claudine_c

[Because lots of my friends are doing it. Grumble: some of these 'books' are really series or anthologies; I've listed as 'read' the ones where I feel I've read a good proportion.]

[Oh, hello. Yes, I'm back online -- briefly. Will disappear again in a few days.]

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (don't know how to rate this -- I gave up somewhere in the middle of The Two Towers)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (hmph, this isn't a book, it's an anthology!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Another series! I've read the first two of the trilogy so far.)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's 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 and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and 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 Meaney - 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
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 Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
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 Blyton
91 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

Via Joshua.

( Probably boring for all the non-Anglican readers, and maybe some of the Anglican ones too. )

Via kerravonsen. Comments are screened unless you ask me to unscreen.

1. Your Middle Name:
2. Age:
3. Single or Taken:
4. Favourite Movie:
5. Favourite Song or Album:
6. Favourite Band/Artist:
7. Dirty or Clean:
8. Tattoos and/or Piercings:
9. Do we know each other outside of LJ?
10. What's your philosophy on life?
11. Is the bottle half-full or half-empty?
12. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest?
13. What is your favourite memory of us?
14. What is your favourite guilty pleasure?
15. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
16. You can have three wishes (for yourself, so forget all the 'world peace etc' malarky) - what are they?
17. Can we get together and make a cake?
18. Which country is your spiritual home?
19. What is your big weakness?
20. Do you think I'm a good person?
21. What was your best/favourite subject at school?
22. Describe your accent
23. If you could change anything about me, would you?
24. What do you wear to sleep?
25. Trousers or skirts?
26. Cigarettes or alcohol?
27. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
28. Will you repost this so I can fill it out for you?

It had to happen eventually. Maybe it's happened already and I didn't notice (my blog/LJ reading has been sporadic lately). I've been tagged for the 'Five things you didn't know about me' meme.

1. Everything I think, say and do is guided by my faith in Jesus. Now there are many people who know that I'm a Christian, but not many of them read this journal. Lately I've been wondering why there is this huge disconnect between my LJ/blog/geek persona and what matters most to me. Maybe this is a topic for another post.

2. I have never baked a cake.

3. I studied law for one semester.

4. Before I became a vegetarian, my favourite foods included fish and my Mum's special chicken curry.

5. I once literally hit someone on the head with a Bible. Only once, mind, and that was nearly ten years ago. I have mellowed since then.

I think I'm supposed to tag five more people now, but I would have to go back and see who has done this already, and who hasn't. Ah, it's too much trouble.

via fwuffydragon

Go through the list. Tick everything you have or have done. If you can tick 40 or more, you're spoiled.

(x) your own cell phone
() a television in your bedroom
() an iPod (but I do have an audio player...)
() a photo printer
(x) your own phone line
() TiVo or a generic digital video recorder
() high-speed internet access (i.e., not dialup)
() a surround sound system in bedroom
() DVD player in bedroom
() at least a hundred DVDs
(x) a childfree bathroom
(x) your own in-house office
() a pool
() a guest house
() a game room
() a queen-size bed
() a stocked bar
() a working dishwasher
() an icemaker
() a working washer and dryer
() more than 20 pairs of shoes
() at least ten things from a designer store
() expensive sunglasses
() framed original art (not lithographs or prints)
() Egyptian cotton sheets or towels
() a multi-speed bike
() a gym membership
() large exercise equipment at home
() your own set of golf clubs
() a pool table
() a tennis court
() local access to a lake, large pond, or the sea
() your own pair of skis
() enough camping gear for a weekend trip in an isolated area
() a boat
() a jet ski
() a neighborhood committee membership
() a beach house or a vacation house/cabin
() wealthy family members
() two or more family cars
() a walk-in closet or pantry
(x) a yard
() a hammock
() a personal trainer
(x) good credit
() expensive jewelry
() a designer bag that required being on a waiting list to get
() at least $100 cash in your possession right now
() more than two credit cards bearing your name (not counting gas cards or debit cards)
() a stock portfolio
(x) a passport
() a horse
() a trust fund (either for you or created by you)
() private medical insurance
() a college degree, and no outstanding student loans

Do you:
() shop for non-needed items for yourself (like clothes, jewelry, electronics) at least once a week
() do your regular grocery shopping at high-end or specialty stores
() pay someone else to clean your house, do dishes, or launder your clothes (not counting dry-cleaning)
(x) go on weekend mini-vacations
() send dinners back with every flaw
() wear perfume or cologne (not body spray)
() regularly get your hair styled or nails done in a salon
() have a job but don't need the money OR
() stay at home with little financial sacrifice
() pay someone else to cook your meals
() pay someone else to watch your children or walk your dogs
() regularly pay someone else to drive you
() expect a gift after you fight with your partner

Are you:
() an only child
() married/partnered to a wealthy person
() baffled/surprised when you don't get your way

Have you:
() been on a cruise
(x) traveled out of the country
() met a celebrity
() been to the Caribbean
() been to Europe
() BEEN TO HONG KONG
() been to Hawaii
() been to New York
() eaten at the space needle in Seattle
() been to the Mall of America
() been on the Eiffel tower in Paris
() been on the Statue of Liberty in New York
() moved more than three times because you wanted to
() dined with local political figures
() been to both the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast

Did you:
() go to another country for your honeymoon
() hire a professional photographer for your wedding or party
() take riding or swimming lessons as a child
(x) attend private school
() have a Sweet 16 birthday party thrown for you


(Phew, only 10.)