Are you an information gatherer?

It is a beautiful but very cold wintry morning here in NS, but I don’t mind much since I’ll be inside most of the day.  🙂  It’s a great day for writing or reading, so I will get some of that done later today  (I hope!)  as I am not one to play in the snow anymore.   BRRRRRRRRR

I continue to post on my page called My ‘have read’ list, adding to it as I finish a book.  I’ve added to it twice this month.  Eventually, there will be books added that I finish reading this year but started months ago.  Often I will take a book with me to read while waiting for my turn in the doctor’s office or some such place.  Because of that it takes longer to finish those ones.  Do you do that or do you just hope you will find interesting magazines on hand when you get there?

Are you one who prefers to make conversation with the people around you?  I did that last week, talked with the lady I sat next to in a waiting room, and it was quite interesting.

Are you a watcher and listener?  Do you get story ideas that way?

What are you reading these days?   Or what are you brainstorming about now?  Or what is it that are you listening for, searching for, gathering tidbits for?  Do tell!

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂

I won a book!

This evening I was in a writers online chat room, the same one I mentioned in my last post. Each Sunday evening they have a guest speaker invited to share with us there. Since I am a newcomer I have only attended two Sunday sessions but I am finding great information is being shared. At least, it is interesting to me.

As each chatter arrives, his/her name is written down by the moderator and at the halfway mark a name is drawn. Well, tonight my name was pulled out! I was so surprised! My prize? A copy of A Black Tie Affair by our guest speaker, Sherrill Bodine. How cool is that? 🙂

Have you read it yet?  Or any of her others?

Tonight I added another title to my list of books that I’ve read since Dec.  ’09. 🙂  I am also reading Gone With The Wind, a copy I have had here for years but could not get into until now.  I loved the movie which I saw in the theatre so long ago and now I’m really enjoying reading the story.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Have you read these 100 books?

In Nov. ’09 I read the following article, and when checking it over I found  that I can easily check a dozen books that I have read completely (inc. the Bible), a couple I’ve read in part and another dozen that I’ve seen on TV – but that doesn’t count.  So, which ones do you believe are must reads?

The BBC believe most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Look at the list and mark the books you have read.


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 – Philis 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 Faulk
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
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 – 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 Inferno – Dante
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
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

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!  🙂