Magpies in Chicago!

Magpies in Chicago!
"Deep Dish Pie Fiesta" Magpie Reunion

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Top books that I've read


'Top' 100 Books (someone posted this as being a modified BBC list; BBC had a survey in 2003 which has a few different ones...maybe I'll post that modified list later)

Bold=Books I’ve Read (47)
Italics=Books I’ve started but not finished, or only read excerpts  (7)
Unread = (46 -- I have some work to do...)

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 (the first time, in 5 days! at age 14)
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 (12th grade end of year English class book report!)
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 (Spanish)
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 (Spanish) 
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 (yes, but I had to look up a synopsis to confirm) 
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon  
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish) 
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 (ugh!) 
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 (French)
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

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Happy holidays!

Wishing everyone happy Thanksgiving! And if I'm not back here before the end of the year, Merry Christmas and happy New Year, too!

Monday, May 31, 2010

Nerd? Geek? What's the difference?



From XKCD: A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language.

Monday, May 17, 2010

One of my other pastimes...

I attended the US Orienteering Team Trials this past weekend... no, I wasn't trying out for the Team (too slow for that; I was going to say too old, but the oldest female member on the team will turn 50 next year--she's superb), but taking part in the orienteering courses offered. We could run the same course(s) as the Team Trialers, after they had all started. I ran the medium and sprint length courses on Saturday, but not the longer course on Sunday.

Here I'm running to the last checkpoint on a sprint orienteering course. Thanks to Clem McGrath for the photo. I have a thumb-mounted compass over my map in my left hand, and my timing chip/recorder attached to a finger of my right hand (the watch on my right wrist tracks my route using GPS signals). I knew someone was taking pictures, so I tried not to grimace!

I may look like I'm running fast, to you, but I'm only about half as fast as the fastest woman there (an 18-year-old Canadian), who took just under 12 minutes on this course (I took just over 20). But I wasn't last!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Next stop, San Francisco?

Maybe the next get-together will be in California, and maybe I'll meet a few more Magpies (I sure hope so!). In any case, I'll be looking forward to the next "Piefest" no matter what we call it.

In the meantime, orienteering calls me back, and I must heed the siren call...

Friday, May 7, 2010

And the party goes on...

Visit Jean's blog for "the further adventures of the Magpies."

And maybe Terri will upload a few of her pictures someday... :-)

Friday, April 23, 2010

Almost settled back into a routine

Now that it's been almost a week since I got back from Chicago, I still don't really have time to do much with this blog, but I've added quilt pictures to my Picasa page, to which I've added quilter and title information.