Today marked the first “training” run as it were and currently there’s some work to be done. So I’ll be off then…

I have no idea where the list is from… anyhow – here goes.

1) Read through the list and mark the book’s you’ve read in bold
2) Italicise any you started but didn’t finish
3) Publish the list on your blog. Then we can gang together and track down the people who’ve read 6 or fewer and force classic reads on them.

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
5. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) – Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm – George Orwell
25. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
27. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
30. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses – James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
46. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
51. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch – George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
60. Emma – Jane Austen
61. Persuasion – Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
66. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement – Ian McEwan
70. Dune – Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
83. Dracula – Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal – Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession – A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

It may therefore come as a bit of surprise for you to find that I have started to remove low maintenance lawn in order to replace it with time consuming borders containing plants. On one level this will reduce the amount of grass I have to cut, on the other I will now have to spend some time weeding (unless I can persuade Kate that she would enjoy that).

Nathanael thought it highly amusing watching daddy turning grass into stones. (We think that he thought the pile of sods I was creating was a pile of stones) Rachael has yet to indicate her opinion (although i’m hopeful she’ll just display excitement).

Piccies will be made available eventually.

Nathanael is coping well with the youngest member of the clan and has already shown signs of being prepared to share his toys. Admittedly by dropping them on her, guess we’ll have to work on that a little.

Proper update will follow.

P.

The idea is that we read a book of the bible each week then meet up and share three things which have caught our attention.

Of course there’s often more than three things which catch your eye, so here’s a few from Matthew – in no particular order.

The lack of faith of the Jews compared to the faith displayed by the gentiles. For example the centurion. Jesus says of him “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.” (Matt 8:10) How can that be that a guy who is a member of the occupying army can have more faith in this itinerrant teacher than the spiritual leaders who are waiting for Him. What’s even more surprising about this is that the disciples are frequently descirbed as being astonished at what Jesus does, even though they themselves are given His authority. “Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal every kind of disease and every kind of sickness” (Matt 10:1).

Another thing which made me pause was an instruction given the disciples by Jesus regarding the pharisees. “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you.“(Matt 23:2,3a) Yes, Jesus goes on to say not to do as the pharisees do, but I wonder what must have gone through the disciples minds at this point.

Finally for today there’s how well the pharisees may have known who Jesus was. I’ll break this into a couple of quotes to illustrate that.

1) The section in Matt 21:23-27, and in particular the discussion the pharisees have. To paraphrase “If we admit John was God’s prophet we’re in trouble because we ignored him. If we say his baptism was nothing special we’re going to get lynched because the people listened to John”

2) Then just a little later we read “When the cheif priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables they knew he was talking about them.” (Matt 21:45) the implication is that the knew full well who the landowner was as well.

There’s more in there. My reccomendation is that you dive in and find them for yourself. Maybe you can share what you notice too.

So how did I do? Not bad. I managed to get myself from the start to the finish in 56mins 13s, which placed me 1854th out of 5636 finishers.

Will I do another? Yes. Oddly enough I enjoyed it. Beside now that I’ve set a PB I have to try and break it.

(Oh and I’ve done a couple of online training courses).

How? I hear you cry in your most frenzied manner as the prospect of being able to fall about laughing at my pitiful progress fills with glee… Actually if you feel that way I’m not sure I want to tell you. Maybe some gentle mirth may be permissible, but guffaws are out, as is rolling around on the floor (unless you bang your knee or something), ok?

Simply go to Sanoodi and look for MrPete.

Why do I say that? Well mainly because most kids love running about when they get the chance. Ever watched a bunch of kids playing football (that would be soccer for the linguistically challenged)? It’s just about running around after the ball – brilliant.

Anyways, assuming you’re an adult you probably fall into one of two categories (Not those ones!) – you like running even if you don’t do it often or you detest running and can’t begion to understand why anyone would wish to do that to themselves without first having a perverse liking for tight clothing and getting sweaty.

The people in the first group are excused the rest of this post. The rest of you may find some kind of enlightenment herein (I hope so anyway). Running is fun because anyone can do it. It’s fun because it’s so easy, it doesn’t require any special talent, you don’t have to master any new skills(unless you find walking mentally taxing), you don’t need any expensive kit. It’s free, you can do it wherever and whenver you like(within reason). You don’t need to assemble a group of like minded people who are all available at the same time as you even (although it can be fun if you do). So just go out and try it and remember how it felt as a kid to be flying along with the wind in your face and no worries at all.

Maybe that’s the real beauty of it. You can be freed of teh everyday cares while you’re on the move.  You can be that kid again.