Sing from a book you were reading in bed

Thank goodness for my fellow bloggers is all I can say. I have yet again been saved from finding inspiration by pilfering a great post idea from sugar007. So here goes.

The reasoning goes that your average adult has only read 6 out of the top 100 books published.. by one publisher, by any publisher... it is unclear but in any case here's the deal.

1) Read through the list and mark the book's you've read in bold
2) Italicise any you started but didn't finish
3) Underline the ones you loved.
4) Publish the list on your blog. Then we can gang together and track down the people who've read 6 or fewer and force classic reads on them.


1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

So there you have it. I for one have some way to go if I want to complete this particular top 100 list. I marked in green books I have but haven't started yet. Reading the list again, I cringe at a couple of them (well, at #64 actually). That's a few hours of my life I won't get back. And as for #54, that's a few hours of my life I saved from oblivion by not carrying on with it!

Of course, that's what I think. What do you think? Which ones have you read or abandoned part-way through?

I can't get no sleep....

Oh, if I could only get some sleep. Actually it's not *that* bad but I really could do with a decent 8-hour stretch.

On the up side, not sleeping means I have plenty of time to read my book. Currently on the go is Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. It is a Wall Street trader's memoir about the early to mid-80s, and in particular about the creation and massive expansion of the mortgage bond market. Even though it covers events from more than twenty years ago, it is eerily resonant in today's unpredictable times, in particular with the latest news from the US property markets. There is quite a lot (the technical bits) that I don't understand, but I'm getting enough to know that people on the money markets make money out of literally nothing. I see it as a bit like a dog chasing its tail. I can't really explain it, but so much of the finance industry is built around entirely intangible commodities. It has inspired to find out a bit more about how the whole crazy world of the markets works.

In other news:
Doggy has a flea. Or maybe even two. Damn and blast. She will have to be subjected to the flea-annihilating spray. Lucky doggy.
Yesterday was Marianne's birthday. Happy Birthday!
Last Wednesday was Bro's birthday. Happy Birthday!
Hubby bought a new suit.

Er, that's about all I have to say about that.

All my pictures of you

As if I don't already spend enough time faffing about online. I've started a sort of a photoblog. Sort of. Ish. So I'm on the lookout for other people doing photoblogs so I can link to them. So that if people land on my photoblog and think it's boring, at least they can out-click to something more exciting.