Top 100 Books Everyone Should Read

Tonight I sat down with my husband to watch a movie called the Equalizer and in it Denzel's character talks about his wife working her way through the Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die list.....and I thought, what a great idea!

So, in an effort to expand my mind and improve myself, I thought I'd do the same. Finding a definitive list was hard, and the movie doesn't state a source (of course, it's a movie!) so I went hunting and finally settled on a list called "100 Novels Everyone Should Read" posted by the Telegraph in the UK. So, to begin, I'm posting the list so you can follow along with me - I'll blog at least once on every book (or at least try to!). Here we go:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
9. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cevantes
11. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
12. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
15. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
16. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
17. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
18. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
19. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
20. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
21. 1984 by George Orwell
22. A Passage to India by EM Forster
23. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
24. Ulysses by James Joyce
25. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
26. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
27. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
28. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
29, Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
30. Atonement by Ian McEwan
31. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
32. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
33. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
34. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
35. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
36. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
37. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
38. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
39. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
40. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
41. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
43. The Rabbit Books by John Updike
44. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
45. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
46. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
48. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
49. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
50. Beloved by Toni Morrison
51. Underworld by Don DeLillo
52. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
53. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
54. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
55. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
56. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
57. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
58. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
59. London Fields by Martin Amis
60. One HUndred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
62. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
63. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
64. The Cairo Trology by Naguib Mahfouz
65. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pastermak
66. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
67. The Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
68. Crash by JG Ballard
69. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
70. The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
71. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
72. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
73. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
74. Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
75. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
76. The Trial by Franz Kafka
77. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
78. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
79. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
80. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
81. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. Germinal by Emile Zola
84. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
85. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
86. Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac
87. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
88. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
89. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
90. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
91. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
92. Cold Comfort by Stella Gibbons
93. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
94. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
95. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. One Thousand and One Nights Anonymous
97. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
98. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
99. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
100. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

I am under no illusions that this won't be a monumental task, taking me years - however I feel like there are so many books that I should have read that I haven't, it's about time I change that! Also, the other rule I'm putting in place is that even if I have read it before I'm reading it again - I want to be able to blog on them anyways, and it's about really digesting the stories.... I've put in bold the few books that I already own, and these will be the "back ups" for when I haven't been to the library. I thought I might start with Pride and Prejudice, partially because its a favourite and partially because I have it readily available to start tonight :) I'll update on my progress every once in a while - feel free to copy my list and start your own literary adventures! Happy reading!!!

Til next time.....

How Beautiful, How Blessed....

I had the most incredible weekend last weekend - hung out with friends and met some new people, had a really great time laughing and giggling :) I came home Monday and was looking forward to the week ahead knowing that it would be a full on week!

And, I was right!!! It's been very full on! Yesterday I had a number of appointments and went to see a band with my mate Cheryl and one of her friends and that was heaps fun :) I walked around the festival for a bit, just soaking it all in. Today I was downtown just after 7am for coffee with the lovely Jeanette and one of her friends, and then we went to Diggers to see the Bob Corbett band and then generally walk around and again soak it all up :) we walked basically the whole length of peel street, stopping to listen to buskers along the way or look at items in the stalls that lined the streets. It was a beautiful hot summer's day and we got to see heaps of very cool stuff that you pretty much wont see anywhere else in the country other than Tamworth :)

I feel very blessed to live here. I know locals whinge and moan and groan about the festival, but the truth is I live in a beautiful quiet regional city that comes alive every January with the most glorious cacophony of noises, sights and smells. It's busker against busker, amplifier against amplifier, street performer against street performer where every gimmick that can be pulled out to draw in the crowds is paraded down peel street. I noticed that quite a few buskers this year bring their own dancers - kind of like spruikers who try and get the crowd watching to clap, dance and hopefully part with their cash. Today I saw both good and bad examples of buskers, including a rather pushy and frankly, a little rude, bloke with a kelpie that was doing tricks (he was singling out people who left before the end of the show, saying that they were rude for not thanking him or, better yet, giving him money. He was even telling them how MUCH he thought his show was worth and basically bullying people into giving him money...puhlease....).


It can be irritating, the amount of cars and people that fill the city, but there's something really special about it. It's the only festival I've been to where every single person who comes can participate equally, and where everyone is accepted. There's a complete cross section of society there every day, and everyone's united by one thing - wanting to hear good music and loving the festival :) Everyone's pretty friendly, and considering how packed the city becomes most of them are pretty easy to get along with. There's a whole heap of "characters" who come to the festival to sell their wares or just perform their songs, and that includes a bunch of kids who come to busk in the streets. I really love it, I love hearing the undiscovered talent lining the streets (of course, some more talented than others!!). Today in the space of 15 minutes I saw a performing cattle dog, a whip cracking stockman, a celtic fiddling band complete with their own dancer, a slim dusty "sound a like" and the McClymonts (an internationally renowned country music act) and I didn't pay a cent for the privilege. Tomorrow I will take my fold up chair and a couple of drinks and head down to bicentennial park where I will see the grand final of the starmaker competition, a bunch of other acts and my childhood idol Lee Kernaghan and again, I will not pay a cent to do so......and at the end of it I won't be camping out somewhere, I'll head home to my own bed! How can I possibly complain about that??? I spent the better part of my childhood fantasizing about the day I got to go to the country music festival just ONCE - I've been every year since 2013 :) I get to LIVE here :) :) Not bad considering how long we dreamed of moving to Tamworth and buying a house and settling down :) :)

