Friday 25 July 2008

Trying to be well read

I found this meme, well its more like a quiz, at Jane Austen's World. I won't be tagging anyone, but feel free to copy and paste into your own blog if you want to.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (pink) the books you love.
4) Strike out (*) the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 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
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
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
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

Well, I think I'm doing alright on 29

Personally I would add these to the top of the list, and they are great books:
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
The 'Master and Commander' series - Patrick O'Brian
Coming Home - Rosamunde Pilcher
Love in a Cold Climate and sequels - Nancy Mitford
actually there are so many more which should be in the list, one day I might have some serious time to kill and I'll write my own top 100.

Sunday 20 July 2008

thinking of the thirties

While I'm plodding through the last inches of stockinette to finish 'Jemima', I've come across some beautiful colourwork sweaters. I might be getting a little ahead of myself, I have after all yet to complete a simple wearable sweater. Nonetheless, this is where my knitting aspirations lie;



'Brocade', by Kaffe Fassett, I think this is featured in Rowan Magazine 38, which I will try and find a copy of.

My Rowan autumn magazine has arrived, and I love the 'nostalgia' set, although I'm not sure how many of them would suit me. These are pretty, and I love the 1930's feel;



I'll add these to my queue, in which the thirties-inspired 'chevron lace sweater' from Romantic Knits has been sitting patiently for quite some time. There is something about the elegance and utility, the delicateness and the practicality, how well-dressed everyone seemed; no jeans and t-shirts in this era. Doesn't this scene from Gosford Park make you want to wear tweeds and sensible shoes? Over a beautiful, form-fitting, lacy sweater of course.



A few of my favourite films set in the inter-war period, and some of the best for costumes, are

  • Gosford Park
  • Coming Home (a BBC production adapted from the book by Rosamunde Pilcher) and it sequel Nancherrow
  • Ballet Shoes (another BBC production, adapted from the classic Noel Streatfield book
  • Love in a Cold Climate (adapted from the Nancy Mitford books 'Love in a Cold Climate' and 'The Pursuit of Love')

Feast on silk dresses copied from vogue by village seamstresses, endless tweed skirts, blouses and pullovers, well-cut slacks, tea-dresses, curled hair and silk scarves, woollen stockings and painted faces. But I'm sure you knew that already.