Happy Blogday to me!

And so I come to my 100th post. I was going to make this a bit of a discussion on new music delivery models (namely Spotify) and my thoughts on them, but I've decided that can be post no 101 or even a bit futher on.

No, today we are talking lists, specifically, the kinds of list that tell you you should have read/listened to/done, or whatever, the various things contained therein. Of course, these things are largely pointless because they generally involve lists made up by journos or pundits all of whom, have some sort of agenda and so they are far too abitrary, but I have done one or two of late and thought I'd share them with you.

So, first up, a list of 100 books that apparently everyone should read according so some spurious BBC News article.

Title	Author	Have I?
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	No
The Lord of the Rings	JRR Tolkien	Yes
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	No
Harry Potter series	JK Rowling	No
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	No
The Bible		No
Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte	No
Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	Yes
His Dark Materials	Philip Pullman	No
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	No
Little Women	Louisa M Alcott	No
Tess of the D’Urbervilles	Thomas Hardy	No
Catch 22	Joseph Heller	Intend
Complete Works	William Shakespeare	Partial1
Rebecca	Daphne Du Maurier	No
The Hobbit	JRR Tolkien	Yes
Birdsong	Sebastian Faulks	No
Catcher in the Rye	JD Salinger	Intend
The Time Traveller’s Wife	Audrey Niffenegger	No
Middlemarch	George Eliott	No
Gone With The Wind	Margaret Mitchell	No
The Great Gatsby	F Scott Fitzgerald	No
Bleak House	Charles Dickens	No
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	No
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	No
Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh	No
Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoyevsky	No
Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	Intend
Alice in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Yes
The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	Yes
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	No
David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	No
Chronicles of Narnia	CS Lewis	No
Emma	Jane Austen	No
Persuasion	Jane Austen	No
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe	CS Lewis	Yes
The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	No
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin	Louis De Bernieres	No
Memoirs of a Geisha	Arthur Golden	No
Winnie the Pooh	AA Milne	Yes
Animal Farm	George Orwell	Intend
The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	No
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	No
A Prayer for Owen Meaney	John Irving	No
The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	No
Anne of Green Gables	LM Montgomery	No
Far From The Madding Crowd	Thomas Hardy	No
The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Intend
Lord of the Flies	William Golding	Yes
Atonement	Ian McEwan	No
Life of Pi	Yann Martel	Partial2
Dune	Frank Herbert	Yes
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons	No
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen	No
A Suitable Boy	Vikram Seth	No
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	No
A Tale Of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	No
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	Intend
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time	Mark Haddon	No
Love In The Time Of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	No
Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	Yes
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	No
The Secret History	Donna Tartt	No
The Lovely Bones	Alice Sebold	No
Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	No
On The Road	Jack Kerouac	No
Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy	No
Bridget Jones’s Diary	Helen Fielding	No
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	No
Moby Dick	Herman Melville	No
Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens	No
Dracula	Bram Stoker	No
The Secret Garden	Frances Hodgson Burnett	No
Notes From A Small Island	Bill Bryson	Yes
Ulysses	James Joyce	Intend
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath	No
Swallows and Amazons	Arthur Ransome	Yes
Germinal	Emile Zola	No
Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	No
Possession	AS Byatt	No
A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	No
Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	No
The Color Purple	Alice Walker	No
The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro	No
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	No
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry	No
Charlotte’s Web	EB White	No
The Five People You Meet In Heaven	Mitch Albom	No
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle	No
The Faraway Tree Collection	Enid Blyton	No
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	No
The Little Prince	Antoine De Saint-Exupery	No
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	Intend
Watership Down	Richard Adams	No
A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole	No
A Town Like Alice	Nevil Shute	Intend
The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	No
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	Yes
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Roald Dahl	Yes
Les Miserables	Victor Hugo	No

1 - Read some plays and sonnets at school but by no means the whole lot. I doubt many people have truly done so or have the patience to put up with the overly-wordy prose.
2 - I started to read it but gave up because, frankly, it was shit.


So, thats the books taken care of. Next was a list on The Guardian website regarding 1000 (yes, one thousand!) songs you should hear before you die, or somesuch. And since it's my blog, I am going to list every last one of the buggers in the next post.