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.

THROUGH THE WINDOW

Not a bad shot when you consider that I took it through the window over the sink, through the screen in the window, me leanng at an angle, one handed. I actually tried four shots, this was the best of the lot.

FACT CHECKIING? NOT

I occasionally run across some strange data on the Ancestry website. I can kind of understand getting place names wrong. Although it’s kind of hard to believe that even an American would believe that someone who died in the twelfth century managed to die in, say, Kansas.

However, I don’t think they had sperm banks in the fifteenth century. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury did have a daughter named Eleanor. But he died in 1460 and the Eleanor Neville Henshall in my family tree was born in 1587. Now that’s a stretch. It seems that once someone makes a mistake and posts it, others copy the mistake without even going “hunh, boy that’s weird.” Actually, it’s kind of scary, now that I think about it. I just hope none of these folks has their finger on a trigger.

FLICKERING?

We had a bumper crop of berries on the dogwood this year. Yeah, the tree had berries until these guys arrived. I found this shot of a Northern Flicker, a kind of woodpecker on the net. They generally feed on insects and other small ground critters but they like fruit this time of year so bye bye dogwood berries. It's a trip to watch an eleven or twelve inch bird deal with some of the smaller branches that are more suitable for chickadees or nuthatches. But, that fruit is mighty tempting.

I had to resort to the net because by the time I get my camera and get to the window the fruit gobblers have moved. LOL This shot is supposed have been taken from a bird watching blind in the Deschutes National Forest in Eastern Oregon

They are a beautiful creature. Most of the time what you see is the white patch above their tails as they fly away.

It was a riot this afternoon. One bird was at the end of the branch and couldn't really hang on above the branch. So....it was very happily hanging upside down scarfing every berry it could reach. Again, gone by the time I got into position.

VISITORS

We had guests in the front yard about a half hour before sunset. There's been a blacktail doe and her twins from this year checking the neighborhood out off and on the last few weeks. We'd spot the twins out front or in a neighbor's yard while mama was on station on the hill behind the house. This evening all three plus a little spike buck were out front just checking out the possibilities. I wonder if "spike" is hers from last year.

There was a story in paper last week detailing how hard it is to hunt blacktails. Can't understand why anyone would. Not because they're cute (if a pain in the gardener's keister) but they aren't very big. They might be about three feet or so at the shoulder on a good day. So far they haven't been too big a pain in the garden this year. More nibblers than munchers. But, then we do have the plantings pretty dispersed anyway.

Didn't try for pictures, it was getting dark. I assume they have a hidey hole up in the brush on the hill. Someplace out of the rain.

ADDENDUM

Not that I'm an advocate of "just good enough" as in just good enough to get Joe Blow to buy it, eat it or vote for it. But, it appears that once just good became the norm; things went downhill really, really fast. The bridge at the bottom of hill is out and the train has no brakes.

I'LL NEVER GET THEM BACK

This pet peeve doesn’t rise to the level the WTF entries over on Women On awhile back. It’s just really, really, really irritating. Anybody else out there getting tired of unasked for phone calls that feature one or all of the following.

A caller who can’t speak English.

A caller who has a barely understandable accent.

A phone connection that sounds like someone put a microphone next to a bowl of rice crispies and put a pillow between them.

Or on a really bad day; all three of the above. I had a call like that this morning.

I think the caller’s name was Jason, or something like that. He repeated it three times and I never did get it. The accent wasn’t too bad, so maybe his name really was Jason or something like that. I believe he was asking me to participate in a survey of some kind sponsored by a company whose name I never got. However, after the above three tries about one word in five was making it out of the rice crispy bowl and past the pillow. At that point it was “hey, I can’t hear you, I can’t understand you, and I think you need a better phone set up. Good by.”

Well, there’s two minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

It’s what seems to be the attitude behind calls like this that mystifies me. Somebody is paying for this. They’re paying the people making the calls, they’re paying for the equipment; but, these calls are so far from “just good enough” they’re in the next state.

FALL

Looked up from weeding and caught a glimpse of a squirrel that was moving a little slowly. He’d been visiting the chestnut tree down the street and was carrying a nut that was bigger than his head. It sort of got in the way of his short little legs.

Yeah, we’ve got little weeds up the wazoo, but all the time sensitive stuff is pretty much done. Garden areas are cleared and planted to clover for winter cover. Everything that we planned to move has pretty much been moved. Still have a couple of lavenders to groom….but that has to wait until the stuff in the yard debris bin either settles or gets picked up next week.

The squirrels have been busy. Looked up this morning and there was a little guy digging through the stuff on the ground. He was all of four feet away from me and wasn’t bothered at all. I guess some of them have figured out that I’m no threat.

Since the evergreen shrubs in the front have gotten large enough we’ve had more small birds in the front. They seem to need the shrubs for cover. They flit from dogwood to andromedas to rhodie and then head across to the trees across the street. They’re busy all day.

THE PRAYERS OF STREAMS AND STONES

THE PRAYERS OF STREAMS AND STONES

Two similar visions of the relationship of the natural and spiritual worlds from opposite points of view. Rae Beth is British; a self described wild wood mystic within the Wiccan tradition. John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me, was a friend of Thomas Merton and was chose to write his biography. Unfortunately he was only able to work complete the material about Merton’s hermitage years before his death.

