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August Blog Challenge - Day 23

List your top 5 hobbies and why you love them.

Hobbies?  Really?
Go back and read the blog entry where I tell you my daily schedule.
HA!

My hobbies are Job #1, Job #2, Job #3, kids, dogs and laundry.
Doesn't leave time for much else, really.

Why do people have hobbies?  I guess to fill their time and to do something that restores them.  The closest thing I have to that is reading.  I love to read.  I read anything.  Even the shampoo bottle in the shower and the cereal box at breakfast. Reading takes me to another world.  I love to read things that are intriguing and make me curious.  Especially about people, their relationships and motivations.  I like a story with a good psychological twist, something unexpected, something I didn't predict. I tend to like the dark stuff.  I love Stephen King, especially his more esoteric novels where he explores the minds of the characters.  Two other favorites are We Need To Talk About Kevin and Fall On Your Knees.  Both extremely dark.  But good literature is rarely happy. I'm going to post the note from facebook below that lists the BBC's choice of 100 books you should read.  Maybe I'll pick one from the list I haven't read.  Right after I finish End of Watch by my buddy Steve.

In the last two years, even that has fallen by the wayside.
In the crunch of time.
In the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

I suppose I might feel somewhat robbed, thinking that I don't really have time to myself, for myself. But I don't.  I'm busy, yes.  Too busy probably.  But I think I'm pretty fortunate in that the work I do is sustaining.  It can be draining, but overall, at the end of each day, I feel like I've done something worthwhile with my time.  That I did my part to make this world a little better, a little safer, a little more loving.

But...when I retire, I'm going to take up quilting!


The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -X
6 The Bible - X 
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - will never read this one.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens- X

Total: 9

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy-X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger- X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - X

Total: 9

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
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- X

Total: 10

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens-X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -X
34 Emma-Jane Austen -X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -PARTLY FINISHED
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden- X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -X

Total: 9

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- X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery- X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -X
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-X

Total: 9

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel- X
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 - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon-X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

Total: 6


61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov- X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas- X
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 - X
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -X

Total: 8

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens-X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker-X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce-X
76 The Inferno – Dante- X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray- X
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

Total: 6

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker-X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flauber -X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -X
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton-

Total: 7

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -X
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- X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare- X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl-X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo-X

Total: 7

Grand Total: 80.  Pretty good.  LOL.  Last time I took it my score was 63.  And Captain Corelli's Mandolin is still kicking my butt.  But 80/100 is still like a B- so I've got some reading to do!

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