what have you read - a revisit

This blog has been in a dormant state for a long time now. Between my last post and this one, I had changed jobs, wrote two posts which are still in draft, traveled less and read more, put on few kilos(Thanks to my wife's cooking) and got bored to death. It was during one such boredom that  I started reading my own old posts for some self motivation. I came across this blog which was a tag, and thought about re-posting it, with updates.

It is a book list and we have to say what we have read out of it. I have done this in August 2nd 2009 and thought about re-doing it just to see how many more books I have read from that list. I have also added a mark IS in addition to the X mark, which indicates that the book is In Store but I have not read.

So here is the Tag:

So how many books on this list have you read?

The BBC says most people will only read 6 of these 100 Books.Instructions:Cut and Copy the list into your notes... then...
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. (remove other persons X's)
2) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - IS

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X

6 Any religious book

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – IS

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 Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X

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 - X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - IS

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X

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

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X

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 - X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

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 - 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 - X

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – IS

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - IS

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 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color 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 - (Read a few of them)

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 - X

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 - IS


That's a total of 18 read and 6 in store books. Last time it was 12 & 5. I would consider it a disappointment since the In Store books remained in store, and I could get hold of only 6 more books in this list in 2 and a half years. Sure this list is not the epitome of best books and for sure I have read many more good books during this period, which unfortunately doesn't fall in this list. But still, given a chance I would love to read them all. Considering that, it is a disappointment :)

Anybody up for this tag ?

20 years of my FIFA Football World Cup

1990 - World cup on DD National. Dad and Uncles for company.
1994 - World cup still on DD National. Dad and Uncles still for company.
1998 - World cup still on DD National. GEC Trichur For company
2002 - World cup on Cable TV and Internet. Dad, Friends and Uncles for company.
2006 - World cup on Cable TV and Internet. Bangalore Boyz for company.
2010 - World cup on DTH, Internet Live Streaming. Wife and Tweeples for company.

Vakka Vakka. Every Time for Argentina :)

thank god..

Thank God I was there to see it. And Thank GOD for providing it.
200* - Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Thank You, a thousand times over. You know how I am feeling. A rare feeling of ecstasy, happiness, overjoy, adrenaline rush - all clubbed together and I am yet to catch my breath.

Phew!! What a Man? What an Innings?

Thank God. I am alive to witness it.

cricket at its best

Now I should be thankful to my company's HR team for declaring Makar Sankranthi as Holiday in a short notice. I had cursed them in my mind for swapping a long weekend for a dull day in mid-week. I had cursed them in my mind since I thought I will sit idle on a day where I don't celebrate anything. But it was not meant to be that. Today I am thankful to them because

• For the first time in my life watched a Domestic Cricket Championship match for the entire day.
• I watched a sublime innings from a young lad which almost took his team on the verge of championship.
• I watched the old 'Adelaide' war horse swing his deliveries like banana's.
• I watched a proper cricket match after a long time in the subcontinent
• Last but not the least I saw people thronging into Gangotri Glades Cricket Stadium, Mysore, cheering the home team and standing up appreciating the visiting team's success. They were silent when the wickets went down. They were shattered when the old war horse pounced a return catch from the last batsman. But after that they stood up and applauded the victorious team.

Cricket lovers. If you haven't seen yesterday's Ranji Trophy final between Mumbai and Karnataka then you have missed something great. Mumbai might have taken the Ranji for 39th time, but it didn't come easy. It was not gifted to them, instead they earned it by playing some good cricket against a good team. Manish Pandey was superb and he had all the time in the world to play his shots. Agarkar and Dhawal Kulkarni bowled with vigor. Sathish and Mithun fought it out. And one cannot forget the contibutions of Abhishek Nayar and Vinayak Samant.

It was good cricket all around.

And here is an interesting article from Ramachandra Guha in Cricinfo about the selection decisions.