Book Time

The days are so dark and miserable at the moment that there are just about no knitting photo opportunities :o(
So instead, I have a meme that is doing the rounds in blogworld at the moment.

I have seen this on various blogs and I thought it might be fun...
This meme is originally from the Big Read, but with the nature of the web this list has changed considerably from the original list here

Apparently the BBC reckon most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Natalie suggests, Post your list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

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 (at school, I remember getting the book in English class and reading it in a couple of nights, and my English teacher was CROSS that I'd read ahead of the class!!!!)
6 The Bible (only a bit of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (again, at school)
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Read in 6th form to prove I was right in not picking A level English, because I could enjoy the book without the work... I didn't really enjoy the book. I remember getting thoroughly bored of the lengthy descriptions!)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, but not all, mostly at school)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier _I have this book, but for some reason have never picked it up.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (very recently, about 3 years after everyone else!)
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 (I don't think I finished it)
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 - (about 4 pages and then I couldn't cope with it anymore)
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 (another one that is sitting on the bookshelf)
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 (bought for me by my best friend because the main charater reminded her of me! I've never been sure what to think about that... )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (again at school, it makes me think of red slippers with feathers on, a tiny mouse and a massive man in blue dungarees)
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 (not all of them)
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

31 in total, 34 off the original list here.
I wonder which one I should read next?

All about me

It's been far too wet and miserable to take any pictures of my finished Swallowtail so instead your Wednesday night blog post is the meme that is doing the rounds at the moment.... I considered myself tagged by Lin
1) What was I doing ten years ago?
Exactly 10 years ago I'd just turned 21 and was sitting my geography finals in Sheffield. Pretending to revise, wondering about what the future held. Worrying about losing touch with my friends and apprehensive about a potential move to London. I passed despite the lack of revision, I am still friends with everyone from Uni who I wanted to stay friends with and the move to London was a success - despite having NO money whatsoever.

2) What are five (non-work) things on my to-do list for today:
1. Buy birthday presents, some belated some for next week
2. Pay in a cheque
3. Have dinner with my friend Lynn
4. Write a blog post
5. Call Lauren

3) Snacks I enjoy:
If I am honest, just chocolate, especially Malteasers and Twirls and G&B's chocolate.
However more recently I'm learning to enjoy apples and bananas and low fat yoghurt instead.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Hmmm... I'm not sure even that much money can magic up the things I dream of .....In my imaginary world I'd have all my friends living close enough to me so that I could pop around for a cup of tea. Everyone would be healthy and happy. I'd have pigs and a big vegetable garden and enough time to knit and not feel like I'd wasted the day. And I'd never have to do any cleaning.

5) Places I have lived:
Wolverhampton, Sheffield and then Roehampton, Fulham, Colliers Wood and Mitcham in London.

6) Jobs I have had:
Worked in a shop that sold cheap jewellery, ornaments, jokes and fancy dress.
Packed frozen chips on night shift
Packed surgical examination kits
Assembled garden taps
Worked in Woolies (this lasted about 2 weeks)
Graduate Trainee at the department for Education
Corporate Finance researcher

7) Peeps I want to know more about:
Roobeedoo, Bryony, Delle

4 Things About Me.

I've been tagged again, this time by Wendy

4 Jobs I have had in my life

- Sales Assistant in a jewellery/gift/fancy dress shop when I was at school

- Packing surgical dressings in a factory in Wolverhampton during university holidays

- Library Assistant at the Department for Education and Employment (where I was always scared that I would tread on Lucy - (David Blunkett's guide dog) as she used to lie on your feet in the lift)

- Corporate Finance Researcher - what I've been doing for the last 8 years, previously for an investment bank now for an accountancy firm.

4 films I can watch again and again
Pulp Fiction

The Wizard of Oz

Moulin Rouge

Kill Bill (either of them but I have to close my eyes when it gets to the eyeball bit!

4 places I have lived
- Wolverhampton, where I grew up and where I live now.

- Sheffield - my University town

- Fulham, West London - in a gorgous but shabby Victorian terrace house with a landlord who had no idea what rental prices should be in this area.

- Mitcham - where I bought my flat

4 TV series I watch
-ER.- Religiously since the first series

-Gand Designs - because it is the only reason Tony has a TV and he was very upset to find it has been replaced by BB

Um, probably not much else to be honest. Maybe Gardeners' World when I remember it is on.

4 places I have been on holiday
So many lovely places to choose from.

-The Lake District is probably my favouriteand we've been here about once a year for the last 5 or 6 years

-Mexico - my dad won a trip to Acapulco in a radio quiz when I was 13 and we went on our first overseas family holiday there

-Italy - I've been to Venice, Verona and Rome and loved them all. The food is fab too.

-St Petersburg - I had a friend studying out there whilst I was at uni so I went to visit her. It seemed like such a normal thing to do at the time! It was freezing but beautiful.

4 things I do every time I go on the Net
-check my email

-check Bloglines for new posts

-check the weather

-work (mostly - I am a researcher who spends all day on the net)

4 things I would NOT eat for anything in the world
-Lobster, I'm scared of them

-Jellied eels - they look horrid and I can't imagine how slimey they must be

-Any kind of insect/grub type thing

-Scrambled egg - just the smell of it makes me retch!

4 places I would love to be right now
-On the sofa knitting

-With my friends chilling out

- Planting things in the garden

-Sleeping

4 people I tag

I tag Roobeedoo, Bryony, Flossie and J

8 Random things about me...

This one seems to be doing the rounds. I've been tagged by Roobeedoo


Rules:
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write a blog post about their own 8 random things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog you need to tag 8 people and post their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment to tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.



8 Random things
1. I am scared of lobsters. Terrified in fact. However I am getting better, I can walk on the same side of the road as the restaurant with the lobsters in the display and once I even managed to pass money over one at a fish stall in borough market (then it moved and I screamed and felt very silly).


2. Like Kerrie and Dee, I have never smoked and I can't stand the smell of it. I can't wait until July 1st. I think a pub crawl is in order to celebrate.


3. I can't roll my tongue. People think it is very funny to watch me try.


4. I count whilst waiting for the bus. Sometimes I count cars, sometimes I count red cars, sometimes I count cars where people aren't wearing their seatbelt (there used to be lots of these in Mitcham). I try and guess how many there will be before the bus comes. I can't really do that in Wolverhampton as I have to wait at the bus depot... hmmm... need to find a game involving buses.


5. I love Marti Pellow and grin stupidly everytime I hear or see him. He was my first crush, aged about 10, and for some reason I've never got over it.

6. Most of my knitting time is on the bus and the train. Sometimes this sparks conversations, sometimes strange looks. I think both are funny.

7. My crocs are the best shoes I have ever bought. They get funny looks too.

8. I love living in Wolverhampton with Tony, but I do miss my friends. I wish we could all live close to each other and pop around for cups of tea etc etc. I often daydream about how fab this would be and I'm a little jealous of those people who live really near their close friends.

I tag - Bryony, Wendy, Glenda and Lizzy