100 Books that British People Love

Circulating on facebook at the moment is this list, with the information reading "Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here."
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. NOTE HOW I PUT PLUSSES AFTER ALL OF THEM. THIS IS BECAUSE I AM A 'TARD AND DIDN'T READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

As for that BBC reckons that peeps will have only read 6, the BBC reckoned no such thing. This was a list compiled over a year of BBC subscribers' favorite books. As such, having only read 6 out of 100 of people's CURRENT favorite books actually means you a) are illiterate, b) read only trashy romance novels (female) Star Trek books (male and my sister), c) are an American Youth, d) only watch movies once they make it onto the big screen. I say big screen because the only people who watch books that were made into TV series are the people who have already read those books (i.e. nerds and romantics).


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 Complete Works of Shakespeare (WORKS!? That's 37 books, not to mention collections of poetry. Plus, Hamlet is listed again later. I refuse)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger+
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell +in progress
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 (Again with the multiples)+
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis THIS IS THE SAME AS 33!!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
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 +
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez +
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins + I LOVE THIS BOOK
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
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 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 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 (Isn't this in his "Collected Works"?)+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl +
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I've tried. I've failed)

45 out of 98. Not bad. Let's just consider the rest to be *starred* for future reading, except Les Miserables. I've watched that movie, at least. Mmm.... Liam Neeson.... I've been looking for a list of classics (and apparently Harry Potter) that I ought to read, and if the BBC readers love these books most, well... I'll take that into consideration.

Purchased Pincushion (due to lameness)

I finally just bought a damned pincusion. This is Katie the Cactus. I purchased her from the Etsy store of Crystal's Creations and Gifts, and I LOVE her. I haven't even gotten her in the mail yet, but when I do... let me tell you. I'm going to stick her like a voodoo doll.

Sorry for the Lameness

I haven't posted in a few days (some peeps I'm sure are thinking PHEW!). Mostly due to lethargy, a little bit due to it being the weekend and not having anything interesting happen, and the last bit due to my attempting several times to make a mother$#*&ing pincushion in which to put my pins and failing miserably EVERY DAMNED TIME.

I was going to make an adorable hedgehog pincushion with the pins being the spikes and name him Prick in honor of Jesse, but I ended up with this fraying abomination that could be bested by a 5 year old in a special needs kindergarten class. It's hideous. It's terribly embarrassing that these hands that can produce the tiniest solder joints can NOT produce something from a pattern with instructions written for above-mentioned 5 year old. It's sitting in the bedroom because Jesse, for some reason that I'm sure includes "ammo for future blackmail", is apparently so in love with it that he won't let me put it out of its misery. No, you cannot see it. Ever, regardless of how good of friends you really think we are. Not ever. If Jesse offers to show it to you, know that it will be the last time you see him with both testicles. Just think of that when he says something about the hedgehog pincushion. SAVE HIS FUTURE BEES.

Then, I tried making an adorable cupcake pincushion like these, but I ended up instead with something that resembled my efforts when I was 5 to microwave flour paste in my pink plastic (insert 80's doll that came with a) muffin pan. Large, overblown, pasty-white, and completely useless. Finn can attest - he witnessed the frustration and ugliness.

Then, I thought to myself, "maybe I'll just do what I did for my very first pincushion when I was 5." I could cross-stitch something cheeky and/or snarky in a general square and then sew it together. Then I remembered: I'M IN ADULT BEGINNING SEWING: THE APRON". I can't sew things together yet. Even if I could, I'd have to wait until class ANYWAY, which is what I need a stupid pincushion for ANYWAY. UGH.

Although, in searching for cheeky and/or snarky things to stitch onto a pincushion, I happened upon this, from the blog author of Snarky Stitching, which in turn led me to watching Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which I think is the best thing that has happened to humanity since the advent of Neil Patrick Harris being cool again. SRSLY - if you haven't watched it yet, you're not one of the cool kids like the whole rest of the United States and probably France. I knew I should have watched it sooner, and NOW it turns out you only have until July to watch it, at which point it will be gone forever. I don't know why.