It's good to remind myself of my blessings - after all sometimes it's easy to forget in the minutia of life that there's so much more out there for me than the gloominess I get caught up in. I'm blessed with beautiful friends, a beautiful city, and frankly a beautiful life :) and I'll hold on to this gratitude as long as I can :)


Until next time!

Goodbye my Friend....

Here's my diary entry from Friday.....in honour of friends loved and lost over the years

Goodbye my friend. Our memories
I'll carry in my heart with me.
Just when I thought your trust I'd earned
Time presses on, I live and learn.

Goodbye my friend, I never thought
I'd see the changes time has wrought
The bitterness and pain I see
shine from your eyes when you look at me.

Whatever wrongs have gone before
have ruined us - we are no more.
The friendship that I cherished so
In one fell swoop I see it go

I am discarded no longer of use
And after small words and hurled abuse
Instead of fighting, or holding too tight
I'll walk away without the fight

No arguments or words I say
Would ever convince you to stay
It's all too easy to start anew
With people who don't challenge you

Goodbye my friend I'll slip away
And not a word of malice say
I wish you well, our hearts will mend
I'll miss you so...

Goodbye my friend.


Pamela Tough
January 20 2015

Another one bites the dust...

So, this Friday I suffered yet another broken down friendship....and this one was quite a shock. I could sit here and whinge and moan and groan and blather on about why they're wrong and I'm right, but what good would that do? At the end of the day, no matter how flat you make a coin it has both sides and the reality is I'm sure for every argument I come up with as to why I'm right they'd do the same thing right back at me. The truth is no one is perfect, and far be it from me to say anything bad at all about anyone.

That's why I have said nothing. I said nothing to the friend we were meant to be visiting together this weekend, I have said nothing to anyone at work, I've kept my big fat mouth shut. There's only two friends I have confided in, and even then I carefully chose my words because I want to be a better person. I want to be someone who wouldn't say something bad about people, and after the last few months I realise just how far I've fallen in this area. I used to be someone who would always see the good in people, and who would try to forgive. But somewhere along the line, my innocence has dissipated and has been replaced with cynicism and it was only after I got out of this latest friendship that I realised the dark and dreary outlook on the world I had adopted had come from that very relationship. Not that I blame them. After all, I am in charge of guarding my heart and my character and my relationship with Jesus. They're not responsible for that, I am, and I've been rather neglectful of late.

Driving home from Sydney today I saw a bumper sticker on the back of a car that said "Love it or leave it" with the Australian flag on it. Setting aside the obvious debate over racism and immigration etc etc it got me thinking about how people relate to each other these days. Friendships and marriages both these days seem to be so temporary - and its got me wondering when relationships became so disposable? The minute you say or do something the other person doesn't like, it's like they just jump at the opportunity to ditch the friendship and move on. I guess its like our consumerism and how we're so ready to throw things away....always upgrading, always trading for something bigger, better, more convenient, more comfortable, less hard. When did we stop working on our relationships?

I feel really sad when I think about how quickly we discard people - it's like as soon as they've served their purpose its all done and you just move on. Instead of making yourself a little uncomfortable and actually have a conversation with the person to sort out the argument its easier to just hit delete, block, and move on to relationships that don't challenge us, or stretch us - but in doing so, do we lose the opportunity to learn something? Do we lose a potentially amazing friendship that could have lasted a lifetime?

I admit, I'm at a bit of a loss to know what to do now. I've been blocked from facebook, and as I'm off work for a week there won't really be any opportunity for contact until next week at the earliest, and even then I have no idea what that will look like. How will they act towards me? Will they speak to me? Will they ignore that I exist? And how will I respond? Without any closure at all, the whole thing is just left hanging in the air without any end, and it's hard to know how to proceed. And as a Christian, what SHOULD I do? The attack came out of a very small disagreement we were having, and before I knew what had happened things had blown up in my face. It wasn't something I had intended to happen, and it wasn't even something I saw coming - it completely blindsided me. Should I have conducted myself better? I have NO doubt at all. Can the relationship be repaired? With God anything is possible....these questions are there, but the one that hangs heavy in my heart is should it?

