Books – A nice compilation

Found the following on a blog. I was amazed at how many I have read, so I thought I shall post it here. For the rest in the list, 2009 has just begun!!

Ones in bold are the ones I have read already.
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
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 Never Let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
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
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
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and 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 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

Catty About It

The following is an article that appeared in today’s news.

Once kitten, twice shy

Gardener of Malad society gets caught dumping four tiny kittens into creek; animal lover who had him booked hopes he won’t repeat it

By Anand Holla
Posted On Friday, January 23, 2009 at 02:22:52 AM

Gardener Sangappa Gawde holds a kitten after it was rescued
They are barely a month old and incapable of doing harm to anyone. But four stray kittens born to a cat at Malad’s Haridwar Housing Society were mercilessly dumped into the nearby creek. Fortunately, the tiny moggies still have eight lives to go, thanks to resident Irene Fernandes who spotted two of the society’s gardeners stuffing them into a gunny sack. Fernandes spotted the two men from her window at around 12 pm on Thursday, and rushed downstairs to find out what they were up to. One of the gardeners, Sangappa Gawde, ran towards the Malvani Creek with the sack. When he came back, Fernandes asked him what he’d done with the kittens, but he said he had no idea what she was talking about and that he’d only thrown some garbage into the creek. Fernandes then got in touch with local animal rights activist Bhavin Gathani, who rushed to the scene and informed the Bangur Nagar police about the incident. After booking Gawde under the Prevention of Cruelty Act, the police took him to the creek and asked him to show them where he had thrown the kittens. By 4 pm, the purring kittens were found unhurt and reunited with their mother. Bangur Nagar police said that the gardeners had committed the act at the behest of some society members who found the kittens to be a nuisance. “Had any of the kittens died, the accused could even be punished with five years imprisonment under the law,” warned Gathani. “If societies have a problem with strays dirtying their premises, they should approach the BMC, never take law into their own hands.” Irene’s daughter Dorin, who also helped bring the kittens back to safety, said, “Those who ordered the act will now have to appear before the court and pay a penalty of Rs 1,200. Even the police were very reluctant to help us out, but once we showed them the rulebook, they were forced to take action.” Cat’s like a good Samaritan.

It argues that the kittens are harmless, ask me about it !!
While I agree that killing them is an extreme action, and we do not have the right to take away a life, they are a menace. I can quote realms on how they get stuck on car wheels just below the bonnets, bite up wires, litter in the most unexpected of places, dirty scooter/car covers and scratch glass panes.
If you appeal to the other members of the society to stop encouraging them by feeding or petting them, they pose the argument that the cats are God’s own creatures and it is an act of salvation to take care of them.
BMC Appeals .. are they a solution? Somebody quote me an instance when the municipality has sprung into action and cleared the premises of these creatures.

All this leaves me wishing that all the cats will disappear one day, even if accidentally, under my car wheels.

What is it with ladies and their clutches?

In school and the growing up years, the little girls had “neatly folded into a square” handkerchieves always in their hands.

College goers had a file of papers or notebooks in their arms all the time..irrespective of how much of it they actually read.

Not so long ago, it was the saree pallu or the front V of the thupatta that they used to clutch or pull continuously while walking/talking/eating/..

Of late, the cell phone is the constant companion. They have to carry it with them everywhere, to the cafeteria, to the loo, to the meeting, to the bus stop and keep it clutched in their hands all the while!

I personally like a pair of free hands. (i.e ones that don’t toss the hair from left to right, and right to left ever so often)