A great fun meme found at Trisha's @
Obsessed ReaderHere's how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
The premise of this exercise is that the
National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
(Ok, Ok, I know I'm not American, but what the heck, it was fun doing it anyway :-). I was amazed to see how many I have read. I used to read a lot of fiction in days gone by, but these days I tend to stick to non fiction.
Here's my list...
1
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6
The Bible 7
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
10
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens11
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller.
14
Complete Works of Shakespeare – I've read some but not the complete works.
15
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20
Middlemarch - George Eliot 21
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23
Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24
War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34
Emma - Jane Austen 35
Persuasion - Jane Austen 36
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 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 Meany - John Irving
45
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49
Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - started but never finished
53
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 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 58
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie.
70
Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72
Dracula - Bram Stoker 73
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - AS Byatt
81
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flauber 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
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 Blyton91
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
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 98
Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.
I hope you like the new look of the Blog.I've had it cream for a while which I was bored with and was playing around with new looks over the weekend. I had put together what I thought was an elegant and restrained colour scheme involving beige and cream diagonal stripes. At the precise moment I finished, Hubby walked past. "What do you think?" I asked. 
But it got me to thinking - and I realised he was right. Restrained is not really me:-) So I decided to go with it and pull out all the stops. The obvious answer that came to mind was peacock feathers - you cant get much more blingy than that. Besides peacock has always been my favourite colour. I got married in a velvet outfit that colour, and even the Rolls Royce wedding car I hired was that colour! Most of the carpets in our previous house were also a lovely rich peacock/turquoise colour.
We've had an absolutely smashing weekend. The weather was great, really hot (78C) by our standards, so we were able to get out in the garden and actually do some work. Hubby managed to cut the privet hedge and mow the lawn and I cleared a lot of the weeds from a couple of the flower beds, so the garden looks a lot more respectable now.
This is why we decided to encamp to the other end of the garden where there was more sun. Unfortunately ( or fortunately), just as hubby finished digging the pond out the neighbour informed us that he had arranged to have the tree trimmed back on our side. This was great if a little badly timed. And what a difference it made. We went to work as usual that day with dark overhanging tree branches ( you could watch the squirrels running around just outside the bathroom window!) and on our return found a bright light airy patio with sun streaming on to it. WOW! and now whenever we get the chance (given the vagaries of the British weather!) we are often out on it until midnight. Hubby lights his cast iron chimenea for when it gets chilly and we have a BBQ and candles all over the place and we sit and chat for hours - lovely.
