BBC Book List

This little gem showed up on my Facebook today and I thought why not follow Purple Niko's lead and post it on my blog...

Quite a fun and interesting little exercise I have to say!

BBC’s Book List

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy the list into a Note and put an ‘x‘ after those you have read, count ‘em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x - well the first one and the 4th one anyways)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( x)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
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 (x)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x)
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 (x)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (x)
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 (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (x)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
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 (x)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
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 (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)
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
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
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (x)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)
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


36 out of 100 - not bad if the average is 6, but makes me think I should be reading more actually...

Now. I challenge you to go through the list and see how many you've read! Have fun!

Some knitting progress and a new puppy!

Finally. Progress in the knitting department.

I've been working on a few small projects for the most part, but picking up Greenjeans and doing a few rows here and there every now and again so it's getting some attention too.

First off, I was starting to feel a bit weird that I hadn't started to knit anything for the baby yet. I'm a bit old-fashioned (read: crazy) when it comes to baby things. I was once told, many moons ago when I was pregant with J, that you shouldn't get anything for the baby before you're seven months along. For whatever reason, that has stuck fast in my brain and I have trouble letting go of it. Really it's silly. Why should I wait until I'm in my third trimester, overly big and overly tired to start preparing for this little one. Plus people were starting to give me weird looks when they'd say, "So have you been knitting lots for baby?" and I say, "No. Nothing yet." It was like I was somehow failing as a knitting expectant mother.

Anyways - to ease my way in to baby knitting without upsetting any superstitious madness, I thought I'd make a couple of pairs of Magic Baby Slippers. They're a fantastic way to use up odds and ends of sock yarn you have left in your stash and they take no time at all to whip up! Because I don't know if this little one is a boy or girl I knit a pair of each.

Next on my list was my Capitan hat. I had been gifted the perfect shade of red lopi last summer and so thought I'd make myself a new hat to go along with the alpaca scarf I'd brought back from my trip to Peru. Apparently, I do not suit Capitan as well as I hoped. Given the ridiculous amount of laughter that ensued when I tried it on for (BF)G, I am thinking perhaps Capitan will be reserved for very cold days out in the yard at home, or will be finding a new home. So - you get to see the hat, without being able to see how silly I look in it. It is a great pattern though! Quick and easy to follow.

I've also been working on (BF)G's socks. They're my go to project when I'm on the go. I keep them in my purse and pull them out whenever I have some waiting to do or some spare time on my hands. I had forgotten that the pattern uses a "Dutch Heel" which is done rather differently then my usual heel that I'm used to, so for a bit it threw me, but once done, I had my "ah-ha" moment and remember that despite it's odd look, it's actually a pretty good heel for (BF)G's socks.

Alrighty - I did mention a new puppy! Because with the four cats, rat, fish, and two dogs, we clearly did not have enough pets already, we went and got ourselves another one. I'd like to introduce you to our baby dog, "Bella". She's only eight weeks old and is a cross between a Great Pyranese and a Newfie. In other words, she will grow to be the size of a small car! But she's beautiful, affectionate and already so smart.

Maybe next time I post I will actually have major progress done on Greenjeans. (It's my next goal in knitting accomplishments that I would like to achieve!)