“….One who speaks for the tree roots and stone. Who speaks with the tree root’ and stone’ voices One who speaks as the grass and rivers. Who speaks as field and woods and hills and valleys and salt marshes and waves and tides. Yet who speaks as what is close to home. With the mouse’s voice or the seagull’s or the fox’s or the badger’s. One who speaks in cadences that go beyond the darkness and beyond stars, encompassing what is immeasurable. One whose entire being vibrates to the spirits’ words in nature, like a reed at dawn in a pool where trout swim.”

Rae Beth in The Hedge Witch’s Way

“The very nature of your solitude involves you in union with the prayers of the wind in the trees, the movement of the stars, the feeding of the birds in the fields, the building of the anthills. You witness the creator and attend to him in all his creation.”

John Howard Griffin biographer of Thomas Merton’s hermitage years. He spent time in the hermitage used by Thomas Merton at the abbey of Gethsemane and kept a journal during that time.
Rae Beth writes of one of her familiars, an old cunning man who lived in Britain over a thousand years ago. He spoke to her of prayers. He said that we must know all the prayers of the world around us; of the birds, beasts or fish. I can understand the idea that a sparrow or a fox might pray; but the prayers of streams or stones?

What does water dream of and pray for? Does the drop of water in a tiny brook remember when is was part of a mighty ocean? Does it remember being a snowflake, a glacier, or a tiny drop of rain? Does it remember being another tiny rivulet? Flowing from rivulet, to stream, to mighty river and finally to the sea. Does it remember being caught up by the warmth of the sun only to become a new drop of rain. Does it remember the long fall from cloud to earth, the sinking into the soil, the slow drift into tree roots, the release from leaves into the air and back to clouds to fall again.

What does a stone remember? Does it remember when its atoms were part of the primal lava flows? Does it remember further back when the atoms were formed in the death throes of a super nova? Do the atoms remember their lives in a cliff face being ground down by relentless breakers? Does it remember the endless pressure as the sandstone was thrust again into daylight or carried down into the heart of the earth to return again as a lava flow?

Imagining the dreams of a bird, badger or fish is difficult enough for a human. Normally we see water, grass or stone as inanimate, unaware. To imagine their prayers; that is a mystery.

A POEM BY PATRICK

Our God, God of all men,
God of heaven and earth, seas and rivers,
God of sun and moon, of all the stars,
God of high mountains and lowly valleys,
God over heaven, and in heaven, and under heaven.
He has a dwelling in heaven and earth and sea
And in all things that are in them.

He inspires all things and quickens all things.
He is over all things, he supports all things.
He makes the light of the sun to shine,
He surrounds the moon and the stars,
He has made wells in the arid earth,
Placed dry islands in the sea.
He has a Son co-eternal with himself….
And the Holy Spirit breathes in them;
Not separate are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Attributed to Saint Patrick.

Part of Patrick’s reply to questions about God and creation in very Irish poetic form. There is no split here between Creator and Creation. There was little or no conflict in the relationships between man, nature and the Creator. While sixth century Christian missionaries in Western Europe were cutting down sacred trees; despoiling sacred wells, pulling down pagan alters, and imposing the Roman calendar in place of rhythm of the solar and lunar cycles the Celts were finding God in the sea and stars.

POST ON GREEN WOMAN

Fishing in a meadow over on Green Woman.

OF GNATS AND SPECKS

“You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.” Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth. He was just a little…upset with certain Temple officials at the time. The allusion is similar to “you keep pointing out the speck in your neighbors eye while ignoring the four by four in your own.”

I was reading some reviews of The Shack on Amazon and came across a comment with the curious (to me) assertion that contemplative prayer was “unbiblical.” Googling the subject led to some interesting websites. I find this curious since the material I've read on praying the office style of prayer is all based on the Bible. Some may add a hymn or short piece for meditation but they all have at least one reading from each testament and a Psalm.Depending on the monastery or convent the prayer cycle might go through the all the Psalms in as little as two weeks or take up to a month. And Kathleen Norris comments in Cloister Walk that the Abbey (St. John’s I think) where she’s an oblate would go through whole books i.e. Jeremiah in the run up to Eastertide, at a time. Personally, I love contemplative prayer and the Desert Fathers were praying it before it was decided exactly what the Bible was. So, has anyone run into this and what is the basis for these opinions?

This started a discussion thread in the Creation Spirit community I joined a couple of months ago. There have been some good responses and I’ve learned a lot. Maybe more than I really wanted to.

I’ve had to take myself firmly in hand and decide that researching the critics is not only futile but depressing. Nothing that I or anyone else outside their communities will change their minds. I don’t really mind that we don’t agree on how to approach God/dess in prayer. It’s that they seem so…..bleak and joyless. Heck, the different authors don’t even agree among themselves. It’s an interesting and dare I say arrogant world they seem to inhabit. Two thousand years of tradition out the door. Forever seeking to correct the imperfections they perceive in everyone around them. But, it isn’t for me.