Proving BBC Wrong!

So, way back in May MovieCritic tagged me with this quite unusual tag.
Apparently BBC have made a list of classics of which they don't believe people have read more than 6!

Preposterous, I know!

So because I love proving big know-it-all institutions wrong, and because I feel a little guilty of not yet answering this tag, here it is:


                               

The Rules:
1. Be honest.
2. Put an asterisk next to the ones you have read all the way through. Put an addition sign next to the ones you have started.
3. Tag as many people as these books that you have read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*

2. Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*
4. Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Story of the Eye - George Bataille
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell*
9. Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott*
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
15. Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
16. The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata
17. Woman in the Dunes - Abe Kobo
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gogol's Wife - Tomasso Landolfi
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald*
23. Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (But I have read Budenbrooks by Thomas Mann, which as far as I know is an even bigger classic of his)
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. Ferdydurke - Gombrowicz
26. Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
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. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair33. Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn - Mark Twain
34. Emma -Jane Austen* 
35. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe*
36. Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Naomi - Junichiro Tanizaki
39. Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
40. The Joke - Milan Kundera
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. Labyrinths - Gorge Luis Borges
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. Under My Skin - Doris Lessing
46. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery*
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
51. Beloved - Toni Morrison
52. The Flounder - Gunther Grass
53. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55. My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
56. A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen (But I've read Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, so that should count as something)
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens*
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Idiot - Fodor Dostoevesky
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
64. Death on the Installment Plan - Celine
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville*
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Metamorphosis - Kafka
74. Epitaph of a Small Winner - Machado De Assis
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. The Light House - Virginia Woolf
80. Disgrace - John Maxwell Coetzee
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Box Man - Abe Kobo
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. The Stranger - Camus (But I have read The Fall by Camus, still should count)
88. Acquainted with the Night - Heinrich Boll
89. Don't Call It Night - Amos Oz
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (This is unfair! I've read tons of her books but not this particular one)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pychon
94. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare*
99. Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe**
100. Metamorphosis - Ovid


Results:
17 read out of 100 (plus the 3 titles that technically wasn't on the list, but was a lesser known work by that same author)
1 started

Mission accomplished!
BBC proven wrong!!

I'm gonna break that third rule and not tag anyone, but if you read this post and thinks this sounds fun, by all means fill it out:)

On Writer's Block And Life

Hello all!
I bet you thought I was dead by now! But fear not, I am not dead merely in blogging (and writing) hibernation.

I have been suffering from the most feared disease among writers:

THE WRITER'S BLOCK!

For those of you that have only heard rumours of it; it is a most distressing condition where your head is overflowing with ideas but somewhere between your brain and your hands there is a severe nerve blockage that prevents you from writing any of it down!
And the few words you might put down is mere gibberish. 

No one knows how you catch it (though work and life are big suspects), and even sadder: there is no known cure other than time!

So yes, pity me one and all, I have been suffering for months on end. Not being able to write a word on my blog or any of my story projects.
In my case it has been so severe that I have not even gotten any new story ideas over the summer, only rehashing old ones. For one whose greatest trait is her imagination that is a bleak fate indeed!!

But just as I was about to arrange the funeral for my literary life it sprang up from its sick bed and exclaimed: I STILL LIVE! (and then it went to sleep for another few weeks, such a recovery takes time).

So now I'm trying to start the blog up again. I can't say how regular updates will be and the first many posts will probably be tags. (So if you know some good tags, let me know) 

But let's not end this post in such a somber mood as it started, let me tell you about this amazing trip i went on this summer.

A dear friend and I went to Stockholm, and it only took a few days for Stockholm to overtake Berlin as my favourite city.

It's the most beautiful city you can imagine; full of history and old architecture and placed in the middle of the Swedish archipelago which ensures lots of breathtaking nature sights without even having to travel from the city.

The Stockholm Castle - dull on the outside but so pretty on the inside

View to a lovely old entertainment park

View from the house we lived just 20 minutes from midtown

Sailing in the archipelago in midtown Stockholm 

As I can not do it justice in words, my only conclusion is: if you have a list of European cities you want to visit, put Stockholm on it (and boost it to the top).

That's all for now! I hope the next post will not take me 6 months to write:)

A Letter To Spring

Dear Spring

We need to talk!

                      

I determinedly set out to have words with you about the shannanigans you have once again subjected me to.

It's not very nice, Spring, to have the sun come out and the flowers start to sprout in late February only to bury it all in a snowstorm on March 1st! That is by many considered downright cruel!

                     

On the same note it is very misleading when you raise the temperature enough for me to put on my spring coat, just to have them plunging down to almost zero degrees again. There is no greater defeat for a human than having to get out her winter jacket again when she has already put it away for the season.

                      

And lastly it is considered quite capricious to keep sending snow and hail showers all the way through April. Don't think I didn't notice the hail shower you sent our way just last week! I happened to be indoors but many had to brave it in their thin spring clothes. If this had been the 19th century people could have died! (Yes, I know it only lasted 20 minutes. Give me a chance to be dramatic)

                     

And yes, Spring, I know you think sending a few days of sun and a good weather forecast my way will appease me and make me forget- and in that you are completely right!!!

SOUND THE BELL! SPRING IS HERE AND THIS TIME TO STAY! THROW AWAY YOUR SWEATERS AND GET OUT YOUR SUNGLASSES! THIS YEAR THE SUMMER WILL DEFINITELY BE A GOOD ONE!

                     

Well played, Spring, well played... but as long as the sun lasts, I guess I will forgive you as I do every year.