I stole this from Maja, cos it interested me to see if I had actually read any of the books on the list and I surprised myself. There are some that I did not mark as it was a long long time ago that I think I read the book - or I may just have imagined it...


The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Underlining is not working so I am stating which are my faves

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen LOVED IT
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien. BOOK ONE THE REST WERE MMM
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte A FAVOURITE
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ANOTHER FAVE
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott LOVED IT
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller WAS CONFUSED... I THINK THAT WAS THE POINT
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Several but not all.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ANOTHER FAVOURITE
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger I LIKED THIS BOOK
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 EVERYTHING HE WRITES IS GREAT
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh LOVED ONES WAS BETTER
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 SHE IS THE BESTEST
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres BORED
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 YEH WHY DID I BOTHER TO READ MORE OF HIS STUFF
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 AND THE REST...
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - MargaretAtwood.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen AS I SAID SHE IS THE BEST
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 Started
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath7
7 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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton WHAT ABOUT FAMOUS FIVE AND SECRET SEVEN.......
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
100 Les Miserable - Victor Hugo

Strangely the ones I haven´t marked are books that I have not wanted to read... I like that...given the fact that I read crap most of the time

Just because you're miserable doesn't mean you can't enjoy your life. ~Annette Goodheart

I´ve been feeling a bit like that recently, both miserable and enjoying life at the same time. Strange, I think it has a lot to do with the weather, work and general summer time blues. Soon though I will have some time off to do some serious work around the house.

Last week was the 17th of June - our national day - hence the photo of the flag. It was also the day they shot bear number 2. She was extremely weak from her swim and her likelihood of surviving a return journey (sedated) to Greenland seem slim. At least this time an attempt was made (an extremely expensive attempt at that...and since a whole heap of experts have come out of the woodwork to say how it really should have gone down), Oh well, we wait for bear 3 and see what happens then. Apparently a couple of women thought that they had spotted number 3, but it turns out that it was probably just a very big sheep.

Freyja watching the proceedings on the oval on the 17th of June - it was a beautiful day - but there was a mighty cold northerly blowing which made being outdoors a tad brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

3am the sunlight lighting the southern end of the fjord

A view to Drangey with Arctic Turns doing their morning breakfast run.

Midsummer has now passed which means (if we want to be depressing) the days are getting shorter... Some shots from 3am are included in this post - but now that I have managed to add flickr to my sidebar (thanks maja) those that want more photos can go there and troll through the really really bad photography...

Summer has set in with its usual severity. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Well, the latest in news from S´krók is that another polar bear has landed. This time further north near Hraun á Skaga. It has settled itself down in the eider nesting area - happily munching away at little eider ducklingss and/or eider duck eggs. The police have this time, sealed off the area, evacuated the farm (where the eider duck nesting area is) and are awaiting further instruction. After the debacle last time they are not going to let the shooters shoot until all other possibilities have been exhausted. This time the weather is sunny - although extremely windy. Stay tuned... till then some photos.
The summer moon, taken at around 10:30pm
This boat once belonged to my dad.... such a nice little boat to go fishing in on the fjord.

Sweetness... ooohhhh she is so cute...

It´s a tough life being a dog, watching me trying to create a garden in front of the house.

Yes well, those rocks are to become a small border for a very very small flower garden.

It is so small that you can hardly see it on this picture -- maybe if you magnify it 100 times... Still I felt I had accomplished something - I also mowed the lawn and did some weeding in the messy bit outside the house... Ah my poor shed it does so look derelict...

These were taken by a drunken me at around 3 in the morning... don´t you just love that sky.

Pretty pink...

Tindastóll looking majestic as usual.

I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy. ~Bern Williams

Yes I am at work, yes, I am wasting time, yes, I could be doing a thousand other very important things. I need motivation and at the moment I am not self motivating, nor is anything else in my surroundings about to motivate me. I hate this. Still a few photos to share... Freyja meeting the newest dog in the hood a little terrier owned by one of the trawler captains.

Our late walk is sometime after 10:30pm, I am thinking that this was taken on one of these, still light but on photos seems a little darker and duskier, the fog is rolling in over the hills. This is a view of the old town centre, bank, church, old hospital and school can be seen on the photo, the old post office is further to the right.

content after the walk... like me new jeans and top?

Support your right to arm bears. ~Cleveland Amory

I borrowed these pictures from the local news website skagafjordur.com

As you may be able to make out there was a polar bear in them there hills. Now polar bears are not native to Iceland but have been known to wander here via iceberg flows from Greenland. Yesterday was a rather lovely day but as they were chasing the bear the fog started to descend. This seems to have caused a bit of panic amongst those trying to work out what to do. You see we keep horses and sheep free range in those very same hills and so having a bear wandering loose could perhaps maybe have resulted in some dead domesticated animals. As there seemed to be at least 10 armed men up there all really really eager to make a "kill", the poor old bear really didn´t have a chance. True, the "experts" on site did not have the right tranquilisers, the tranquiliser gun at Egilsstaðir was broken and well, we don´t have any suitable cages or storage areas (polar bear proof) - and the question also arose as to how it could be transported back to Greenland.... All these questions and problems made the decision to shoot bjössi bear that much more logical.
Aterwards everyone else (particularly those living in the south - very far away from the big cuddly bear) were most upset. Now there are calls for action plans to be drawn up on how to safely drug wandering polar bears and remove them back to the wild. Which is all well and good. However, given the fact that
1. No one was prepared.
2. They didn´t close the road (this is a main artery between Saudarkrok and the south and west of Iceland), so lots and lots of human food was standing and gaulking.
3. The smell of blood had penetrated the "hunters" skin.
4. What were we going to do with it once caught? I mean who knows where home was - maybe he didn´t want to go home. Perhaps he had been ostrasised by the bears back home and decided to go on a really big adventure????
Ah yes a dilemna...

and then it started chasing the hunters down the hill....
RUN AWAY