Today I continued reading Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman. This is a hilarious jaunt through the author's life and her own personal views on femininity and what it means to the modern lady. She is very witty and I tend to agree with her thoughts on just about everything, which is a little odd as I am a man. I am, however, a gay man, and perhaps this is why I am able. Maybe it's because feminism is really nothing more than humanism. You know, being a human being who tries not to hurt anyone and is generally quite tolerant of the diversity that surrounds us.
My favourite chapter has to be about the Titty bars, or "Strip Clubs" as they are otherwise known. Now I don't frequent such establishments, seriously, I don't. I have been to many a gay bar and there have sometimes been strippers present. Most of the time this has been a joyous occasion. The men are happy to receive the adulation given to them by the crowd and the crowd is happy to see a man get his kit off. No one is harmed and everyone is happy.
Once, in Australia, I did end up in a straight strip joint. I attended this place with my lover, my brother and some other members of my family. Now the reason we actually attended was because aforementioned family members actually worked there (I hastily add that one worked on the door and another behind the bar - none of my family members were actually stripping!). We thought it would be a laugh. It really wasn't.
My brother and I even had a little dance organised for us. Again, I thought this would be quite amusing. It really really wasn't. I was a little drunk at the time, but pretty soon after the event (actually, pretty soon after it started) I felt quite horrible indeed. I'll admit I was very impressed when the lady began to make her boobs dance - she had amazing control of her pectoral muscles - but then suddenly she spread her legs wide... and I had to look away. I spent the rest of the dance looking at my brothers face. (He felt obliged to continue watching, of course, purely because he didn't want to hurt the lady's feelings...).
I agree with Caitlin so strongly about these places. Honestly, they should be banned. She mentions that in Iceland that they actually have been banned. Good on the Icelanders! These places are cold, and pretty ugly to boot. Men are not loving these women who jiggle their snatches before their hungry eyes... and the women who do so are definitely not loving the punters. I even heard that these ladies actually pay to be able to perform there. If they don't get enough men giving them cash for their little shows they end up out of pocket as a result. What an absolute disgrace!!!
Moran is correct. The biggest clue about these places is the lack of gay men. If a place doesn't have any gay men attending, it is not a place worth going to. If you want a classy sex
joint, go to a Burlesque bar. This is where all the gay men go, and the straight men who actually like women.
The New List
I have finally come up with a list. I won't be changing this list now (honest!!!!). Mainly because there are so many lists out there and there are so many books. I like reading, I love books and I'm quite partial to having a list. Anyway, funnily enough my list is now of 143 books in total.
Now I'm not saying I'm going to read 143 books before Ostara 2014, although I will definitely try to do that. What I am absolutely certain is that I will finish at least 100 of them. I've already finished one, and tomorrow I'm pretty sure it's going to be two. I'm actually really looking forward to finishing Judy Finnegan's book, I want to know what happened to Eloise.
