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Books glorious books...

Monday, 31 August 2009

In the midst of trying to decide what to read next I stumbled across the list of the 100 best books of all time compiled by the BBC... There really aren't many surprises - I'm sure there isn't a book on the list I haven't heard of, but quite surprisingly quite a few I haven't read. In fact the BBC claimed that most adults had only read 6 out of the 100 best books of all time! I managed 39 read, plus a few started but couldn't finish :-S - how do you stack up? ;-)

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 X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
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 X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
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 X
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 X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
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 - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
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 X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Labels: 100 best books, book, reading

posted by genloz at 10:58 PM 0 Comments

Home is where the heart is

Sunday, 18 January 2009

Book of the Week: The Invention of Clouds... The extraordinary tale of Luke Howard and the birth of meteorology... What is most amazing is how by simply defining 6 words this discipline took off in leaps and bounds. Highly recommended!

You will be pleased to know that Green Card is back online... Someone managed to guess the password somehow - rather than any particular flaw in the code (human error I guess you could call it - I made the password too simple or distributed it to too many people!)... At least I hope that's all it was!

Apart from that it has been a weekend of home improvements... Mostly turning over the soil for growing veggies (and finding some very weathered 1958 pennies in the process), planting fruit trees and native herbs, and repainting old furniture with the spare paint from the shed. I read that the imagery of a pair of birds in feng shui is suitable for the southwest corner of the bedroom so I repainted my previously fluorescent blue and yellow chest of draws to match the room with a simple design... It worked out well as the yellow blended into the walls and so the room still looks spacious! While I was doing that Ganesh started work on the pond... When I planned the garden out I decided to capture the water from the shed roof via a simple water wheel into a pond as extra water storage for when the drought is extreme. He did a fantastic job digging a deep hole, about 2m long 1m wide and 50cm deep... It will have to be reduced to 30cm deep to comply with the law, but the amazing part was that we struck a layer of clay at the bottom. We had a lot of fun spreading clay all over the sides of the hole to seal it... I felt like I was in a New Zealand mud spa - the texture of the wet clay was like cream! I finally understand why people enjoy mud baths!

This evening we had dinner with my aunts and uncle at a lovely Thai restaurant in Alphington and tasted some deliciously sweet mulberries from their farm... we are now listening to Osho videos on you tube. Osho turns out to be on the surface a crazy Indian guru... "I know for sure God does not exist. And thank-God he does not exist!"... But under his jocular exterior he makes some interesting points, and he also is a fantastic example of a person who so easily introduces humour into his speech. While his humour is a little more crass, Osho does remind me of Douglas Adams - the greatest author of all time!

Labels: book, home improvements, osho

posted by genloz at 11:03 PM 2 Comments