BBC Book Meme

 One of the blogs I  read (soggy weeds + bee spit = a nice cup of tea) posted an entry this morning about how the BBC believes that people will have only read 6 out of these 100 books.  Now, some things I can't really agree with, as they have SERIES mixed in with single books. Worse, number 98 is actually a part of 14.  But, the meme is to bold those that one has read in order to prove the BBC right or wrong.

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 Faulk
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 Hitchhiker'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 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

"I Found Jesus!"

I have a story. A lovely tale of how my youngest son, the three-year-old, found Jesus.

First though, let me tell you a different story. This story is about a toy. This toy is owned by my eldest son and is a small Jesus figurine.  It's about an inch or so high, and he was given it as a reward at some church function about two years ago. Truthfully, it was one of those things that a kid is given, and the parents just automatically assume will be lost within two weeks.

Well, that's basically how it worked. My eldest had it, for a few weeks it sat on his headboard and then it just disappeared for the longest time.

Until last night.

Last night, it was found.

By my youngest son.

I don't know where he found it, or how he managed to get his hands on it.  All I know is that I sat on the couch, reading a book on my Hitchhiker's Guide kindle and my son came running into the living room.  A bright smile shone on his face and I could see that he held something.

When he was about five steps away he exclaimed, loudly mind you, "Daddy, look! I found Jesus!"

Of course, I'm sure you've put together exactly what he found, and what he was carrying, but that doesn't negate the sheer.... well cuteness of the whole scenario.

SOTD: 2 Timothy 3:16-17

All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I've always thought that this (along with the verse in Hosea that I often use for signatures) is one of those verses that folks wished didn't exist.  After all, it touches upon a few fundamental cornerstones of faith, which a lot of folks, just don't want to think on. 

First and foremost, is the fact that ALL scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. This is important, when one considers how few people actually read such things as the Law of Moses.

We, as humans, have a tendency to supplant verses we don't like. We want them to go away, and thus, we forge excuses that we don't have to read and obey them. Statements like "Well, I could never get into Numbers," or "We should never base doctrine on a book about change."

That last one is an actual quote from an elder of a church I once attended when I reminded him that the only book of the Bible in which we get to watch actual conversions of people into Christians was Acts.  Said elder did not like large portions of Acts because the descriptions of events did not coincide with the conceits of the church he was an elder for.

This is something that we're all guilty of, in some way or another.

In regards to today's scripture, C.H. Spurgeon wrote:

The Bible is the writing of the living God." He explained that though "Moses was employed to write his histories with his fiery pen, God guided that pen. It may be that David touched his harp and let sweet psalms of melody drop from his fingers, but God moved his hands over the living strings of his golden harp. Solomon sang canticles of love and gave forth words of consummate wisdom, but God directed his lips and made the preacher eloquent. If I follow the thundering Nahum, when his horses plow the waters; or Habakkuk, when he sees the tents of Cushan in affliction; if I read Malachi, when the earth is burning like an oven; or the rugged chapters of Peter, who speaks of fire devouring God's enemies; if I turn aside to Jude, who launches forth anathemas on the foes of God—everywhere I find God speaking. It is God's voice, not man's. (Thoughts for the Quiet Hour).

Think about that. The Bible is God speaking. God giving us instructions. God teaching. God rebuking. God correcting. God training us in righteousness. All this, so that we all can do that which He wills.