Sunday 13 January 2002

I'm almost scared to visit Amazon.co.uk these days, as my wish list just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. It's The Enormous Turnip or The Very Hungry Caterpillar of wish lists. And as soon as I buy one, or two, or five books, either from aforementioned website or my adored Waterstones, I add another two, or three, or ten. When will it ever end?

I also blame The Usual Suspect's Reading and Writing threads, which always have intoxicating conversations about who's reading what, what's new, suggestions, and of course their book club. ARGH.

I do occasionally cull the list, dropping titles I'm no longer interested in, or have read in situ at Waterstones (naughty, I know; but they don't seem to mind, particularly when I end up buying a heap of books anyway).

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Many of the titles on the list are "gaps" in series; for some (possibly anal) reason I have to own the full range of titles in a series. Thus I include the missing Dune titles, even though I'm not completely enamoured of the series (although now Sam is getting into it, so that's a decent rationale right there); also a few missing Discworld titles, although that's different as I adore Pratchett, and would probably find his shopping lists as full of clever puns and inter-contextual references as his books.

Then there are the "must haves"; Matt Ridley's titles on evolution, a couple of Margaret Atwood's I don't yet own, science fiction and fantasy "classics" such as Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, both of which I have read numerous times but simply want to own (see how much this is all about acquisition? how materialistic of me, you may well be thinking), a number of truly yummy and essential cookbooks, the type one can read like novels (and one usually does), and of course, a truckload of children's books, all of which are quite simply necessary for life as we know it. I mean to say, Roald Dahl and L'Engle's Time Quartet? The Bluye Sword and Dickinson's Changes Trilogy? I mean to say. Gotta have, no question.

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So here it is (so far this year ... ):-

Non Fiction

Byatt, Andrew et al.  The Blue Planet

Chaney, Lisa.  Elizabeth David

Damasio, Antonio.  The Feeling of What Happens

Downer, John.  Weird Nature

Durrell, Gerald.  Birds, Beasts and Relatives

Flannery, Tim.  The Eternal Frontier

Ridley, Matt. 

                The Red Queen

                Genome

Smith, Michael.  Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park

Swenson, David.  Ashtanga Yoga

Weir, Alison.  The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Fiction

Adams, Richard.  Watership Down (replacement)

Atwood, Margaret. 

                Cat’s Eye

                Alias Grace

Bradbury, Ray.  Fahrenheit 451

Brin, David.

                Earth

                Glory Season

Card, Orson Scott.

                Ender’s Game

                Speaker for the Dead

Coupland, Douglas.  All Families are Psychotic

Danielewski, Mark Z.  House of Leaves

Doyle, Roddy.  The Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van)

Fielding, Helen.  Bridget Jones’ Diary

Franzen, Jonathon.  The Corrections

Gaiman, Neil.  Neverwhere

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. 

                One Hundred Years of Solitude

                Love in the Time of Cholera

Gibson, William.  All Tomorrow’s Parties

Hemingway, Ernest.  For Whom the Bell Tolls

Herbert, Frank. 

                Dune Messiah

                Heretics of Dune

                Chapterhouse Dune

Irving, John.  

                The Cider House Rules

                A Prayer for Owen Meaney

Kingsolver, Barbara.  Small Wonder: Essays

Lethem, Jonathon.  Motherless Brooklyn

London, Jack.  The Call of the Wild / White Fang

McEwan, Ian.  Atonement

Miller, Andrew.  Oxygen

Pratchett, Terry.

                Guards! Guards!

                Moving Pictures

                Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook

                Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Pratchett, Terry & Neil Gaiman.  Good Omens

Sayers, Dorothy L.  Unnatural Death

Siffert, Rachel.  The Dark Room

Shakespeare, William.  (individual paperback editions of:-)

                Macbeth

                A Midsummer Night's Dream

                Twelfth Night

Tey, Josephine.  The Daughter of Time

Willis, Connie.

                To Say Nothing of the Dog

                Bellwether

Food and Drink

David, Elizabeth. Italian Food

Ko, Masaki.  The Japanese Kitchen

Roden, Claudia.  A New Book of Middle Eastern Food

Simonds, Nina.  Asian Noodles

Stein, Rick.  The Seafood Lovers Guide

Children

Dahl, Roald.

                Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

                Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

                James and the Giant Peach

                The Witches

Dickinson, Peter.  The Changes Trilogy (The Devil’s Children, Heartsease, The Weathermonger)

Fitzhugh, Louise.  Harriet the Spy

L’Engle, Madeline.

                The Time Quartet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door , A Swiftly Tilting Planet , Many                 Waters)

                A House like a Lotus

                An Acceptable Time

McKinley, Robin.

                The Blue Sword

                The Hero and the Crown

                Deerskin

Montgomery, L M.  Anne of Green Gables

Nesbitt, E.   Five Children and It

Pullman, Philip.  His Dark Materials Trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)

Williams, Margery.  The Velveteen Rabbit Deluxe Edition

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