| Lanark | Alasdair Gray |
| Football! Bloody Hell | Alex Ferguson |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
| Wise Children | Angela Carter |
| Lovely Bones | Anne Sebold |
| The Way We Live Now | Anthony Trollope |
| Memoirs Of A Geisha | Arthur Golden |
| Time Traveller's Wife | Audrey Niffenegger |
| Secret Diary Of A Call Girl | Belle de Jour |
| Sybil | Benjamin Disraeli |
| The Bottle Factory Outing | Beryl Bainbridge |
| Bradley Wiggins: An Autobiography | Bradley Wiggins |
| American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis |
| Wonders Of The Universe | Brian Cox |
| The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis |
| How To Be A Woman | Caitlin Moran |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
| My Animals And Other Family | Clare Balding |
| The Rainbow | D. H. Lawrence |
| Over The Moon: My Autobiography | David Essex |
| Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell |
| One Day | David Nicholls |
| Mr Stink | David Walliams |
| Ratburger | David Walliams |
| Fifty Shades of Grey | E. L. James |
| The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance | Edmund de Waal |
| Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont | Elizabeth Taylor |
| Artemis Fowl | Eoin Colfer |
| The Snow Child | Eowyn Ivey |
| Men Without Women | Ernest Hemingway |
| The Riddle of the Sands | Erskine Childers |
| Scoop | Evelyn Waugh |
| Wise Blood | Flannery O'Connor |
| The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett |
| Frank Skinner | Frank Skinner |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Daniel Deronda | George Eliot |
| The Diary of a Nobody | George Grossmith |
| Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn |
| The Quiet American | Graham Greene |
| The Tin Drum | Gunter Grass |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| Bridget Jone's Diary | Helen Fielding |
| Tom Jones | Henry Fielding |
| The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James |
| Bring Up The Bodies | Hilary Mantel |
| Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel |
| The Black Sheep | Honore De Balzac |
| Atonement | Ian McEwan |
| If on a Winter's Night a Traveller | Italo Calvino |
| The Casual Vacancy | J. K. Rowling |
| The Hobbit | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Waiting for the Barbarians | J.M. Coetzee |
| The Story Of Tracy Beaker | Jacqueline Wilson |
| A Street Cat Named Bob | James Bowen |
| The Autobiography Of Jack The Ripper | James Carnac |
| La Confidential | James Ellroy |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| 12th Of Never | James Patterson |
| Emma | Jane Austen |
| Pride And Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| Diary Of A Wimpy Kid | Jeff Kinney |
| Kane And Abel | Jeffrey Archer |
| Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In the 1950s | Jennifer Worth |
| Three Men in a Boat | Jerome K. Jerome |
| Riders | Jilly Cooper |
| My Sister's Keeper | Jodi Picoult |
| The Thirty-Nine Steps | John Buchan |
| Pilgrim's Progress | John Bunyan |
| USA | John Dos Passos |
| Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus | John Gray |
| Looking For Alaska | John Green |
| Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | John Le Carre |
| Me Before You | Jojo Moyes |
| The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared | Jonas Jonasson |
| Nostromo | Joseph Conrad |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| Eloise | Judy Finnigan |
| The Snail And The Whale | Julia Donaldson |
| Being Jordan | Katie Price |
| An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| The Pillars Of The Earth | Ken Follet |
| A Thousand Splendid Sons | Khaled Hosseini |
| The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini |
| Lucky Jim | Kingsley Amis |
| Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Celine |
| In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust |
| Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson |
| The Godfather | Mario Puzo |
| Money | Martin Amis |
| World War Z | Max Brooks |
| The Princess Diaries | Meg Cabot |
| Life And Laughing | Michael McIntyre |
| Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes |
| The Book of Laughter and Forgetting | Milan Kundera |
| Is It Just Me? | Miranda Hart |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark |
| The Pursuit Of Love | Nancy Mitford |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| The Executioner's Song | Norman Mailer |
| The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster |
| Still Standing: The Savage Years | Paul O'Grady |
| American Pastoral | Philip Roth |
| We Can Remember It For You Wholesale | Phillip K Dick |
| Dangerous Liaisons | Pierre Choderlos De Laclos |
| The Inside | Piers Morgan |
| The Periodic Table | Primo Levi |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler |
| George's Marvellous Medicine | Roald Dahl |
| The BFG | Roald Dahl |
| Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| My Booky Wook | Russell Brand |
| Haroun and the Sea af Stories | Salman Rushdie |
| Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett |
| Clarissa | Samuel Richardson |
| Herzog | Saul Bellow |
| Running My Life | Seb Coe |
| Confessions Of A Shopaholic | Sophie Kinsella |
| The Charterhouse of Parma | Stendhal |
| The Perks Of Being A Wallflower | Stephen Chbosky |
| Brief History Of Time | Stephen Hawkin |
| The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson |
| Entwined With You | Sylvia Day |
| Mort | Terry Pratchett |
| Far From The Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy |
| Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy |
| Nightmare Abbey | Thomas Love Peacock |
| Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison |
| Honest: My Story So Far | Tulisa Contostavlos |
| A Bend in the River | V. S. Naipaul |
| Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| Austerlitz | W. G. Sebald |
| Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography | Walter Isaacson |
| As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
Days Left: 354
Books Read: 1
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