BBC Book List

Hmmm much fun, though I should be doing more productive things

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt."

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
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 Meany - 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
53Cold 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 - 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 Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

read 25 and partially read or read abridged versions of another 8

blogging, so 2006

not blogged for ages, why is that? Am i too busy or can't i be bothered, or maybe it's so 2006. Blogging's for nerds who aren't busy enough. But i like blogging and maybe i miss it a bit. Or perhaps it's cos i'm reading jPod and i'm feeling all nostalgic for 2007. Loads of interesting stuff must've happened and will i miss those memories and thoughts not captured here? Were hours spent on facebook worth it. Seemed fun at the time, but it seems these days i can't be bothered to keep up to date with a myriad of people. Any way stuff has happened, good and bad and days, weeks and years have been ticked off. So anything to show? weddings, friends, kisses, life, death, job, worries. Anything new? dreams. is there time to dream. yes. no. but dreams stay dreams, time moves. can you strive for something tangible, or are all tangibles fleeting? Yes i'm getting all douglas coupland, and that's why i love his books. do i Like them because i elements of myself in his characters or is he astute at capturing the zeitgeist. Do i wish i was the Zeitgeist. Or am i just a nerd that gets excited when someone writes about a character that is excited about pi and prime numbers. I love coupland's quick and crisp narrative that floats between story and random interventions. Pages of chinese characters, computer code, lists and ingredients. There's something that excites me and compels me to read. mediocre. life. nonsense. there is so much to see and do yet time just seems to slip through and if i sift through all the mundaneness is there anything of value left. and who measures that value? what about the kingdom of god? Is that mundane too? maybe i should blog just to remind myself how mundane life is, and maybe i will see things that count. what counts? and who says it counts# who says i need a question mark^

just downloaded a new version of iTunes, probably sold my soul by agreeing to the new terms and conditions, waited ages for the installation, rebooted and not a lot has changed. i can still play my tunes.

runaway boy at runaway girl

I popped into the library on saturday whilst i was wandering around town, mainly to go and view the exhibition in the graves gallery. They have some nice photography and some abstract pieces in at the moment. One of the galleries looked especially good, a great use of space and colour and perhaps the best setting i've seen of the sculpture 'the kiss'. Whilst i was leaving i picked up an information booklet about the annual festival of reading and writing in sheffield, off the shelf. I'd noticed that tonight there was opportunity to go and read something aloud for up to 3 minutes at the runaway girl. It sounded interesting and I wondered if i could perhaps try reading a bit of the book I'm writing aloud. Bit apprehensive about mooting a work in progress, but there was a scene i'd read on saturday which i was quite happy with, and would also work as a stand alone piece. So off i toddled this evening, late cos getting into town for 7:30 isn't going to happen when you get home at 6:30 and have nothing in the fridge to eat. No matter, i envisaged a bar of bohemian writers and creative types, musing over beer and wine. Perhaps I may even find a creative writing class that could provide some assistance. I could slip in and listen to the readings and if brave, venture forwards and breath life into my sterile words. Take them off the page and see how they form when i articulate them audibly. Maybe receive some feedback. I got there and snuck a look through the window, all the tables were set out and they were filled with groups of people enjoying a meal over a glass of wine. Not looking particularly bohemian, more 'richard and judy book club' middle class women. A split decision, i'm not going to be able to sneek in here and sit and be comfortable. no way. I'll stick out like a fool with no friends.

run away....

Writing

I quite like writing and I often wonder what it would be like to be a writer. For a few years I've been mulling an idea for a novel in my head. The plot is all there, but the scenes and characters need developing. It's not a straight forward as just sitting down and letting the words just stream forth. Whilst at latitude festival i went to a Q&A with some authors (i don't recall their names). They were talking about the process of writing that they use, the fact that a lot of the time it looks like they are doing nothing, but in actual fact they are constantly thinking of the book. I knew exactly what they meant. I have little time to write and the odd few hours on a saturday morning I can glean, I wander to a local coffee shop to write. I can spend nearly an hour re-reading what I have written to try and get back into the situation, then there are the questions that pose themselves. How would this character react? what would this situation actually look like? Sometimes very little gets written at all. And this is how it was today. With a day off work, for which I was anticipating travelling back from snowdon left me with an opportunity. It's been ages since i last wrote anything and I was spending ages re-reading, then I was questioning my prose, what is the best narrative style. I think I want to use a couple of different styles, which makes it more complicated to write, and I wonder if it would actually work for the reader. So I decamped to Waterstones with the aim of finding some more books written in a particular perspective. The staff there were really helpful and one was able to think of such a book at once, though she couldn't think of anymore at that moment. A couple of books in hand, I thought how i'd relish to be able to do this for a living. Walking, meandering around town with ideas maturing. Reading, to draw inspiration for writing, studying to ensure what i write is credible and makes sense under scrutiny. Instead tomorrow it will be back to the world of data management, minute taking and copious ammounts of tapping on the computer.

