Books, Books, Books

A friend of mine posted this on her facebook page. I thought it was pretty cool. I also wanted to prove that I have surpassed BBC's view of me :)

BBC Book Challenge

Have you read more than 6 of these books? 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 only an excerpt.

• Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not, after all reading is not a competition!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 Lord of the Rings - 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 Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’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 - A.A. 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 Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*

80 Possession - A S 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 - E.B. 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

I asterisked the books that I saw the movie instead. I think it should count if it was a BBC production. :) Dickens is great but so much better or should I say more concise in movie form. If my counting is correct I've read 39 of the books listed here in their entirety.

Playing Catch Up

Fall has flown by and we are already days away from Christmas. Our camera ran out of battery and we lost our charger so I don't have many pictures over the past couple months.

Here are two from my cell phone:

Greta was able to help out with me in Edwin's class the last week of school. We spent 3 days there making crafts, building "gingerbread" houses and enjoying a movie/popcorn party. Greta was very pleased with her house.

Joseph did so well in basketball this fall. His technique and skills are really improving.

The first weekend in October we headed out to the fishery to see the Salmon Run. It was really fun. The kids enjoyed poking the dead fish and watching those still living in their struggle upstream.

Months ago I posted a masterpiece created by my sister, Sarah. (See post entitled "AMAZING") and failed to properly display my own creation. This carrot was homegrown by me! It's astounding the shapes you can create when you don't thin your carrots :) My duck face is for my darling husband who loves such poses!

My carrot can-can, can yours?

The kids and I enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend in Langley with portions of my family. We had an untraditional feast and sauntered over to the temple grounds.

Joseph is "photo-phobic" like his mom and opted to capture this moment rather than be in it.

On our way home we stopped in Abbotsford at this amazing corn maze wonderland. We could have spent the whole day there.

Greta posed this way in every picture in the maze.
They also had an indoor hay bale maze that you could leap on top of or traverse through.

Greta still enjoys pretending she's an animal. She put herself in the dog kennel.

In November we celebrated Edwin's 6th Birthday. It was a fun family affair at H20, Red Robin and Harry Potter.
Ryan's 32nd birthday came in went in November as well. He spent it up at the ski hill then recuperating from a mild concussion. Don't worry he now skis with a helmet.

I was able to collect 20 bags of leaves before the snow arrived. Unfortunately that means I will have to deal with the remaining 40 bags of leaves that weren't raked up in the spring. It's a good thing I have such good helpers.
I'm sure there are a thousand things I am missing but at least I hit a few. We'll try to get our camera up and running or be more diligent capturing Christmas on our cell phones for future posts.

Merry Christmas!

4 things.... i was tagged

Four shows I watch:
1 - modern family
2 - the office
3 - the event
4 - survivor

Four things I'm passionate about:
1 - family
2 - reading
3 - running
4 - good food

Four phrases I say a lot:
1 - that's awesome!
2 - go do, go get, stop __________!!!!
3 - i love you
4 - what do you want for dinner?

Four things I have learned from the past:
1 - life is happier when i let things go
2 - i've never regretted a good choice
3 - these moments with my children pass too quickly
4 - too err is human to forgive is divine

Places I'd like to go:
1 - France (again)
2 - England
3 - Norway
4 - Thailand

Four things I did yesterday:
1 - went to the gym
2 - returned some unneeded purchases
3 - wrote my christmas letter and prepared the cards
4 - watched inception - dreamt about it all night

Four things I'm looking forward to:
1 - christmas break
2 -maui in february
3 - our 10th anniversary
4 - paying off all our student and buying into the practice DEBT

Four things I love about winter:
1 - when it's over... ha ha
2 - singing christmas carols
3 - snowshoeing
4 - sitting by the fire reading a book

Four things on my wish list:
1 -health and happiness for all our friends and family
2 - a mediterranean cruise
3 - no debt
4 - our own home

Four people I tag:

1. Jen Davis

2. Amy Ledding (this is an attempt to get you blogging)

3. all my sisters

4. all my sisters in law

from the mouth of babes (for auntie lisa)

*last sunday i took greta into the washroom with me while i grabbed some tissue.

someone had recently used the facilities and had left it quite malodorous.

greta quickly turned around and said while banging on the door, "let me out... it's too SPICY in here!"

*while abusing my children this morning (aka having them clean their room) there was a lot of bellyaching and fighting.

i decided to split them up and send them to different rooms to clean. then thought better of it.

these boys will be brothers forever so they better start learning to get along and work together.

i called edwin back upstairs and explained the above theory.

edwin burst into tears and said, "i rather clean the toilets!"

Amazing

One of my amazingly talented sisters, Sarah, make this cake topper for a friend of hers. She did it all with plaster-cine. I just had to brag.

Family Photos

We booked a photo shoot for our family and Ryan's when we were in Saskatoon this summer.

Let me know which shot you think we should go with. Colour or black and white?

Even though the wind is blowing my hair everywhere I love the brother's arms around each other.

Back to School

(while her brothers attend school, greta attend her own class of body painting. why is it so difficult for a 2 year old to understand "only on the paper" ?)


Edwin and Joe have been back to school for a week and a half now. Grades 1 and 3! We are so happy that they are at the same school this year and we can walk again.





All summer long, Edwin was stressed about going to school... being at a new building, having a new teacher, would his friends be in his class and getting into serious work. His kindergarten teacher was very "play oriented" or in my words LAZY! After some tears I left him to it and he is loving it. His teachers are really sweet and we hope he'll learn a lot this year.




Every year when my sister in law warns me about a teacher, Joseph gets that teacher. Lucky for us, Joe is a very agreeable, happy, helpful and intelligent boy. We are hoping that he can get through another year with a difficult teacher unscathed and more prepared to face the real world.

Hope it went well for the rest of you.

SUMMER IS...

...turning 33
...running my second half marathon
...visiting family
...family coming to visit
...temple trips
...joe turning 8
...joe being baptized
...edwin overcoming his fear of water
...edwin doing flips off the dock
...hiking in the mountains
...hiking to the waterfall
...swimming at the beach
...swimming at the peanut pool
...more swimming
...playing with friends
...melting in the glorious heat
...having watermelon drip down your chin
... greta attempting potty training
...buying a practice
...planting, growing and harvesting a garden
...floating down the river
...beach, beach, beach



















































AND SUMMER ISN'T EVEN OVER YET!!