love the garden!!

reading

This year I read 8 books:

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay;
The Naming of Tishkin Silk by Glenda Millard;
The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith;
The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith;
A Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp;
Calebs Crossing by Geraldine Brooks;
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett;
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith
Not many... but I also browsed many other books and read magazines. ;)

Last night Melanie showed me this list.  The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. I am not sure who decided which 100 they would be, but the deal is that you highlight those which you have read.  I have coloured the ones I have read blue.  There are 15.  I own a good many that I have not yet read.  Shame on me.

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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (but not over to cover)

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  (some of)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
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
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur 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 - Gabriel 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 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
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 Posession A S Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu 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 and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I read this quote the other day:

"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one." Augustine Burrell

I love it.  And fingers crossed, this coming year should see all of my books orderly, like this...

image from here

Is it any surprise one of my favourite scenes in Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire is the book shop scene??

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year

CHARLES DICKENS

so it has begun...

This morning Nicholas crawled into our bed and said "mama, it is Christmas Eve today!"
He loves the Christmas Carol, 'The Little Drummer Boy' and yesterday made a drum and has been playing it while listening to it on this movie... 

I play the Josh Groban version loudly.  It has a very regal feel!

David and I stayed up late last night making fruit mince tarts and bon bons...

Audrey has been in awe of Santa and was in tears the other night as we were leaving the shopping centre as Santa had "gone home".  We don't "do" Santa at Christmas but last night took her to say hello to him.


More poignantly for the Season, listening to the Little Drummer Boy, i pondered this line...

I have no gift to bring...
That's fit to give a King

And last night I read Touching Wonder Recapturing the Awe of Christmas.

Recognition

Who on earth saw him first, knowing

truly who he was? belly to belly, when

John, prophet in utero, distinguished

in the natal soup the fetal bones, the body

curled like a comma, eyes tight, skull

packed with universal wisdom,

the unborn cousin began to dance.

And when she, birth-giver-

her ordinary vision arrowed down between

her legs, through pain and straw, to her son's dark,

slime-streaked hair hair, to his very skin, red with

the struggle of being born - she lifted him

to her breast kissed the face of God,

and felt her own heart leap.

~ Luci Shaw

This year my thoughts at Christmas time have been on the fact that this really happened. 
A baby born, that man no more shall die.

Christmas catch up

I haven't posted pictures from when we decorated the tree a few weeks ago...

Advent treats

Some cute links.
A puppet nativity scene and colouring pages here.
Oliver & S measurement chart here (they are too cute!)
This blog has some lovely Christmas related ideas.  As I peaked my Christmas enthusiasm about 4 weeks ago I'll save it for next year!
The kids in their Christmas play...

And, not Christmas related, but our proud little Joey

Christmas baking

Last Christmas I made Margaret Fulton's fruit mince tarts.  They were so yummy and I felt very pleased with myself for producing something from scratch that can be easily bought from the supermarket myself. It was the real thing.  :)

This year David is going to make them with me (which is great because his pastry is always perfect).

At the moment I am addicted to Martha Stewart's Spiced Maple Glazed Pecans.  They are SO good (probably not so for the hips) and I am making bags of them to give to work colleagues.  yum, yum!

Spiced Maple Glazed Pecans
from Martha Stewart
500grams unsalted pecans
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
4 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon light-brown sugar
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Place all ingredients in a large bowl and toss to combine. Spread nut mixture in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet lined with a nonstick baking mat. Bake, stirring frequently, until browned, 12 to 15 minutes; let cool. Pecans can be stored at room temperature in an airtight container up one week.

...and the Christmas cds.  My favourites this year are Bette Midler's O Come, O Come Emmanuel, Josh Groban singing Little Drummer Boy and CeCe Winan's Do You Hear What I hear?

Advent calendar in use!

 

 

at the moment

I don't feel particularly on top of my Christmas plans... Christmas cd collation is ready to hand out, I have started writing Christmas cards, baking and shopping for gifts is yet to commence....So I have been listening to music.