I had to really examine myself, and this friendship, and I came to realise that perhaps this relationship wasn't something I should be fighting for. I didn't like who I was around this person, suspicious, gossipy and bitter. They weren't lifting me up, or challenging me to be a better version of myself.  If the person were here, they'd easily take my inventory (and in part did when the argument occurred) and I'm sure it wouldn't be pretty either. That's not the point anyways. The point is that I had been changed, I had turned into someone I didn't recognise, and I became very depressed over the last couple of weeks as a result. It was only after the friendship ended that I realised this was where it all came from.

So, now what? Well, that's a really great question! I won't ever truly know why things have happened the way they have, and I wont ever understand why some people have come and gone from my life. What I do know for sure though, is that sometimes God's greatest gifts truly are unanswered prayers - sometimes the biggest blessing that God can give us when it comes to relationships is a broken one because it means there's room in my life for other relationships where I grow and learn. It's so so hard to let go, it's really tough to admit that the friendship truly is over and done with - but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's something that God has allowed to happen to me for a reason. And when I figure out the reason, I'll let you know!

Until next time,

Bathtub blues....

Today I had to call in sick. I try not to do that very often, not out of some high brow dedication to my job but because I simply hate the guilt I put myself through every single second from 9:01am through to 5:01pm knowing that the rest of my colleagues are out there, saving the world one child at a time and I'm selfishly sitting at home being human. How dare I! I always have this overriding fear that I'm going to go into work the next day and be fired for taking a sick day.....or have missed some kind of fabulous promotion that I could have gotten if ONLY I hadnt had a severe bout of nausea or vomiting or stomach cramps or the flu..."Oh I'm sorry Mrs Tough, you're fired because you took a sick day. We really don't care that you had over 100 hours in sick leave owing....sorry...." Irrational? Ok perhaps!

Anyways I digress...

I decided that at the end of my guilt ridden sick day that I was going to bite the bullet and have a bath. I've only used our bathtub like, twice, since we bought this house two years ago, so I'm well overdue. Besides a bath is a bit of a novelty since for the better part of a year my ankle wasn't stable enough for me to even consider it without worrying I was going to KILL myself getting in or out. I had asked my darling husband to give it a clean a few days ago just so I could use it so why not?

So, I do everything right, I line up my towels next to the bathtub, I rinse the tub out with water from my kettle (I'm paranoid about dust and dirt floating in my bathwater, can't stand the thought!) I grab my phone and put on a 1 hour youtube video of "music for relaxation and healing" and grab my second to newest copy of Frankie Magazine (I'm running behind!). I filled the tub with near to cold water given that it's summer, swirled in a generous dose of radox (with my inner child screaming BUBBLES!!!! My bubbless......) and lowered myself gently into the tub.

And then it started.......

The thoughts. Oh God the thoughts. Coming at me thick and fast like a freight train running late.....

Thoughts like "how selfish are you to have a bath when we're on water restrictions.."

"You know there are children in Africa who don't have clean DRINKING water..."

And then...

"Hmmm perhaps I can make it worth my while and shave while I'm in here...dammit didn't bring a razor. I wonder if there's a razor in the bath vanity...I could reach those drawers..... I could wash my hair but I dont think I'd fit my head under the tap - and I hate feeling like I still have soap in my hair....besides, in Japan they dont even bath for cleanliness, they take a shower first and just have a bath to relax - which of course is what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing - RELAX DAMMIT"

And then...

"Gee I hope the dog doesn't crap on my carpet while I'm in here"

"Is this something I'm supposed to be doing on a sick day really?"

"Hmmm this article is about home made peanut butter....maybe I should have peanut butter on toast for dinner.....perhaps its time to re-read all my Jane Austen novels - no wait, I have other books to read first.."

"How long do I stay in here to make it worth it?"

"Wow that music is loud, what if I am getting robbed as we speak and I can't hear it...oh wait no all the doors are locked, we should be good"

You get the picture!

At the moment I'm reading this book called "The Happiness Trap" which spouts a lot of talk about mindfulness. And then there's another book I'm reading called "If not Dieting then what" by Rick Kausman that also talks about mindfulness. Mindfulness is evverrryywherrreee - it's the new buzzword in all types of therapy, much like psychotherapy and freud were, then CBT, systems theory and so on. Mindfulness has been around for quite a while but lately its really taken off, yet it's SO HARD to accomplish on a regular basis. If I had a New Years resolution (which I don't because I think they're stupid" I would say it would have to be living a more "in the moment" life - a life lived in the present, not thinking about the future or toiling over the past but living in the right now. Problem is, my brain keeps reading forward or stretching back so while I sat in my cool soapy bubbly nirvana of womanly bliss, Frankie Magazine perched on my chest and hippie music blaring from the vanity, I was thinking about water restrictions and dog crap.

One day I aspire to find a way to switch my brain clear off. Just be here, present, in the now. For now I'll just secretly hate all those people out there to have found this elusive state of mind and are walking around with stupid grins plastered all over their peachy faces and spouting euphemisms about "being present" - meanwhile I'll be wondering whether I took that chicken out of the freezer for dinner or not. Oh wait, that reminds me.....


Til next time!