Books!

I'm not totally sure about the authenticity of the BBC being involved in this, but it seemed like a fun challenge...


Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses...

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
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 Niffenegge
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
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
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 - 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 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 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

Total: 28!

Movie Reviews Part 2

Quantum of Solace
Daniel Craig as James Bond – he’s good, but since Pierce Brosnan was Bond when I first started watching, he’ll always be Bond to me! But Quantum of Solace rocked. I didn’t really enjoy Casino Royale – it was too tragic for me! It’s the ONLY movie I’ve ever seen where I had to leave the theatre because it was too icky. Quantum of Solace on the other hand (besides having an awesome title) was really enjoyable. The plot was great! Again with the sex and the violence I’d give it an R, but I would have given Casino Royale an RRR!

Dracula - Dead and Loving It
Totally campy Mel Brooks vampire movie – lots and lots and lots of fake blood everywhere! It was pretty funny, and I always enjoy Mel Brooks, but I’m not a fan of vampires at all, so I was pretty creeped out! They make my skin crawl. :P But if you’re a fan of vampires, you’ll probably like it, and besides the one scene with all the fake blood it wasn’t too violent. Mel Brooks is the master of innuendo, which is highly entertaining, but this isn’t a movie for a younger crowd!

Toy Story 3
I actually found this movie to be more then a little disturbing! I can’t tell you exactly why without giving away too much of the plot, but it was almost part homage to horror movies. And I also have waaaay too much imagination when it comes to how my stuffed animals might feel about something (the Velveteen Rabbit was an early influence!) so the movie made me a bit uncomfortable. The Spanish Buzz Lightyear was pretty funny though! All in all, I’d say Toy Story 2 was my favourite of the franchise, and the ride at Universal Studios was one of my favourites at Disney World.



Letters to Juliet
This was a really feel-good chick flick. This American girl vacationing in Italy meets a bunch of ladies who answer letters that are written to Juliet (from Romeo and Juliet). She ends up going on a road trip all over Italy trying to help this older woman find the “Romeo” she lost when she was young. The Italian scenery alone makes this movie worth seeing! I’d give it a PG-13 – it’s aimed at an older audience, but there’s no violence and not much sexual content. It’s been a while since I saw it, but I don’t remember there being much in the way of swearing, either. It left me smiling!

Movie Reviews Part 1

I've seen a bunch of movies in the last few months, and many of them were really enjoyable, so I'm going to tell you about them! Stay tuned for more....

Easy A
This movie was a lot of fun. It posed some good questions and had a great sense of humour. The lead actress was really great – Emma Stone – I hope to see her in more movies in the future. It’s definitely not for a young audience though – I’d give it a 14A at minimum! My biggest complaint is how they portrayed Christians – either as hypocritical or totally unaware. We’re not all like that that, I promise!

Despicable Me
SO CUTE! Definitely on my to-buy list! My favourite line: “HE’S SO FLUFFY I’M GONNA DIE!” I loved everything about this movie – it was just a happy cartoon with a great message about the importance of family, and some awesome humour. Is it just me, or does the ‘bad’ guy remind you of Bill Gates?

Nanny McPhee Returns
I wasn’t a huge fan of the first Nanny McPhee movie, even though it had Colin Firth in it. But I wanted to see a movie, and this was the best thing playing! I liked it a lot more then I liked the first one – there was only one scene that was so cheesy that I actually squirmed. It’s set during WWII, and has a star-studded cast – I counted four Harry Potter stars in it! The plot line was pretty good, and Maggie Gyllenhaal was brilliant as the over-worked mum.

The Other Guys

“I’m a peacock – you gotta let me fly!” The fact that Mark Whalberg could deliver that horrible line TWICE in one movie nearly killed me! I laughed intermittently for a couple of days about that. He and Will Ferall play a couple of inept cops and they are hysterical. Trevor and I were both really entertained by this movie. But for violence, language and sexuality, I’d definitely give it an R!