The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom
3) Italicize those you plan on reading

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 – technically this is 7…
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faul
18 Catcher in the Rye – Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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
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 – Technically 7…
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 – 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
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 X
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

39 isn’t too bad May have to start reading more to elaborate on this list!

Nothing much planned for this weekend. Need to get some groceries in and cleaning done but not much else. Probably going to head down to Mum’s on Monday night cause I haven’t seen her in a bit.

Brian emailed me last night talking about coming over for a bit, but it’s unlikely with the whole paying for flights and money to survive on when he’s here. We’re now thinking about shipping me over there for just over a week. I’m able to get the days off work easily enough, so we’re just thinking about it at the moment and seeing what happens.

I desperately want to see him, but I don’t want this to mess things up for him moving over. And I worry that he’s having second thoughts (on a daily basis) but he assures me that he’s not. I’m just worried that he’s giving too much up for me.

Anyway, this was just me jumping in to leave a quick note. I have a post to get finished for The Fraggle today about hair lol, so I want to get that done and and out of the road in between work. If I get the chance i’ll maybe effort to get the letters to Brian finished that I’ve been promising him forever. I owe him a couple of movies and stuff too lol.

Talk to ya all later.

Jen

I’ve been spending time with my Mum and the rest of the family down in Islandmagee, a peninsula on the north coast of Northern Ireland. I love it out here, the scenery is beautiful and calming, the air is clearer (and colder) and I don’t have to be busy busy busy like I am at hime. At this moment I’m watching a blue tit feeding from the window feeder in my mum’s office. It’s fab to have the wee birds so close I’ve been able to think a great deal about the wedding when I’m here too, mum’s full of interesting and fun ideas to help me out with the garden. It makes me happy lol.

Unfortunately, I’m not as smart as I appear sometimes. I left the laptop at home (purposefully) because there’s already two computers here, and I wanted to detatch for a while; however, I forgot to lift my phone charger, so I haven’t been able to converse even slightly with Brian all weekend. It frustrates me, especially with talking about the wedding, that i’d be stupid enough to leave it behind. But he knows I love him (I love you Brian!!).

Other than that, this week we’ve had mum’s birthday, and Nicky’s. I bought cake (nom nom nom) and I’ve been able to have a lie-in the past two mornings. Mum’s cooking dinner as we speak which is great. It’s nice to come down here to get away from it all every now and again, without having to worry about the cooking and the cleaning at home. I’ve been drawing and reading more. I read “My Swordhand is Swinging” by Marcus Sedgewick last night. I’ve read some of his other stuff before and I really wasn’t impressed by this offering. It was a vampire story (of course) but it focused too much on the old “factual” information about where vampires originated on without explaining it. I was able to understand it all as I’ve researched the subject to death, but for others I think it will be a bigger let down again, especially if you’ve had the chance to read “Floodlands” or “Witchhill” which were both fantastic young adult novels.

Now, speaking of novels, I’m away to ignore my character development and to write a bit more. I’m afraid if I over develop the characters then I won’t be able to learn and adapt them as I need to which will lead to a bit of a stalemate.

Anywho! Below is my offering for the wedding invitations, I hope to get a graphics tablet soon and be able to get them coloured and “cartooned” properly

Byes for now!

I have noticed recently that I have been getting more and more creative spam emails into my hotmail address. The spammers however creative, are definitely showing their lack of initiative and intelligence…

My address is jenikirkland@hotmail.com I’m not afraid of posting it, cause it’s the address I use for most of my public affairs and such (makes me sound smart), but I mean really, read it – jenikirkland.

It’s not like my name might be confused with Michael or Daniel, in the western world it’s an extremely common girl’s name, yet still I get offers for Russian Brides.

Yes, you did read that right, Russian Brides. I was quite surprised myself when I first got them, they do make me giggle every time I open my junk mail. I’ve also had “Your ex has searched for you” and “Diet Tea” (which would actually be a miracle if it was real).

So I put it to you the general public, what’s the funniest spam email you’ve received and why??

Jen

Other than that, not much going on at the moment. Brian was going on about Mardi Gras last night and I woke to a slightly (and I’m being kind) tipsy email from him, so I’m assuming he had a good night. Good long convo with him tonight (yay!) so hopefully he’ll tell me all then.

Back to the gym tomorrow night. I’m not exactly thrilled about it, but I put weight on when I was away in January and it’s not going away on it’s own so I need to go do something. Besides the fact that I’m always so, so tired, I’m hoping this will get my blood flowing a bit more.

So hopefully I’ll get settled into the routine below over the next couple of weeks while I shuffle things about:

• Monday – Working, with the night to myself, writing
• Tuesday – Working, straight to the gym
• Wednesday – Working, and either the night to myself or down to mum’s/writing
• Thursday – Working, straight to the gym
• Friday – Working, either out or bottle of wine and a movie
• Saturday and Sunday – Housework, Laundry, relaxing and writing

I don’t like the fact that the gym is involved at all to be brutally honest. I think the break has throughly thrown me off it. I don’t see any other way of doing it though, I’n really not a motivated person lol.

Any ideas appreaciated.

Jen

Using Safari 4, it doesn’t seem to enjoy wordpress too much and is constantly picking out little question marks where I should have all my menu choices – poo. So I’ll report it as a bug and we’ll hope that Apple fixes it asap.

Well, this is just a short welcome, I’m going to go make a PB & J sandwich and settle down to watch the life of Jade Goody before she leaves the world forever. It makes me ponder my own existence when I see that woman willing to exploit herself in every way to make sure her kids are looked after when she’s gone. It’s kinda sad to watch this program too, to see her so positive last October when she was first diagnosed, and to know what the prognosis is now.

Anyway, hunger strikes. I’ll be back no doubt this evening, and I want to get a post up over on Irksome Fraggle before bed too. (because Safari is being a nonce, here’s the addy http://theirksomefraggle.wordpress.com)

LOL @ Jade saying Testosterone haha, god love her.

Anyways, byes for now