8 posts tagged “bbc”

Copied from Jenn F.  She has read 56.  How will YOU stack up.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:

Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1.               Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (_)

2.               The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)

3.               Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)

4.               Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)

5.               To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)

6.               The Bible - (_) - I have read large chunks of The Bible but seriously - who, with so much choice of reading matter, would choose this to read from cover to cover.  It’s not well written and is not consistent either.

7.               Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)

8.               Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)

9.               His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)

10.           Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (_) - I cannot get into Dickens.  I have read Oliver Twist - let’s see if that comes up.

11.           Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)

12.           Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)

13.           Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)

14.           Complete Works of Shakespeare (_) - again, like The Bible, I have read some Shakespeare.  But not everything.  

15.           Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (X)

16.           The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)

17.           Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk (X)

18.           Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)

19.           The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)

20.           Middlemarch - George Eliot (_)

21.           Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)

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 (X)

26.           Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (_)

27.           Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (_)

28.           Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)

29.           Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)

30.           The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (_)

31.           Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (_)

32.           David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (_)

33.           Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)

34.           Emma - Jane Austen (_)

35.           Persuasion - Jane Austen (_)

36.           The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)

37.           The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - (X)

38.           Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (_)

39.           Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (_)

40.           Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)

41.           Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)

42.           The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (_) - And I don’t think I ever, ever will.

43.           One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (_)

44.           A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (_) - I started this, but gave up.  I could not see what everyone saw in it, to be honest.

45.           The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (X)

46.           Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)

47.           Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (X)

48.           The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)

49.           Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)

50.           Atonement - Ian McEwan (_) - Another one I gave up on.  I know, it is beautifully written, wonderful story, yada yada yada.  Boring is what I thought.

51.           Life of Pi - Yann Martel (_)

52.           Dune - Frank Herbert (X)

53.           Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (X)

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 (X)

59.           The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)

60.           Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (_)

61.           Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)

62.           Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X)

63.           The Secret History - Donna Tartt (X)

64.           The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)

65.           Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)

66.           On The Road - Jack Kerouac (_)

67.           Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (X)

68.           Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)

69.           Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (_)

70.           Moby Dick - Herman Melville (_)

71.           Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)

72.           Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)

73.           The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)

74.           Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (X)

75.           Ulysses - James Joyce (_)

76.           The Inferno - Dante (x)

77.           Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (X)

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 (X)

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 (X)

88.           The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (_)

89.           Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)

90.           The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X)

91.           Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)

92.           The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)

93.           The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (X)

94.           Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)

95.           A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (_)

96.           A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (X)

97.           The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)

98.           Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)

99.           Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)

100.       Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

Very well, thank you - I make my total 66.  I have only not heard of two - A Confederacy of Dunces and The Shadow of the Wind.  The others remain unread through choice (looking at you, DaVinci Code) or just not got round to yet. 

Who are these people who have only read 6 - I read more than that in infant school, for crying out loud.  People - you need to read.  It’s cheap, portable and you don’t need accessories.  Except reading glasses.  When you get older…   

I don't know if you can listen outside the UK, but the Wednesday afternoon play was a Torchwood spin on the Large Hadron Collider.

Wednesday

Big Bang Day: Torchwood - Lost Souls
 
By Joseph Lidster

Torchwood go to Geneva where Martha Jones, ex-time traveller, is now working as a doctor for a UNIT task force at the world’s biggest physics laboratory, CERN. Deep in an underground tunnel, a giant particle accelerator is about to be activated for the first time. But something strange is happening. Scientists are hearing voices and collapsing with a strange illness. Is something lurking in the underground tunnel? Do the dead ever really stay dead?

Captain Jack Harkness ...... John Barrowman
Gwen Cooper ...... Eve Myles
Ianto Jones ...... Gareth David-Lloyd
Martha Jones ...... Freema Agyeman
Professor Johnson ...... Lucy Montgomery
Dr Oliver Harrington ...... Stephen Crichlow
Leon Foiret ...... Mark Meadows

Music by Murray Gold and Ben Foster.

Producer/director Kate Mc

Go here for the link.  You can only listen till next Wednesday.  Daughter and I listened today, while we ate our lunch - it's not bad at all!

Feeling fragile and hungover after two (yes, two) mammoth drinking sessions in two days (take it from me, yes us older people can drink teenagers under the table, but they recover lots, lots quicker!), so I am surfing the net. 

Found this little gem via the BBC:

As supplied by I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, BBC Radio 4

Arboretum - a dock-side restaurant
Argy Bargy - Owner of a narrow boat in Buenos Aires
Binge - where Sean Connery puts his bottles
Bloater - Japanese straw hat
Carmelite - a half-hearted Buddhist
Fundamentalist - give money to David Icke
Geriatric - next time Germany starts a war
Malady - Bit like a duck
Midwifery - half-way through breaking wind
Pie Crust - What you get if you don't polish your pike
Sorcerer - even more of a saucer
Snuff Box - A coffin
Surcharge - Cash for Honours
Titillate - delayed puberty
Uganda - go and have a look
Winnebago - a horse with a bad back