THE BBC 100

I don’t have notes on FB so I’m blogging this puppy with a link on FB.

"Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the one hundred books listed here. I haven’t figured out how to do notes so I’ll blog and put in a link. Bold the books you’ve read. Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. "

Personal opinion: this is a strange list. Lots of Austen and Dickens, no Trollope or Galsworthy. Ok, so the Forsyte Saga is a Victorian soaper but Trollope’s novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire are a hoot.

Is it just me, or does this list read like a cross between several best sellers lists, adaptations shown on Masterpiece Theater, and the required reading lists for English Lit?

Some of what they left out. Everything by Mary Renault. The Shoes of the Fisherman and the Clowns of God by Morris West. Captain Newman MD by Leo Rosten, The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton………………..

I am ahead of the curve on the BBC list though.

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 Do the first three count?

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (significant portions)

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 (Most, but not the complete works) I took Shakespeare in college, I had to read them.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

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

23. Bleak House- Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams and all the sequels

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 (Saw the movie, does that count?)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown I’ll admit I blasted through this trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. Big shrug.

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 and all the sequels

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 Sorry, just couldn’t get into it.

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- I know, this is his masterpiece. I didn’t make it past page three. I do not do stream of consciousness, period.

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

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

87Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88The 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-

There it is. Have fun.



AIRPORT INSECURITY

I got such a kick visualizing this that I decided to post in Women On, too.

May I suggest an alternative to the airport security check ins that have so many knickers in a twist? I haven’t figured out which combo is best. But, when you arrive at the airport and check in you are issued either two bed sheets or a sheet and a hospital style gown. You are also given flip flops and a see through bag that can be sealed once it’s scanned. Perhaps they could use something like the anti shoplifting tags that use dye. That, or a very small stink bomb to deter folks from unsealing their bags.

You change, put your clothing, including the above mentioned knickers and other unmentionables in the bag and go through the security scanners. Your bag is sealed and you board your flight looking rather like an extra from Gandhi, the Animal House toga party or an old sword and sandals film. I would not want to be stranded on the tarmac in Chicago this time of year.

For extra spice all congressional representatives, bureaucrats etc. would be required to fly commercial airlines and have to do the same thing. Especially anyone remotely tied to the TSA or Homeland Security. Can you imagine all our over sixty representatives without their power suits (or skirts) as the case may be. ;-) It’d be worth the cost of a ticket just to see Mitch McConnel trying to figure out what to do with his tighty whities.

“Those who sacrifice liberty for a little safety deserve neither liberty or safety” freely borrowed from Ben Franklin.

HAPPY SNACK

This is one of our favorite snacks. Homemade French bread, basil pesto and shredded Grana Padano (Italian cheese on step below Parmagiano, really good stuff). Then you run it under the broiler until the cheese melts as much as it's going to. Spraying the bread with olive oil mixed with Balsamic vinegar is pretty good too.