that's novel

i was sitting in a park in the shade in sydney, basking in the december heat when i had an idea for a book. i scribbled a couple of the ideas down in my notebook and decided i would start writing a book on my return to england. and that is what i did, whilst job hunting i began writing, but then time seemed to ebb away and i never had chance to add to the words, instead dropping a few words here instead. Recently i've been getting fed up with work, and with the hassle i had sans car i was considering galavanting off somewhere to write my book. i'd been chatting about it with v when we were enjoying chilling out in tea rooms in prague, thinking they would be ideal places to chill and write. So with the prospect of spending lots on a car, i was thinking i'd rather spend it on some time out. however, i'm not that bohemian, and worried about the bills and subsequent lack of cashflow. anyway, i decided that i would restart the writing and purchased a notebook in which to collect my thoughts on plotlines and characters. wasted most of saturday watching the abismal cfc, so spent a couple of hours today re-reading my manuscript and adding my thoughts to the notebook. quite excited about it actually, wish i could spend some more time on it, but i get caught up in all kinds of things, i never have the quality time to dedicate to it. but at least the ball is moving again, hopefully someone will read it....

Review of the year

Albums

A lot of the albums I bought this year weren't released in 2006, however of those I did buy that were released this year here are my top 5:

1. Bright Carvings - Monkey Swallows the Universe
This album is quite superb and deservedly takes the honour of album of the year. I can remember the first listen like yesterday as it broke into Sheffield Shanty I thought this sounds like Twee nonsense trying to appeal to Sheffield sensibilities. But then on the second listen I realised that I had been fooled and that this really was a work of musical and lyrical genius. Clever stories told over beguiling music played with such delicacy and simplicity that it's myriad layers come together in a delightful way. You need to own this record.

2.CSS - Cansei de Ser Sexy
Tremendous bubblegum punk record, at 35 minutes, there is no room for dull tracks. Unlike MSTU it's merit is not on musicallity but on fun. This record oozes cool, vibrant tunes matching Lovefoxxx's astute and cheeky lyrics. Art Bitch is the highlight, though it is the live performances where these songs come to life.

3.Mr Beast - Mogwai
Probably their poorest album to date, but with few records to choose from I'll put this in the list. Probably only half of the tracks are great on this offering, however it does have the magnificent 'glasgow mega snake' which packs Mogwai at their most ferocious into a delightful 3min track.

4.Love and Other planets - Adem
Another up and down album, however his ability to create music using a variety of borrowed sounds makes this album worthy of note. Some beautiful tunes and allogories of love. Perhaps my love of his first album, homesongs, sets a standard that just can't be matched.

5.Campfire Headphase - Boards of Canada
Back to their best after their mediocre last album. Beautiful melodic electronica that is perfect for ambient surroundings. Lacks the odd sampled vocals of previous albums.

Must also mention the superb double album of Peel Sessions by the delgados, not included in the list due to being a compilation album. Superb music as always and the added bonus of mentioning me in the sleeve notes (i'm the moog). arab strap sadly split up this year and also released a compilation of rareities and hits.

Albums I bought this year worthy of note:
Clap your hands say yeah
Belle and Sebastian - Life Pursuit

singles
My top singles of the year with links to youtube videos

1 when the sun goes down - Arctic Monkeys
At the start of the year I hailed this as single of the year and I wasn't wrong, though the next few tracks made it a close run thing. Perfect single material that just makes you want to bounce along. Shame the album fell a bit flat after a few listens.

2 boy at school - Hot Chip
Not only is the tune great but the video is superb. I love the harmonies over the simple electronica. Just need to get the album now

3 alala - CSS
There's another video too. When I heard this on the radio I liked it straight away. It's got perfect pop elements, driving beat, makes you want to dance.

4 Monster - The Automatic
I love the shouty vocals on this, though it sounds very much like Seafood.

5 science - Monkey Swallows the Universe
You'll have to go to theur website to see the video. Following on from their superb album comes this beautiful tune about losing faith in the 'truth' of science.

6 Us - Regina Spektor
Wonderful piano playing from the anti-folk queen. Using vocals to create unique sounds, the video is wonderful too.

7 Maneater - Nelly Furtado
The best pop record of the year from the crazy nelly furtado. Shame the video is a bit lame.

8 Yeah Yeah - Bodyrox
A nod to a dance tune that couples simple beats with great shouty vocals sung with attitude.

Live gigs of the year
CSS - Leadmill
Adem - Boardwalk
Monkey Swallows the Universe - Boardwalk
Mogwai - Plug
Regina Spektor - Leadmill
65 Days of Static - Leadmill
Belle and Sebastian - Octagon
Emma Pollock - Leadmill
Radiohead - Blackpool
Broken Social Scene - Manchester Academy

Best book I've read this year:
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, I reviewed in some depth a while ago, you can search for it if you're interested!

I'm sure there's more stuff, but that'll do.

Judge Dreadnought

The judge who presided over the failed Da Vinci Code plagiarism case at London's High Court has hidden his own secret code in his written judgement, the news story is here.

In his written judgement he has put odd letters here and there in italics, and these form the basis of the code. I had a look at the judgement document but it was a 71 page pdf document, and it's not easy to scour and pick out the letters in italics. However, someone has cracked the code and the fairly dull hidden message can be read here.