Booksong..........

I saw this list on Bill Blunt's blog and thought

'mmm? Interesting!'

I love books and take after my father for that. The thought of throwing books away fills me with sadness. I have attempted to do this in the past and not succeeded.

Thankfully my niece is a bookworm too so I can pass them on to her now.

I have banned myself from going to the enormous Waterstones in Manchester as it like entering a time warp.... suddenly 2 hours have passed and I only went into get a specific book.

So back to the list. Apparently most people have only read 6% of the top 100 books on this list compiled from BBC's Big Read. I found that astonishing. I know a lot of the books listed are oldie books now but certainly in my youth, at school and beyond, I read them with pleasure. There are also some excellent books not on there that I would gladly put in the top 100 such as Engelby~ Sebastian Faulkes, Winter in Madrid ~ C.J. Sansom & The Russian Concubine ~ Kate Furnivall... I could add more but I won't.......

However, here are the instructions

1) Look at the list and embolden those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Books you love change to highlighted in blue
4) The books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated change to highlighted in red
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

Some I have left with nothing denoting them as I don't know the books so don't know whether I would read them or not!!!

So, including a couple of red 'I was forced to read and hated books', I have a respectable 43% ... not as respectable as Bill's 58% however but hey!!

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 - 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

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 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

what is happening out there?.........................

This is the World Clock................ it does come with some 'rider's' with it but it is amazing all the same!
almost 6.7 bn people
80m births to 34 m deaths (mm the balance is out of hand here )

25m cars produced, 65 m bikes and 50m computers
wow there are 1.1 bn internet users .. how cool

but scarily to keep this growth going there is over $ 720bn invested in the miiltary

must venture deeper into this website!!

symbiosis?......

This photograph captures a most mutually beneficial relationship

But note to the left..... it is a pharmacy.. 'so the drugs don't work!!'.... and to the right a newsagent where folk can check out your obituary!!

Neat hey??

hey hey 'tis summer.......

I am aghast! We have had 3 days uninterrupted sun.
In the UK up North this is certainly a result. Sad as it may seem but each sunny day is cherished and remebered.
A few weeks ago I visited the Manchester Science Museum and witnessed a 'talk' (along side a league of different nations) about the Manchester cotton trade in the 1800s.
This area was ideal for spinning cotton as it was so damp apparently!!
Gosh why didn't I know this before I bought my house here and settled in the area??

Yesterday, I ventured back home to Southport and spent a great few hours on the beach there. The sun shone hard and the sea?? Well the sea was absent. I had quite forgotten this,as in the summer months the tide goes so far out you can't even see it.

We walked .. under the Pier and beyond and still we could not see the sea.

down in the tube station at..............

I am not a lover of the tube.
I prefer my feet on the ground and not below or above the ground for that matter!

But I had to travel on the London Tube system and my eye was caught...... some great sights on 'click, walk, click'

click, walk, click.. london style....

Point, click & walk with just a bit of resizing and cropping






What did I miss up there?
horses behind lol

lust for london...

I was in London yesterday.
My meeting was for one hour but I did a 10 hour day!!!
I love visiting our capital but it is only these days on a day trip as the train can get me there in a little over 2 hours.

I took my camera and did a walk, click, walk.
But that can wait for another blog or two.

Our London offices are nestled in Whitehall a stones throw from Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament but most importantly 10 minutes from the National Gallery.

I have not been there since I was a teenager, nor have I had time to pop in on other trips to London. As I had 1 1/2 hours to spare before my train I thought 'why not?'


The gallery was packed and it didn't strike me for ages, until I heard another UK English voice just how many foreign tourists were there. Many Japanese, French, Spanish etc and so many Americans (which I thought unusual due to the state of the $ to the £ just now).

My first 'oo' 'ah' there was Cezannes ~ 'Bathers'. Love the simplicity yet depth of this painting

Then dear Van Gogh and his 'Chair' & 'Sunflowers' 'Sunset in Wheat Fields'.. how we had to draw 'The Chair' in that style aged 16.

Some great Lautrec's ...

Moroni ~Portrait of a Lady ('La Dama in Rosso')

How sumptuous is that fabric on her dress?

Dirck van Delen from 1634 and Architectural Fantasy.. simply wonderful in composition & imagination!

Rembrandts 'Anna and the Blind Tobit'

Rubens 'Minerva Protects Pax from Mars'


Velazquelez ~ The Toilet of Venus' an odd title, love this along with a contemporary postcard 'Life imagining art!'

Drouais ~ 'Madame de Pompadour' sensational. the lover of Louis XV (15th).. no image I could find could depict the fineness of the fabric and lace on her dress.. it is exquisite and like a real life image or photograph.. had my nose pressed up to her skirts!!

Loved this image of 'Antoine Paris' by Hyacinthe Rigaud. (oh not a woman painter but a man!) how contemporary is this guys face (not his dress or hair) in comparison to other portraits in the 1700s?

But finally I gazed on a painting I have admired for many years, having it hung in my bathroom...

Georges Seurat, ~ Bathers at Asnieres.

I hadn't realised just how large it is? Approx 5ft x 8ft.. and even more sensational live :-)

Ahh! My inner soul is recharged again :-D