Adrian Mole's Reading List!

I had forgotten just how enjoyable it is to read Adrian Mole. It is just amazing the vast amount of books that kids goes through. If you have a teenager at home or you know of one around you, if they haven't read what Adrian has then let them get cracking!

1. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
2. Madame Bovary
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. Origin of Species
5. Beano Annuals.
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
7. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
8. War and Peace
9. The Man in the Iron Mask
10. Waiting for Godot
11. Mill on the floss by George Eliot
12. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
13. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
14. Uncle Tom's Cabin
15. Escape from Childhood by John Holt
16. Glencoe by John Prebble
17. Progress, Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom by Andrei D. Sakharov
18. Wuthering Heights
19. A Town Like Alice by Nevile Shute
20. Crime and Punishment
21. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
22. How Children Fail by John Holt
23. Condition of the Working Class in England by Frederick Engels
24. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
25. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
26. The Cruel Sea
27. The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
28. To Sir with Love

Diary Talk!

So, welcome back from the weekend. Hope it was good for you as it was for me (have always wanted to say that!). Anyways. Enjoyed watching the Golden Globes last night although E! UK were having a moment and I completely missed Ricky Gervais's opening speech. Did catch up on it later but I was sooo disappointed. I thought that he would come out this year with something so totally different and mind blowing like just plain stand up comedy but it just felt regurgitated and fake. He looked totally uncomfortable being there (although he still "doesn't care" which is really starting to sound hollow and enough already!). I love Ricky Gervais to bits and am saddened when he falls short. Shame!

Let's see, this weekend I finally got to reading The Calligrapher's Secret by Rafik Schami which has been sitting in the "To Read" pile for months now. I can report that so far is fab. The characters are set in 1950's Syria. It is fascinating on so many levels particularly how Schami manages to paint a very vivid image of life in Syria back then It is also fascinating for me in that Syria was where my parents would holiday as children and later as adults (I have only been there once when I was very tiny and hardly remember it). My dad must have been in his late teens in the 1950s and so it in a way has turned into a hunt to try to find him in some of the characters. I am only a 100 pages in so will let you know how that develops.

Found out this weekend that Adrian Mole turns 30 this year. Gosh I can't believe how time flies. Diary writing is back in fashion especially with the hit Diaries of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. But Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole rules. In celebration, I am re-reading Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major which covers the first ten years. So incorporated are the complete texts of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole together with selections from True Confessions of Adrian Mole and Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians. Gosh, I remember now how I got bitten by the diary bug in the early 80s. It was fun to start but then when things really started happening in my life (and discovering that mum did really go through my things while I was at school) I made the wisest decision of my life back then; what happens in my young life should just stay there and no more diary nonsense.

It is weird this obsession with recording our every action. Blogs are an such an example as well as Facebook and Twitter. This generation may not realise it and may scoff at our lock and key diaries of olden days with their scented paper recording our childish whimsies and yet these recordings differ in that they truly were secret diaries. Whereas this now is a generation who feels the need to share every teeny tiny bit of their life with the ENTIRE world. Where did the privacy go, where is the secrecy? In a way I envy this generation their confidence and exuberance and yet I fear that their exhibitionism will one day backfire on them. but some might argue that having a blog is in a way exhibitionist of me too. So hey ho, whatever rocks our boat I guess.

Enough from me now and see you tomoroz!

mwah!