I had a monster of a migraine on Friday and spent most of the day in bed with my pillow over my head. It was so bizarre because I was asleep and suddenly woke up at 4 am with a stabbing pain in my left temple. Usually sleep is the best cure so it was very strange to get one while asleep. Anyway, I got up and got ready for work but within minutes was hurling in the sink - not fun. I decided it would be stupid to try and go to work so phoned in sick.

As I said, I spent most of the day in bed, either sleeping or watching DVDs with the curtains closed. Saturday, I felt better but it was a kick in the teeth when Auntie Flo arrived in the afternoon and I had cramps the rest of the day. What else could go wrong?

So, as fragile as I was, I decided to ban myself from the internet and the computer the whole weekend. I will confess to reading emails on my ipod but that was as far as I got. As a result, I finally finished a book I’d been reading for weeks and got pretty upset about the abrupt ending. I hate books that end abruptly. I also tried my first audiobook out but hated it. I decided I don’t like anyone else’s voice in my head when I’m reading, especially an American one. I’ve nothing against the accent - it’s just not mine!

1) Look at the list and highlight in bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you plan to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog.

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 (Never in a Million Years!!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
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

I bought a copy of The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall after reading a recommendation on the website of Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth and I’m so glad I did.

The Russian Concubine tells the story of Valentina, a White Russian, and her daughter, Lydia, who must fight for survival in the International Settlement in China after fleeing the Bolsheviks. Wounded by the loss of her husband, Valentina seeks solace in vodka and pretty much leaves Lydia to her own devices. Lydia finds herself having to resort to stealing to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. As political tensions in China increase, Lydia falls in love with a young Chinese communist which not only places her own life in danger but also those around her.

The love story between Lydia and Chang Lo is very powerful and so heartbreakingly full of despair and promise at the same time. I’ve always been interested in pre-revolution Russia but never felt the same way about China. The atmosphere in the novel is so striking, I’m now finding myself very curious and that can never be a bad thing.

However, the cherry on top of the cake for me, was discovering the premise is actually based on the experiences of Furnivall’s own mother who was a White Russian raised in China and India. While the events of the story are fiction, the premise and many of the names used are directly lifted from Furnvall’s family tree. Furnivall was unaware of her Russian heritage for a very long time and a visit to her website reveals the story behind the book.

Lydia and Chang Lo’s love affair ends abruptly and we will have to wait for the sequel to find out more, however Furnivall’s next book is also set in Russia and I can’t wait for its release.

It’s a bank holiday in the UK today and the sun is actually out! Of course that means all my neighbours are out doing the garden which is why my eyes and nose are streaming. Gotta love that fresh grass smell. Not!

I’m actually feeling very frustrated with myself. I’ve been messing around in PSP, trying to do some website design but it’s totally not working. I try so hard to be creative but I actually suck at it. If someone could just invent software that read your mind and translated it, I would be so happy. Every now and then, I surf round the sites of some top designers and my chin just drops at the awesome stuff they create. I get the urge to hire them to make my site look beautiful but I get bored with layouts so fast, I’d just be wasting my money.

As well as being a bank holiday, it is also Switch It Off weekend. I’m not sure if this is nationwide or just part of our particular govt dept’s initiative but we’ve been getting bombarded with emails about it over the past few weeks. The whole idea is to save energy by switching off appliances you are not using. I know we all have to do our bit for the environment but this kind of campaign annoys the hell out of me simply due to the fact the govt is not good on saving its own energy. How many buildings do you see lit up in city centre’s in the middle of the night? Or in shop windows?

However, I’m not sure the campaign was aimed at encouraging people to switch off their televisions over the weekend because the choice of viewing was so bad. I sorely miss my dose of Supernatural on Sunday nights now that we have caught up with the pre-strike episodes. I finished all my Prison Break DVDs too - awesome series.

So, instead, I curled up on my bed and finished reading Kate Furnivall’s The Russian Concubine which I bought after reading a recommendation from Kate Mosse. The story is about a mother and daughter who flee Bolshevik Russian and end up in pre-revolutionary China. The daughter, Lydia, eventually falls in love with a young, Chinese communist and they must fight to stay together despite the odds stacked against them. I love stories about Russia. I have no idea why but I’m drawn to them.

I registered with this great site called Bookhopper which acts as an online library and I’m already loving it. Basically, it works by registering the books you are willing to swap so others can request them. In return, you can select books from other people’s bookshelves. No money changes hands. You need to pay the postage on any books you send but it works out because you are requesting other people do the same in return. You can either keep the books you request or you can put them back on your bookshelf to pass on again.

You are restricted to the number of books you can request depending on the amount you are offering. For example, you have ten books on your shelf so you can request one book every three weeks, however if you are sending out a lot of books you are entitled to request more books. One book every three weeks actually works well for me because I don’t get a lot of time to read these days. I’ve already had three requests for books and am waiting on my first request being sent.

It is such a simple idea and it means I can send for books that I’m interested in without having to buy them all the time or worry about late fees for the library.

I’ve been waiting on this book being released for a long time as Margaret George typically takes up to five years to finish a book. Unfortunately, the book’s release proved to be bad timing for me since I lost my grandmother the week before and as a result I found it hard to concentrate on anything. When the book arrived, I thought it would help take me away from my problems for awhile since Ms George is an extremely powerful writer and it’s not hard to lose yourself in her books. However, this book proved to be the exception to the rule and it took me nearly six months to finish it instead of my usual couple of days. I can’t blame the author entirely for that because there was a lot going on in my life and I found it hard making time to read.

However, there is no denying that this book failed to grab me in the same way as Mary, Called Magdalene or The Memoirs of Cleopatra and I found it very hard getting a clear picture of Helen and her motives. Ms George’s research was as stunning as always and she certainly brought the era to life in much the same way as any of her books but Helen never seemed to click for me and I’m not sure the author managed to make her seem like an ordinary person. Most of us know the story of Helen, the daughter conceived by Leda when she was visited by Zeus disguised as a swan, but Ms George tries to throw doubt on the circumstances of her birth and I think it strips the story of some of the magic. I have to admit that I’m a huge fan of Greek mythology and the stories of the Gods and their meddling in the lives of mortals weave such a colourful tapestry, I would’ve preferred a more fantastical approach I suppose.

In conclusion, Helen of Troy is never going to be one of my favourite Margaret George novels but it certainly can’t be considered the worst either. My favourite of her novels is still Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, so it will be interesting to see how I feel about Ms George’s next novel - Elizabeth I - the woman who executed Mary!