Book list

I am currently reading The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith which is taking me ages. Perhaps it is because I am too busy with my job and other things to read, or perhaps the characters are just too shallow and superficial. I have a huge pile of books to read too, and VH was ordering some books on Amazon the other day, so I thought I'd order a couple too that I am curious about including The Book Thief and What Was Lost. It will probably take me a year to read all the books I have at my current rate, but when I see a book I want at a good price, I can't resist it. I have a lot of travelling for work next week, so perhaps I'll have the chance to make a small dent in my pile.

I was wondering how well read I am. Here is a Telegraph list of the top 100 books; I've read 26 of them completely. How many have you read? There are others that I have read quite a lot of like The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and The Bible; others that I have seen an adaptation or film of but not read like Les Miserables, Lord of the Rings, Oliver Twist and Tess of the D'Ubervilles; and others I can't remember if I've read or not, like the Jane Austen books, The Hobbit and some of the children's books. Most of the books that I have read, I read ages ago, either as a child, or in depth through studying them at school, but I feel quite up-to-date with the modern 'classics' on this 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
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
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 7
6 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 Alborn
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

Passing time whilst commuting

When I commuted into work in London, I travelled in by train. This was a 1.5 hour journey each way. I initially just sat doing nothing, but before long I started reading to pass the time. I really enjoyed reading all of the free London papers. I think newspapers are often the best to read on a train journey as you can dip in and out of them, and it doesn't matter too much if someone is distracting. It was also useful that there was a library right next to my work place, and despite being small it was the best library I have ever used, as it stocked such a range of new books. I suppose I could have bought an iPod or MP3 player, but I preferred to read. Being silent seemed to fit in with the mentality of people commuting into London; I have never been on such quiet trains.

Now I am driving to and from work everyday on a 45 minute commute either way, and this will get longer next week when the schools re-open after the holidays. At first I was driving doing nothing else, and concentrating on the driving as it was a new route, but before long I felt confident enough to start listening to music. When driving, in general I prefer listening to easy to listen to music, nothing too upbeat but rather music that relaxes me, that isn't too distracting. At the moment, I enjoy listening to albums by James Blunt, and Duffy which I bought last week. Today I bought Take That's album so I will be listening to that this week. If I am not careful I will end up buying an album every week! I don't feel too guilty, but see buying albums for my commute a bit like buying lunch, an essential part of working life.

Random ramblings

It is 10.30pm and Veggie Hubby is watching Jesus of Nazareth. It is a loooong film (some 6 hours in total) and I'm totally bored. I feel like writing a stream of consciousness for the sake of it, as I have nothing better to do.

Well, actually I could read 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' which I am really enjoying but I have read a lot of it already today, and it is actually quite depressing. It angers me how women are treated in some cultures; that they are treated based on WHAT they are rather than WHO they are. For instance, one of the two main protagonists in this book, Mariam, is even treated like dirt by her own parents and much older husband, who was forced upon her when she was aged only fifteen, because her father was too ashamed of her to allow her to live in his house. The reasons they seem to have for treating her so appallingly are a) because she is a woman b) because she is the result of an affair, neither of which she (obviously) had any choice over. It does not matter to them that she is a sweet and trusting, if somewhat naive girl (because she hasn't received the education that she should have been entitled to). They seem to have no empathy at all for her, or her situation. OK, this is just fiction, but many women all around the world are quietly suffering at the hands of men. Reading this book makes me feel pretty lucky that I am a British woman, married to a 'modern' man.

Today, we have been preparing for Easter. This afternoon, we were looking at/photographing an Easter egg display in a shop window, which was really cute, with bunnies and sheep. Then, I looked up and noticed a beautiful rainbow. All of a sudden, it started to rain and not just rain but heavy sleet, with lots of hail and ice. So much for it being the start of Spring, but Veggie Hubby thought it was rather appropriate as it is Good Friday. The ground was quickly full of ice and slush. I haven't seen such a torrential downpour for a while. It gave a nice community feel, as everyone was huddling together in shop doorways, waiting for it to stop. However, I don't mind the rain much, I felt happy to run (it was raining too much to walk) through the empty streets, as it is not often they get that empty. We stopped in a coffee shop to dry off and have a drink. Tomorrow, we are going to visit some friends, and then on Sunday, we are going to spend our first Easter together, just the two of us. We are going to try to make our first Easter dinner together, and we may go to Church.

Libraries and books

I haven't read a book for a few weeks now, since I finished Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. I don't think that it is a co-incidence that I haven't read a book since I started my blog! Anyway, it is time for me to read another book again soon, the next one on my list is Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. I have had this one on order for a while now from the library, and finally yesterday I got a letter through the door saying that it is ready for collection. I briefly thought that it was a speeding fine, as the letter was a very official looking document from the council, but that is just me being paranoid as I am so careful not to speed. Anyway, I am digressing. This book has been a number one best-seller, the kind of book that is not stocked by my local library, which is why I had to order it from another linked library. My local library does have a relatively good non-fiction section though, and is good fiction-wise if you like those kind of Mills & Boons/saga/romance books, or crime novels, none of which appeal to me. It is a library that is trying to appeal to the older reader, I think. I can't complain too much about it though, I have never seen such cheery, friendly librarians in my life (except for a particular favourite school librarian of mine, Frankofile!!)

I do enjoy buying books too. I love bookshops like Waterstones and Borders, especially when they have Starbucks or Costa Coffee in them! However, there are no such bookshops nearby. Books in ASDA are cheap, and I am often tempted by their selection (not much choice, but seem to stock all the best-sellers). Last time I saw Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans which screamed 'Buy me!' to me, but I resisted. At the moment, buying books is not a top priority of mine. Having said that though, do sometimes buy books from charity book shops, the most recently being Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees yesterday, which was only 49p ($1) from Oxfam in Slough. Oxfam must realise that people in Slough have less money to give than where I live, where books cost £2.49 ($5). I cannot really complain though, as it is for charity. However, I do not need to buy many books anyway, as I have an ever-growing back-log of books here to read, including two gifts from Veggie Hubby; C'est La Folie and The First Wives Club.

Following my parents' advice

I have been reading a book I borrowed from the library, 'Blogging for dummies.' It is slighly out-of-date now I think, as the online world quickly evolves, and I have noticed on Amazon that an updated version has recently been released by different authors. The author of this version, Brad Hill, recommends the following article about how to write a better weblog. He also suggests that you should update your blog every weekday as to not lose readers. In general, I only try to update my blog when I have something useful to say, heeding the wise advice from my dad, 'If you have got nothing to say, say nothing.' Nevertheless, today I shall try to say something, despite having nothing to say.

My mum told me that everyday you should try to think of 5 things that you are grateful for.

Here are my 5 for today:

1) That I live close to the supermarket, so can just nip out and get some ingredients. For some strange reason, I love wandering around supermarkets even if I don't buy anything (which is rarely, as I can usually find something).
2) That I have my own space and don't need to share with other flatmates, such a luxury.
3) Of course, I live with my 'AlmostVeggieHubby' but I am grateful for that too, and that he has his visa for the time being.
4) That VeggieHubby loves washing up.
5) That I can randomly ramble on and someone, somewhere will read it ;-)