Lourdes

My few days in Lourdes. The first day - cloudy as anything; the second - bright blue skies!

41 Books

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.

2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.

3) Star “@” those you plan on reading.

4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen +

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee +

6 The Bible x

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens x

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy @

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen x

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x

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 x

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

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 x

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 x

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth +

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x

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 x

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x

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 x

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle @

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton x

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 x

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 x

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo +

TOTAL = 41. I need to read some more!

Victorian Bushfires

Need I say more? The worst bushfires Australia has ever seen hit Victoria with such great force that most didn't even see it coming. At the moment, there are up to 31 fires raging out of control in the state with over 300 firefighters trying to control the inferno. The Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983 have been surpassed in the burning flames scorching Victorian soils once again.

More than 100 suspected dead at this stage. For the residents of Victoria and their families, my prayers are with you.

The France Forum

A new forum I've been checking out

Coulonges sur l'Autize