The Telegraph Top 100 Challenge

For fear of losing out on a tantalising slice of lemon cake, I have given in to the cajolement of my illustrious fellow bibliophile, 'The Oxford Reader' to once again take up my blog and strive, seek and find once more my long lost love of reading. The catalytic gauntlet has been thrown; the challenge is thus: to read all one hundred books as voted for in the Telegraph as the well loved reads of 2007 within one year, and to review them on here. Believe me, if it wasn't for the cake, I may have been sorely tempted to 'run away', Python style. However, cake is cake, and I will not yield! Here are the books (I will mark with a asterisk once read):

1. Pride & 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

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime & 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 - AA 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 & 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 Nighttime - 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows & Amazons - Arthur Ransome

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 Colour 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 Alborn

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 Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A great deal of cake and cajolement is required methinks to survive such a Herculean task with my brain intact! Adieu my friends, I shall be back with my first review anon!

Stertors and drones

It's official. I am totally and utterly disillusioned with life. You might say that this is a phase, or a fad, or indeed a sign of unwanton disintegration into that well plowed furrow called 'old age'. Quite honestly, it is a mixture of all three, with an extra helping of self pity along with a dollop of an insatiable desire to share that with all and sundry on the side. With fries. Always with fries, despite Jamie Oliver's crusade against anything with a hint of automated flavour enhancing. Don't get me wrong, I am not about to vilify JO and feed my thankfully non existent children with fast food through the iron railings of a school gate. Quite the contrary, I feel that anyone who has the balls to profess a different view to the status quo deserves a medal, a pat on the back and a get out of jail free card. Or at least a gold star for effort.

So why the downbeat opening? Emo's beware, I am not about to open up and condemn the entire world to another wrist hatching episode of woeful soliloquies and depth defying sob stories. I simply wanted to show my utter detachment to today. And only today. Think of it as a sudden snore in the midst of an otherwise peaceful night's sleep. A snore doesn't equate to an nightmare, in the same way as my opening doesn't equate to a blue filled blog. Think of it as a sudden stertor in life as opposed to a continuous drone. Over and Out.