LT Meme: Top 106 unread books

Okay. So I procrastinate. This meme has been going around for a while. It's a list of the top 106 books that are tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. Here's the way it works. Bold the books you have read. Italicize the books you've started. Strike through the books you hated. Asterisk* the books you've read more than once. Underline the books you plan to read.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the nightime
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Out of 106 books, (no idea why they came up with that number), I have read 28 and started 6. I really didn't hate any, but I'm not interested in finishing Middlesex or Beloved. There are 5 books on this list that I plan to read someday. Right after I read the 149 books, (more or less), that are in my house that are either unread or partially read. MUST ... NOT...BUY...ANY...MORE...BOOKS!!!

May Flowers XIV

Johnny-jump-ups or pansies are one of my favorite spring flowers. These have self seeded in the two foot strip that seperates our driveway from my neighbor's house.



I was amazed to see that the four flowers on the right, two with white faces and two with light blue ones , are all on the same plant.

Pansies are from the same family as violets. These don't smell. They thrive best in cool weather.

Pray you, love, remember.

And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

- William Shakespeare

- Hamlet

May Flowers XIII

Aquilegia caerulea- Colorado blue columbine



I grew these from seed some years ago. Now most of my gardening consists of pulling up seedlings of these and many other perennials and annuals that self sow all over the place. I never know what 's going to come up from year to year.



These have established themselves a little too near the Aquilegia canadensis out back. Columbines are known to hybridize easily, so right after I took the photo, I pulled these up. I know hybrids are lovely, but I am more interested in preserving each species in a seperate part of the yard.

Of columbines, in purple dressed Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

- William Cullen Bryant,

To the Fringed Gentian

Robin Redbreast

This poor baby either fell out of his nest or was fledged too soon. I worked in the yard for several hours today. When I first saw him, he was on the ground a few feet from me. He managed to flutter to the top of a fence. Later he perched on the handlebar of this bike for about an hour. I think he was very tired becauase he almost fell off a couple of times.
Other robins would fly up to him from time to time.



It seems that his tail feathers have not grown out enough for him to fly well. You can still see the little downy feathers sticking out of his head.

Robin

Suddenly spring wings
into the backyard, ready
to play tug-of-worm.

-J. Patrick Lewis

May Flowers XII

Lilies of the valley. I almost missed them this year. They are planted under the lilacs. A few years ago I planted peonies and hydrangas in front, so now I can't see when the lilies of the valley are blooming.

The plant grows about eight inches high with fragrant white bells in May. They spread aggressively so be sure to plant them in a place where you can contain them.


The lily of the vale, of flowers the queen, Puts on the robe she neither sew'd nor spun. - Michael Bruce- Elegy

Family Reunion

We've spent two of the last three days on the road. Ten hours or so each way. Saturday we all met up at a picnic area called Pilot Knob, I think, near Camden, Tennesee. It was my husband's family's reunion. I haven't attended with him in about ten years or so. This year I'm not working so I went along. Of course I did not take enough pictures. We went to the top of the mountain to the scenic overlook of the Cumberland River and I left my camera in the car.



The day was fine. Honeysuckle scented the air. The company was good. Many stories were swapped. And we all chowed down on fried chicken , biscuits, cornbread, banana pudding and lots of other goodies.

May Flowers XI

The chives are just starting to bloom. The foliage starts early in spring and can be harvested spring , summer and fall.
Since chives lose much of their flavor when dried, it's good that it can be harvested fresh for such a long season.
Snip off the flowers before they go to seed or you will have many seedlings. Clumps of chives can be easily divided every other year to prevent overcrowding and to increase the number of plants.

The next time you make potato salad toss in a handful of chopped chives. Ummm!