Reading, Writing...Err, Can We Forget the Arithmatic?

So I heard about this challenge via Sandra's Blog. Below is the list of books of which the BBC reckons most people have only read 6 out of the hundred. If you want to accept the challenge it is simple - copy and paste this list on to your blog and link back to here...please?

Instructions are as follows:

• Copy the list of books below.
• Those books you’ve read in their entirety put in bold.
• The ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt put in italics.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible - (yes, really!)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

*Last book is missing so those who have gone before me have been suggesting number 100. Therefore my suggestion for the 100th book is: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole [the original Gothic novel!]

What book would you suggest?

So I appear to have fully read 16 of those, including my suggestion for number 100. Although I suppose you could count the Harry Potter books individually...but then it wouldn't be out of 100 would it?

And the following books are the ones that I want to read...once I've read the stack of books that is stood next to my bed. Actually a couple of them are already in the stack of books waiting to be read.

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Inferno – Dante
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Now it's your turn!

NaNoWriMo - The Fourth and Final Update

Yes it is the end of week four. I will not be posting tomorrow night. It is for the same reason that I didn't post my update blog yesterday. It is because...I FINISHED!!!!!

This last week I have pushed myself as far as possible, as you will see from my word counts. Well there are a couple of days where I didn't do quite so many words but I made up for that before and after.


I ended up spending the last hour of typing sat in the dark as I thought that if I got up to close the curtains and switch the light on I would lose my momentum.


So without further ado my word counts for the last week:


Monday: 1699
Tuesday: 4009
Wednesday: 342
Thursday: 946
Friday: 2545
Saturday: 2203
Sunday: 3331


Week total: 15075


Grand total: 50079 words!!!

I actually calculated my total as 50077 words but when I had it validated on the NaNoWriMo site they had it as 50079. So I went with their total. I've printed out my certificate. And I now plan on ignoring my first draft until the New Year. I can spend the time catching up with everything that I neglected throughout November.


Well done to all my fellow NaNoWriMoers, whether you have finished or not. Well done for simply having a go!

Random Quote #7

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

Walt Disney

Random Quote #6

I want to pass on a bit of advice that a friend gave to me when I was at my lowest during that time. She said to me...she said 'Don't look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Stomp along there and turn the f***** on yourself!'

Sarah Millican, Dave's One Night Stand

NaNoWriMo Update #3

Another week and seven more word counts. But this week has been a good one. I've had four figure word counts all week and today I have finally managed to claw my way back up to where I should be. Today's suggested word count was 35000 words and I am now four words over - yay!


Monday: 1703
Tuesday: 2136
Wednesday: 2274
Thursday: 1680
Friday: 2100
Saturday: 1832
Sunday: 1938

Week total: 13663 words


Grand total: 35004 words


Next week will be the last update before the end of NaNoWriMo. I'm on schedule at the moment so fingers crossed for the coming week.