How Many Of These Books Have You Read?

I just picked this up off the internet.
According to the BBC, "most" people will have read less than 6 of the books on this list.  I have NO idea why these books in particular were selected.......
Here's the list:

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 Faulks

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 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

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



November 23, 2010: My first day of full retirement.....Oh, My!!!!

It hardly seemed right to let today come-and-go without writing something.

I can't say that I did much today. I had a very long list of what I intended to be doing, though. Despite the social contract of my list, I seemed to have dodged it almost completely. In my 5-day a week working days, the only fair reason for such procrastination would have been illness -- mine, my child's or else one of the animals. Although the latter would have been a soft reason for doing virtually nothing as far as my co-workers and bosses were concerned.

Apparently no-one told them that in Buddhism, which defines itself as a way of living rather than as a faith, the art of doing nothing is highly esteemed. In fact, a respected Buddhist principle is: Practice the art of doing nothing and everything will happen. Ambiguous, to be sure. But as a Westerner and a once highly productive member of the food chain, I remain captivated by the notion of the "art" of doing nothing. Just go ahead and try it -- it's not as easy as it sounds. In fact, my own admission is a deceit. I have done lots of things today. It's just that none of them conforms to "work" as I have known it -- hence the notion that if I'm not doing something work-like, I am clearly doing nothing at all......

Today I walked the dog (twice); washed the dishes; answered some emails; read a number of illustrated picture books (IPB) in the hopes of getting a brainwave of how they might be made attractive to high school teachers on our ELA website; made lunches for 2; spoke to my mother and my (former) mother-in-law; went to the Pawtisserie to buy victuals for the beasties & chatted with the lovely young woman who works there; took a nap; and read from a new novel called The Lord of Misrule....about which I have nothing to say yet except that the author is American, she writes competently and understands how a good story ought to work and I bought the book because it received high praise from several newspapers that I respect.

Here is what I was on my list: write up the section on IPB's for high school; purge the coat closet in the hall to make room for other people's coats, including my son's; clean out the cat litter; begin a major purge (started earlier this fall) of items various & sundry that need to be thrown out or given away.

As you can see, I didn't even come close, did I?

.....Now, this piece started as a way of commemorating my first day of full retirement. I see from going through the exercise that productivity is a sensitive issue for me : meaning that the spectre of retirement still feels rather daunting.  As usual, I am in a real hurry to arrive at a place long before I've even left the station.

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

I found this project on a fascinating lady's Facebook page and thought: "What a great idea!!!"
So here are a few of my Objects of Desire (in no particular order) and I should add that, while it's less than complementary to consider anyone or anything as an "object" I'm using the term synonymously with "focus" as in "focus of my desire":

A great, white shabby chic sofa -- and this one is a beauty!!!

Red licorice and it must be Twizzlers and slightly oily and fresh.

Prehistoric stone adorned with classic symbols and designs.

Peter Sellers: the sexiest of men. I SO wanted to attack him......

The Amalfi Coast, Italy. I've never been but it's on my list! I just love the idea of cities built into rock.

Stone. All sizes and shapes. In my pocket. In my purse. On furniture. Abigail in Hebrew means "father of stone."

John Lennon. He was my favourite Beatle as a girl but I adored him as he reached 40. Lean, hungry-looking.....YUMMY!!!!

The little prehistoric goddess/Earth Mother of Willendorf. I have an exact replica of her by my bed and I kiss her goodnight each & every night.

Zenyatta. Probably one of the greatest American thoroughbreds ever. Like Secretariat, Northern Dancer & Nijinsky, Zenyatta runs on heart.

All that is Zen. The Tao Te Ching. The beauty of:
"To be great is to go on,
To go on is to go far,
To go far is to return."

The Quality of Light

These shots -- below -- illustrate the beautiful effects of light just before dusk and early one morning. The three long shots were taken late one afternoon when the light was busily turning reflections of shrubs and trees into watercolour. The shot that shows the elliptical shape (#3) is all a result of light and shadow playing across the landscape. I had never before seen such a magical image sculpted into a landscape and I'm so glad that I took the shot, since a mere 20 minutes later, as dusk drew nigh, all of these images were gone.

I came out early the next morning with the dogs, a cup of coffee and my camera (just in case). The shot with the wooden pier jutting out into what looks like sky (below) was taken as I realized that the effect of the light was to transpose the sky and clouds above me onto the water. An exact mirror image. If you look closely you can see the water rippling over the clouds and the motion makes the photo image seem a little fuzzy. Or that you are looking at smoke, perhaps. It is an ethereal effect, despite the pier that should cue the eye to the possibility that it is looking at water.

Interesting, is it not, how this experience relates to the Zen art of "going with the flow."
The natural world demonstrates this art minute-by-minute, once we are wise enough to take the time to really begin to see...........

Learning Flow

Today, Jericho & I are going to the country for a few days to visit with friends, Mark & Sheila. Sheila has just called to say that she is "...as usual, running a bit late." We talk about how, during our working lives, we were Type A's when it came to being exactly on time but how now, in our 60's, everyone we know (including ourselves) of the same age are "running a bit late." 
I think in my case (since I'm running late more often than not too!) it's an aversion to being scheduled most of my working years -- constrained by time demands. Although women are still better at time restraints largely because with households, children and careers they need to get used to discontinuity on an hourly basis, I am still in rebellion at 60 about being rushed or pushed or overwhelmed with too much in too short a time frame or locked into a small space by inflexible situations or people. I'm finding that I need to "go with the flow" now. Too, I am at a level of acquired knowledge and experience -- in life as in my field (education) -- where I know I can be leisurely and get a quality job or etc. done anyway. 
A bit like the astounding thoroughbred mare, Zenyatta, who clearly knows that she can take her time to get up to speed, cover the distance from way back compared to the rest of the field and get to the wire in front anyway.