Christmas is coming...

It looks like the whole country apart from where I live is under inches and inches of snow, and everyone I know seems to have already put up their decorations, but I'm really not feeling it yet. Sure, I've done some of the shopping and wrapped some presents but the festive spirit is distinctly lacking. Snow would definitely help but our sprinkling of the stuff has been and gone. Last week I saw this on Facebook, (apparently the list is slightly different from the original BBC list) :

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

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 (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May 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 Travellers 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 Carrol
 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 Berniere
 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim 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 - Gabrial Garcia Marquez
 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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 Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell
 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
 74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
 76 The Bell Jar - Sylivia 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 - Charles Mitchell
 83 The Colour 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 & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was quite pleased with myself clocking up 35 read, until I discovered people who'd read 65+. So, I was thinking perhaps I should try and read some more of these well loved books, and as A Christmas Carol is one I haven't read yet maybe I can kill two birds with one stone, read a good book and find the spirit of Christmas. I started it a bit earlier and am hoping Monkey will go to bed and settle easily tonight so I can get into it. Wish me luck!