One hundred books

I found this one on my friend Rhonda Steed's blog (and she said she got it from facebook). 
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.  Who knows if this list was really started by the BBC or is one of those internet urban legends that floats around.  Still interesting.  (As an aside, I googled it after I finished assessing the list below, and it looks like there are number of different 'BBC' lists floating around). 

Quite honestly, a lot of these books on this list I read thirty or so years ago and don't remember much!  When I was young, I tried to work my way through a lot of the 'classics'. Might be time to reread a few.  Some of them I disliked and struggled to finish.  The really good ones I reread every few year.  The Hobbit and Gone with the Wind are wonderful every single time I read them!  I own a handful of the others (Life of Pi, DaVinci Code, etc.) and just haven't got to them yet.  There's a few on this list that I never heard of before.  We could probably all make our own lists.........  get out there and read!  Preferably with some friends - discussing books is motivational for getting them read.

Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.



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 The Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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
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 Graeme
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 - A.A. 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 - L.M. Montgommery
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 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
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The 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 St. 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

Nova Scotia

well, I'm a little behind, since I was there during the last week of September, but can I just say I absolutely adore Nova Scotia?  Oh my goodness, it just suits me perfectly.  I could move there in a heartbeat.  I love the climate and the people and the landscape and the smell of the ocean.  I went with two of my friends, Kim and Sue, on a 'mommy' road trip and we could not have had a better time.  We talked and laughed and photographed and did not cook a single meal nor clean up after any child.

Here's where we stayed:  Cottage on Black Rock Road

Kim and her husband Bill bought this cottage a couple of years ago and rent it out through Cottages in Canada.  It's a wonderful little gem sitting right on the Bay of Fundy, perfectly situated for relaxing and exploring most of Nova Scotia.  If you're heading that way and need a place to stay, it would be perfect for a family vacation.  I'm hoping to take my family there in a couple of years.  I think everybody needs to visit Nova Scotia at least once!

Book Closeouts Sale

If you're looking for inexpensive books,  Book Closeouts has a great sale on right now, 50% off of the already discounted prices of many books, plus free shipping over $35.  They don't have the brand brand new releases, but there is still plenty to choose from.   I ordered a bunch of books for my oldest son, a voracious 10 year old reader, for a few bucks a piece.  On his list were anything by Eoin Colfer, Erin Hunter and the Warriors series, the Ranger's Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney, Simpsons comic books, and I found all of these at Book Closeouts yesterday.  I also ordered a few books for me - a novel, a cookbook, a photography book and a papercraft book.  All told, I got 13 books I wanted for less than $40, including tax, a pretty sweet deal.  ;-)

November Update

ooh, what a crazy month it's been, but every day of November that passes brings us a day closer to Christmas..........  and eventually out the other side to spring again.  Can't wait!  So far, November has contained my wedding anniversary (22 years, can you imagine!), my husband's birthday, a scrapbooking weekend in Pigeon Lake, lots of work deadlines, magazine deadlines, a bout with a stomach virus and the serious start of indoor soccer, meaning four or five days a week hanging out at the indoor soccer pitches.  This is the first year we have tried indoor soccer, and it is a lot of fun!  But definitely a serious time commitment.....

I just received the winter edition of Canadian Scrapbooker in the mail.  Always a happy mail day, and this issue was especially significant as it is the five year anniversary since the magazine began!!!!!!!!   I had a lot of fun with cork in the latest magazine - my big frugal score was a couple of rolls of cork shelf liner on clearance at Superstore.  Perfect for embellishments!  The thinner and cheaper the cork, the easier it is to punch and tear (although sometimes it tears too much so be cautious).  The thicker cork sheets that you can purchase for a bit more money are much sturdier.