Around Europe Without Leaving Your House

Inspired by one famous blogger's ideas* I decided to add one more thing to my 2009 resolutions. Well, it will actually combine two resolutions - reading more and travelling more.

This year I'm going to take a virtual trip around Europe and it will be done reading at least one book written by a writer of each European country. I think that it will be exciting to find out more about these countries in such an unusual way.


You are welcome to participate either by advising me on what to read or joining in and travelling along. Just copy the list of countries given below and start researching. I hope you will enjoy it and share your expierence with me.

I'm not sure that I will even manage to find books from all of these countries that would be translated into Lithuanian or English (these are the languages that I read in), but I guess it's worth a try. I'm ashamed, but I have to admit that I don't remember reading anything that would be written by our closest neighbours -Latvians or Estonians, I haven't got a clue what they would write about... So I think that it's high time to enlarge my knowledge in literature and geography.

Anyway, I'm off to read...

Albania
Andora
Austria
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Kazakhstan
Latvia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Malta
Moldova
Monaco
Montenegro
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
San Marino
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukrain
United Kingdom
Vatican City

* The blog that inspired me can be found here: http://www.ihanna.nu/blog/?p=946 (In 2008 Hanna participated in her Daily Art Card project, for 2009 she has arranged a Daily Poetry challenge.)

Snow is Back

Finally we are having a decent winter: -18C, crisp snow under your feet and cheeks tingling with the cold! The last few winters were really disappointing; I felt that we were experiencing constant autumn with its unpleasant wind and rain… Of course back then I decided to take loads of photos of snow and frost that later on could even be assembled into a book and I bet that’s the thing that jinxed it – the temperature stayed above zero and whenever dark clouds were threatening us with their contents we only got rain drops…

So what was planned in 2005 continues in 2009!

More than 6 - Can You do Better than that?

I came accross this list of books on SussexYorkie’s blog (http://sussexyorkie.wordpress.com/). I think originally it came from somewhere else, so it must be popular and must be doing a bit of travelling.

Anyway, as it really goes well with what I plan to do next year (keep a diary of books I read, so that by the end of 2009 I can tell how many I‘ve completed) I decided to join in and publish it here. According to SussexYorkie’s blog most people will have only read only 6 of the 100 books in the list. Well, just test yourself – can you do better than that?

I bet it looks like a stupid illustration especially for such a serious book list, but it’s also a book and I absolutely love the pictures! Believe it or not I bought this book for myself, couldn’t resist it! It’s called ‘Animals without Zoo” and is written by a famous Italian children books’ writer Gianni Rodari. All of the short and simple stories have hidden meaning, they are great. Oh, and the brilliant pictures are by Anna Laura Cantone.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Post your list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

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
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 Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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. 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 Alborn
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

As you can see it’s more than 6. I’m really happy about that, although I’ve marked in blue (couldn't get these underlined) quite a lot of books that I’d like to read, just never get round to it… I find it frightening that people don’t read books these days; they are really missing out on this!

Well, even if your list has less than 6 book titles in bold don’t forget it’s never too late to start reading, there’s plenty of books for you to start with.