Now, go watch Dr. Horrible and make sure not to think about Hedgehog Pincushions, because Jesse's future reproductive capabilities depend on you.

Because 5am is Where All the COOL Kids Hang Out

Jesse and I have discussed, and agreed upon (!), a new schedule. Seeing as we have the social lives of certain predatory birds, it makes no sense to stay up late and just wait around for bedtime by playing video games/facebook and spooling out that last reserve of energy until we're drained like a functional bathtub.

SO.

Starting Tuesday of this week, we are instead wasting our time in the morning, at FIVE O'CLOCK. Voluntarily. This is of about the same normalcy level as Jesse getting pregnant. With a gerbil. These past two mornings, I have spent my reserve three hours doing the following: facebook and crafts. The selfsame things I did in my post-work three hours. HOWEVER, I did these things without feeling guilty about not actively pursuing house-cleaning responsibilities instead. Because NOW, I can justify not unloading the dishwasher with "that would be so noisy for Jon and Margaret. I wouldn't want to wake them up with clanking dishes at (5am - 8am)." So I don't. I facebook without shame. Though at the same time, I am prevented from hammering on crap for the same reasons. Because I'm nice.

I thought I wouldn't like this super-early hour. Instead, I find I REALLY LIKE IT. I like having a cup of coffee or two and/or spilling it on my leg before brushing my teeth. I like sitting quietly across from Jesse while he reads and I do tiny things while I still maintain a semblance of good vision and not-carpal-tunnel hands. Someday I'll have old-lady-claws, so I'd best get this in before my knuckles look like tree knobs.

American Teenage Slaughter of English (as evidenced by Taylor Swift)

I won't even go into the likes of English slaughter by the genres of "Rap" and "Hip-Hop", because it seems as if they are barely speaking the language in the first place, and that the whole point is kind of "who can make the biggest mistakes on purpose?" OOH. I KNOW. I'LL THROW MY HANDS IN THE AYER, AY-AYER, AYER. Because "air" now has two syllables.

Anyway. I've spoken of KIIS FM, Ryan Seacrest in the Morning, which is where I heard "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. She has it all - fame, fortune, a body worthy of posing on Women's Health even though she hadn't but barely reached her legal maturity. Look at this! female readers of a health magazine! This could all be yours! If you only but had the metabolism of pubescence that you wasted eating pizza in high school with your friends and forging lasting bonds instead of touring the country on a bus and connecting through myspace! I don't actually mean to bust on Taylor Swift, though. I think that she's rather talented, all considered.

BUT!

"You were Romeo, I was a Scarlet Letter?"

I just about scowled aloud at that. "You were the most romantic hero of all written history" - which I can dig - "I was the flamboyantly embroidered punishment symbol of a puritanical harlot who cuckolded her husband and brought about the death-by-shame of the man I loved and sinned, who was the heart and spirit of a whole town?" Does she know what "The Scarlet Letter" was about? And then the next line is "and my Daddy said 'stay away from Juliet'". So she's both aforementioned parole punishment and also the Shakespearean romantic heroine who saved herself only for Romeo? You can't be both.

Pardon my irritation. I know it's a dumb subject for a blog. It just drives me insane. Also - please notice that she switches audiences in the last stanza. Bah!

Also also notice: I knew all the words without looking them up. Guess who hums it to herself in the car?

First Attempt at Bead Embroidery. Maybe Last.

I have spent so many hours sitting in my little "mod" chair creating this damnable, yet beautiful bracelet. Whilst I am proud of myself for not giving up, my shoulders do not thank me. Neither can I forgive myself for making it a little too big so that it's hard for me to wear. NEVERTHELESS! An artiste is never completely satisified, so that is what I must be. For another moment of self-gratification, here's a side view where I had glued another cabochon on each side until I remembered that glass doesn't bend. Obviously, I had to rethink my strategy: