Hannah Montana

Oh, how I love to read. Thanks to the need to keep two children home on Friday I have managed to finish two books this weekend. On Friday I finished The Secret Life of Bees which reminded me how much I enjoy books set in the American South. There has been a movie made of it too which I would be interested to watch. Today I finished The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins. I came across this book when it was returned to the library and rather guiltily confess that it fascinated me. Is it wrong to be so interested in how conjoined twins lived? At times during their lives they were world famous and by all accounts, talented entertainers but theirs is a very sad story.

I also finished A Walk With Jane Austen last week. This is the true story of a thirty-something American woman with a passion for Jane who travelled to all the places Jane went in her life. I also adore Jane Austen but must admit that I found the American woman very annoying. There was just a little too much single woman, chronically ill angst in it for my taste. Now that those three books are off my bedside table I can get into The Pillars of the Earth and Highways to a War. I also need to read more books from the list currently going around Facebook. The BBC say that most people will have only read six of the books from this list.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Bits and pieces) X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth X
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon BC
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt BC
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre DumasX
66 On The Road - Jack KerouacX
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt X
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X - I hated this book!
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole BC
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor HugoX

I have read 52 (the ones with the crosses) but there are lots that I would like to read. I won't go for the hundred though because I think I can live without reading The Da Vinci Code or Dune.....

Even though reading is in almost every way superior to watching movies, I do enjoy a trip to the cinema. I saw the Half Blood Prince of course, though I do need to go with low expectations in order not to be terribly disappointed. This film was better than some of the others in that while an enormous amount was left out, it didn't have heaps of scenes that I felt were just wrong. The exception was when the Burrow burnt down. ?? But I can get over that. Jossie was very keen to see Hannah Montana during the school holidays but we didn't make it. This was its last weekend at the cinema so I gritted my teeth and took her.

Australia does kids' television really well. Good dramas and comedies that are well acted and original. Many of the shows that Jossie enjoys however, are trite, predictable and hideously over-acted. I wasn't looking forward to seeing Hannah Montana but it wasn't close to being the worst movie I have ever seen. What is the worst movie? Maybe Artificial Intelligence: AI or Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes - I didn't even watch the end of that one and cannot stand Ralph Fiennes now. Thankfully he wasn't in Hannah Montana and Billy Ray Cyrus didn't sing that song of his that will go un-named in order to prevent its being in anyone's head for the rest of the day. Hannah Montana was predictable and there was at least one scene where everything goes horribly wrong and there was a boy who said things that no boy of that age would actually say but the music was pretty good and I was even a bit teary in places - not that that is saying much, I cry in ads.

The whole time that I have been writing this post I have tried to upload photos but it just will not work. Maybe later.