The Odd Boy Sat Down by the Football Field...Pulled out a Slim Volume of Mallarme.

Hey, two posts in one day.
I just thought I would answer the reading question posed on JJ's blog in order to make a mockery of the so-called findings that most folk have only read six of the books on the list of the top one hundred.
Here goes:-
1
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien.
3 Jayne Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4
5 To Kill a Mockinbird - Harper Lee
6
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20
21
22
23
24
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26
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
32
33
34
35
36
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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45
46
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
55
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 Nightime- 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
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81
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 Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So there! Thirty four out of the top one hundred. It makes you wonder who they interviewed to come up with an AVERAGE of six!
Well, here's an update on the Shughie and Ronald post below. And sad reading it makes too.













Shugie* and Ronald*. Father and son. Still lived together 10 years after Mrs Shugie (Mum) died. Ronald wasn’t the marrying type. Not that he was sexually diverse or anything. If I had to describe that side of him I would say that he was asexual. Living at home with his dad was probably the best option for him. Comfort and no questions asked.
This morning I travelled the eight miles from my home to my place of work in 29 minutes. Now, considering my house sits within the outer ring of the proposed congestion charge area and my workplace is in the inner ring of the proposed congestion charge area I can, on this evidence, only come to one conclusion. Manchester is not very congested.








A couple of months ago I purchased a decent-ish spec system unit to attach to my 19" LCD panel and finally kiss goodbye to my IBM T21 laptop with the missing keys. It cost me £137 for a dual processor 300Ghz box with 2Gb of RAM, a 250Gb hard disk and Vista Home Premium. Bargain.
If I hear anyone else pontificate about how exciting this season's Premiership run in is I will scream and scream until I'm sick.






Hmmm....strange weekend. I (well we...) went to Birmingham. For me it was the first time since 1972. For the rest of 'em it was the first time.









Well that was a turn up for the books. As I peeked out of the bedroom window at 6:30am on Easter Sunday I saw a good three inches of snow covering everything. Deep. Crisp. Even.






