BBC Book Meme

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of these.


[ ] 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 - God Yes, even all those bleeding begats at the beginning of it
[x] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[x] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I''ve read two and a half - couldn't get through the last one.
[ ] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 8

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
[x] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[x] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller I keep meaning to
[x] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare There are one or two that I haven't read such as "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Rape of Lucrece" but that's about it
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier Half
[x] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[x] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 7

[ ] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[x] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[x] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[ ] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[ ] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll Also, "Through the Looking Glass"
[ ] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 3

[ ] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[ ] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Shouldn't this be included as part of the "Chronicles of Narnia"?
[ ] 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[ ] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden It's on the bookshelf, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
[x] 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 3

[x] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[x] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown I
[ ] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[ ] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[x] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[ ] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 5

[ ] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[x] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 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
[ ] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 2

[ ] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[ ] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[ ] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[x] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[ ] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 1

[ ] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[x] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[x] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[ ] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 76 The Inferno - Dante
[ ] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome Great kidlit
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt

Total: 2

[ ] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mxistry
[x] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
[ ] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[x] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I have read some of the stories, but not all of them.
[ ] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 2

[ ] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[x] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Again, shouldn't this be included in the Complete Works?
[x] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[x] 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 5

For a grand total of 38.

Calefaction

There is something about baking that does good things for me.

I am not a good enough baker that I can bake without following a recipe. I enjoy the process of looking through my books, or searching for a recipe online. I choose cookies, or muffins or a cake, based mostly on how good the picture looks, and what I already have in my pantry. I will substitute if I don't like or have one of the ingredients. You will never find a raisin, current or any candied fruit in anything I bake, and I am against maraschino cherries on principle. Next I assemble all the ingredients and tools that I will need. It took me years to remember to turn on the oven at this point - baking has finally taught me to think ahead a bit. I enjoy the measuring, the stirring, the kneading. I love the chemistry that makes three separate things (butter, sugar and flour) in to one (cookies). The part I enjoy the least is the cleaning up, but my husband has taught me to do that as I go, which really does make the whole process much simpler. Finally, I love the anticipation of the final product. The smell as it bakes, getting to poke it with a stick to find out if it's done, trusting that even if it looks a little funky, it will taste good anyway.

Three things

1. Fred got his EI payment today so I went and bought cream (among other things) and I have enjoyed coffee for the first time in three days. Nectar of the gods.

2. I finished knitting mom's silk socks, while watching some of Season 5 of Buffy. I had forgotten just how annoying Dawn was.

3. We are finally using up gift cards tonight. We're going to the Keg to celebrate our 2nd anniversary (a couple of days late). Snails and steak and lobster, here I come!

3a. Hooray for awesome bosses who give recognition in gift card form, or our anniversary dinner would have been the pork chops we had for dinner on Monday.

3b. Fred's anniversary gift from me was a copy of Hit Parade magazine detailing the Top 100 Hard Rock bands of all time. I figured he'd get more enjoyment from it than from a card, which was only three dollars less.

4. I'm really crap at sticking to my own guidelines...