Ah Bliss!

Inspired by seeing your lovely neat desks and sewing rooms I am starting to try and clear my office (and all the other rooms I have taken over since my office became unworkable) but as a card carrying workaholic and juggler I have many mysterious boxes filled with half baked- ooophs! half finished ideas. But what does this have to do with the picture above? Well it occurred to me as a mother of 4 healthy children I should give a little back so I am selling lots of bits and bobs with a 50% donation to bliss the premature baby charity

There's lots more in my ebay shop here Many thanks Zia

bookaphilia.........

(Paper moon)

I seem to be copying everything that the Sian-from diary of tiny holder does nowadays but who can resist a little list or 2- besides I have so many half sewn projects to finish..........
so to buy me a little time, I have to confess-

Books I have read..........

Bold-read
Italics-Like to read


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
2.The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling -
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - strangely fascinating (did you know the bible stated the world was round hundreds of years before we worked it out?)
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 - Maybe halfway there....
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. 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- I got 5 pages in and my baby son ripped about 20 pages out!
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - I was given a beautifully illustrated version of this that I plan to read with my children

even Annie Lebovitz and vogue love alice...

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(great film though!)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

(from here)
(sorry but there doesn't seem to be any Gophers in this story)

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

Yes, I know I'm getting all moviefied on you but blockbuser or not- Ang Lee made a crackin Sense and Sensibility- though I do cringe when I think I'm supposed to be marianne!

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 - I started to read this and couldn't get into it
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( am I going crazy I thought this was by E m Forster-or am I just on Merchant- Ivory overload?)
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Wow-less than fifty per cent- and quite shocking to realise most of them were back when I studied English literature at college- so all the classics are there and all the classic English children's stories too, the most recently written book I have read from the list is the Harry Potter books- I wanted to see if they were suitable for bedtime stories. I confess many of these I haven't even heard of- Basically anything written this century is a mystery to me! Though I suppose this could be having better things to do (4 children-3 careers-4 houses etc) it's really secretly due to the fact I'm not convinced that modern writers can weave magic into their stories the same as Thomas Hardy or Shakespeare- and the desperate midnight page turning by lamplight is just not going to happen for something really is better summed up by a 2 hour blockbuster! I also find my edwardian morality horrified by the fact all the books my local bookshops recommend seem to based on child abuse and torture....... so if you are a modern reader tell me what you would suggest for this over-romantic, living in the past, read the whole story without sleeping, type of reader..... (remember less sex, more soul rendering emotion!) Tell me what you love from this list or elsewhere and why I should read it............

(Photo Elpapel)

I just popped over to visit the diary of a tiny holder and decided to do her personality test- I think it wasn't far off but a lot of the options I could have chosen both choices-does that mean I'm in a muddle or I just don't know myself very well? Why not have a go?

P.s. anyone who knows me well can judge for themselves if its true- though be kind!

The Visionary

You are charming, outgoing, friendly. You make a good first impression.

You possess good negotiating skills and can convince anyone of anything.

Happy to be the center of attention, you love to tell stories and show off.

You're very clever, but not disciplined enough to do well in structured environments.

In love, you see everything as a grand adventure. You enjoy taking risks for love.

And if things don't work out, you're usually not too much worse for the wear!

You would make a great entrepreneur, marketing executive, or actor.

At work, you need a lot of freedom to pursue your own path and vision.

How you see yourself: Analytical, creative, and peaceful

When other people don't get you, they see you as: Detached, wishy-washy, and superficial

What's Your Personality Type?

Oooophs!

(micheal davies)

Hello everyone, I have been absent without leave for a while- but thanks to internet password craziness I have been all blogged up. I managed to send out 12 parcels around the world from my giveaway- probably all to the same person as I got in a muddle with blog/normal names! It was quite nice to imagine where they all went to I was very tempted to google earth all your addresses but then I realised I would probably hate to have that huge spy sattelite zooming in on me in the garden while I'm sunbathing! So I just imagined them instead............. I promise to pull my socks up and blog something a bit more interesting for you soon!