Just when I thought I was almost up to date on my reading list!

Here's the list from BBC of top 100 books (or some such thing) that I found on Facebook. And they believe most people would have read only 6 from this list. I am certainly better off than that. But still got to do a lot of catching up. I have read only 21 of them! The X mark next to the book denotes that. and "movie" in the bracket means that I haven't read the book but seen the film. Sigh...

Anyways I know what to look for next time I hit the library.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen-(movie)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -x
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -x
6. The Bible -
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -x
8. 1984 - George Orwell - x
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens- (movie)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott- x
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller-
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - ( partial)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- x
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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams- x
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll- x
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - x
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 - x
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - (movie)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - x
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell-
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown- x
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - x
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - x
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 - x
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - x
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 - (movie)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - x
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (partial)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce -
76. The Inferno - Dante
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 - x
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - x
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 - x
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl- x
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Kitchen Confidential - Adventures in the culinary underbelly

If I didn't like Anthony Bourdain before, now I love him! This book just proves that one need not use big eloquent words for the book to work, Honesty will do. And AB makes it work very well.

Also I have given up the long cherished dream of opening a restaurant. I knew it was hard but didn't realise how hard!

This book is guidebook for chefs, eye opener for lay people who know nothing about restaurant business and to me it was simply inspirational!

I loved the book!

My rating 4.5 on 5 (I could give it 5 but just being stingy like the math teacher from school)

Nancy drew - A race against time

Just for the record!

Considering 2 of the 4 books I got from library were a bad choice, this one was a saviour.

A midsummer night's gene

A classic case of never judge the book by the cover! The blurb on the back cover was very funny, the book was not. To give myself credit I did try very hard. Read more than 50 pages and didn't see the humour promised in the back cover. Considering this is a sci-fi parody (based on Shakespeare's midsummer night's dream if you haven't already guessed by the title) that I was reading right after Douglas Adams, made things only worse. I gave up! I am going to be wary of author Andrew Harman from now onwards, that is for sure!

Rumpole and the Angel of Death

This was recommended by Varali. Usually I like her choice so I picked up the book. But then I had forgotten her penchant for English humour! It is too subtle for me. So I didn't really complete this compilation of short stories by John Mortimer.

Too bad. I like Woodhouse better than this guy is the only consolation for me!

Life, the Universe and Everything

What can I say? It was brilliantly Humourous. Just what was the man on to come up with stuff like this? The bizarre names he comes up with for characters itself is a subject of study. And in this book he converts Cricket into a intra galaxy war of "Krikkit" simply awesome!

I bought this book, an omnibus with six of his books in 2005. Despite my urge to finish of the series, I have been savouring one book at a time. It is simply is more fun this way.

No rating n all, I simply love this book :)

An example for the usage for the phrase "pustakada badanekaayi"

It is not a very literary post but interesting nevertheless one thinks...Quoted here is none other Uppi aka Upendra from Sandalwood. Roughly translated it means Love is nothing but bogus :) I wonder how come most such statements are found on the back of the Bangalore autos?

The ugliness of the Indian Male and other propositions

Needless to say the title prompted me to pick up the book. Mukul Kesavan is a professor of history with a penchant for cinema and he is humourous too. The book is a collection of his essays on topics ranging cinema, documentary and how chennai might as well be another country.

Although I expected the entire book to be about the title, the array of topics wasn't disappointing in any way.

I only differed with his views on the choice of subjects for documentaries. It makes a very ineresting read.

My rating 3 on 5

City of Djinns - William Darlymple

What a revelation this book was! This is my first WD Book and I wasn't disappointed.

I was impressed with the kind of history he managed to rake up. So many things I didn't know about Delhi. Honestly I am not a big fan of the city and the book didn't change that either but a lot of it's attitude and behaviour was put in perspective. I was a bit intrigued that the book largely covered only the Mughal era and no sign of any Hindu rulers anywhere. Then during the course of the book I realised the Mughals came in to Delhi in the early 13th century and held on till 18th, that is the british rule. He briefly delves into the Mahabharath period (in the BC he says) towards the end. I have always wondered about Mahabharatha whether it is fact or fiction err mythology may be the right word. WD kind of points that it might be a fact that has been embellished over the centuries and is in the current form of grandeur and divinity. I was very impressed with WD's deligence through out the book. And made me wonder why I never researched anything this determinedly...

There were times when I got bored of the royal ways of life but the book always draws you back into it.

My rating 4 on 5

Nancy drew - The treasure in the royal tower

Yeah yeah yeah I am a bit old for this. But it is the only teenage fetish I have held on to :)

It is a quick read, gives my gray cells something to solve :)

Can't rate them though. It is purely for fun.

The best 125 Meatless Pasta Dishes

I love cook books! I only try about 2.5 of them from every book but I still love reading them. Looking at the yummy pictures, imagining the taste of the spices and aromas. And sometimes if I really like it make them too.

My latest fetish being Italian food and since very little meat is part of my diet I thought this book would be interesting. The edition I picked up had no pictures so I was very disappointed. I like to to know how the food turns out or rather how it is supposed to turn out. But it made a very interesting read nevertheless because it talks about the basics of pasta making. Right from the different kinds of pastas, sauces, the equipment. Some of the cheese based recipes sounded delicious. I have it written down. Hopefully I will try them sometime soon.

My rating 3 on 5 (mostly cos of no pics)