Review as promised

Certain paragraphs in Petite Anglaise reads like my diary....the honesty beams through the words. Petite is potrayed as a not-so-nice person ( she admits it as well ) in the first half...and in the latter part, she acknowledges her weaknesses. It's a change from the other work of fiction where the main character is either very very evil...or very very good. Instead we have a human very real main character..with faults and warts and all. So yes I enjoyed reading Petite Anglaise very much. ( I was afraid I wouldn't..after all the hype ...so I was pleasantly surprised.).My mother has her hands on the book now. I just got off the phone with her...she seemed eager to continue reading....so I got booted off line.

Thank you Hamdi!

The week has been filled with loads of legwork and quite a bit of brain work as well. The internet service at work stinks. ( It's slow and you may attach ONE file per email only.) I fail to see the rationale behind this but I'm sure there's a reason for eveything.

For comic relief...these are the following things done...

1) Petite Anglaise ....reading very slowly to savour the book for as long as possible. I'm almost finished. Boohoo.

2) My friend and I hooked up for a photo shoot. Long overdue....comments welcome.

3) Listening to music CDs for inspiration. I've moved on from Mozart to....eeerm...Vivaldi.

4) I'll be giving a review of Petite Anglaise when I'm done. Which will be midweek I think. So many deadlines...and ignoring them doesn't make it go away. DAMMM

IT 's ARRIVED folks!!!

Look what came in the post for me....*BEAM*BEAM* And if you're not jealous you're lying through your teeth. The eagerly awaited-for " Petitie Anglaise" is now on my desk to my right. I'm almost scared to starti reading it now that it's here. I'm scared I would have to read it in many stages ( due to time constraint ) and it would mar the book. BUt obviously I have little self control ( some would say none at all), so I'm just saying all this...but I KNOW I'll be reading it tonight.There is no way I'm going to just stare at the book and wait for a perfect time.

Thank you Catherine Sanderson!! You make me believe special things do happen to people.

The Big Book List!!

The following was borrowed from Anna's blog because I found it very interesting.


In 2003, The Big Read (a BBC programme) compiled a list of Britain’s 100 favorite books. The program reckoned that the average adult has read only 6 of the books on this list.
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.(Having seen the movie does not count, of course!)


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell ( read it midway as a child and got bored)
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 Elliot (Marian Evans)
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 ( reading it now...stopped at first chapter..)
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 García Marquèz
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 Marte
l52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ( Am looking for this book)
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 García Marquèz
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 Colour 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 Magic 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
:(
My count...a mere 14

AHHH-peh-geous

Scales are boring. ( Very occasionally therapeutic) There is nothing nice about playing arpeggios. Nothing!! You practise for an hour...and when you next play it the fingers move, the pitch is off and you're back to square one. POOH!!

Yummie!!

Why is that, the minute you start controlling what you eat and shifting the fat...and feeling smug......temptation comes in the form of good friends giving your chocolates ???

Hajime Restaurant

They look very exotic. My previous experience with anything remotely like this had me chewing through the seaweed wrap. So this was different. Minimal chewing and a burst of something crunchy hits your palate just at the right time. I would recommend this to anyone who has friends who pooh pooh Japanese food. It's a good ploy to get them to at least agree that Japanese food can be delicious.

On a side note, the wasabi ice-cream would be a sure way of reinforcing negative perception. So stay away from it.

What 's in store ...

Whilst waiting for P.A to arrive, I shall be immersing self in these two books. Wodehouse is an old favourite and Johnson's Notting hell was enjoyable so I hope this Shore Hell doesn't disappoint.

Who would have thought...

And I thought today would be just like any ole Monday. Some idiot parked in my spot....making me even later for work than usual. I agonized over what would be THE most appropriate way of dealing with the situation. Blocking the car with my own car ( and risking the wrath of the owner ), removing some air from the tyres ( that would make it less economical ...using more petrol and hurting it where it would) or merely parking somewhere else. But where?

I did a bit of thinking( and a bit of cursing under my breath ) and decided to get a "higher authority" involved. Thankfully the car disappeared by the time I got back to it. Arrived midway through some discussion which ended earlier than expected.

And then off to check my mail. And THAT's where I was very plesasntly surprised. I wanted to whoop and hop about when i read it.

If only I knew what was in store for me. The author of Petite Anglaise has left a comment on my blog. BLESS Her!!

Finally...

There is no Petite Anglaise at MPH. The lady sitting behind the information counter checked for me. She also looked bored and inefficient.( But I'm sure she just LOOKED inefficient...but is in fact efficient.) So now, the direct opposite of emotions is stirred. I am now , more than ever, determined to get my hands on this book.

Wanted:
One book named Petite Anglaise
Author: Catherine Sanderson
Publisher:Michael joseph
Price:?
Due to be out in March 2008 ( UK )
Other commonwealth countries: May 2008

Malaysia is a commonwealth country isn't it? ( a very jessica simpson - bimbo question ) But I need to know so I'm asking it.

Headlines on yahoo this morning..

NO MORE PERFECT TEN FOR GYMNASTS!

Nadia Comaneci thrilled with world with the first ever perfect TEN in 1976 in Montreal. If the new rules had been applied back then ....she would have been famous for getting the first perfect 17...or is it 15. Doesn't sound as nice as a perfet ten...but I'm sure there must have been much discussion before this change. The electronic boards weren't equipt to flash a ten...so nadia got a 1:00 instead.

What do these two gymnast have in common...along with Mary Lou Retton? They're all trained by Bela Karoli.

La Petite Anglaise

Blogs are mushrooming in the bloggo-sphere...so how do you choose which to read? You know, a good example of how you get information when you least expect is this experience: reading a dog-eared magazine and finding out...about petite Anglaise. What is appealing is that this lady is living the dream of almost every blogger ( including self). Who wouldn't want to be offered a book deal?? Speared out of obscurity right into the limelight following an interview on the telegraph.

This 35 year old English woman, a graduate in French and German from Bath university, living in France finds herself terminated from her job when the boss finds out the existence of her blog.

There's an attempt at being protecting names, ex-husband is known as Mr Frog and daughter as "tadpole". Nor does she use her own name...but the by uploading her photograph and describing her daily life with snippets of work-life ( you can't avoid talking about work surely ) ...this qualifies her to have her post terminated. Gross Misconduct?

The bookcover looks very chic-lit...but it promises to be entertaining and with such an interesting start to the book, wouldn't you want a copy yourself?