan about you going all American, but then you said blame goodreads... and I can't be mad at goodreads, as that site is the only reason I ever found myself onto 1FF after TFF died. Now I have all of this anger and nobody to direct it at.

But yeah, HP is great. That last bit you put about adults thinking it may be too childish but getting hooked is absolutely spot on, because that's how I felt. I liked the films but just never imagined I'd enjoy the books for some reason... yet I started reading them about a year ago (5 books in so far) and I fucking love them. I'd highly recommend giving them a go.

 

[mistermagic]

So Goodreads saved my life! After saving yours!

One of my favourites sites ever!