Reading list meme

I'm sure I've done this before, but it's interesting how the list morphs as it keeps circulating. This has a very heavy slant toward British authors, but I do not believe the list originated with the BBC as claimed.

Latest version from Corelog.

Have you read more than 6 of these books?
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.
Bold those books you've read in their entirety
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.
Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

( List under cut )

If I counted this right, I've read 40 out of 100. Of course, there are duplications in there, which is one of the reasons I doubt that the BBC is the originator. It seems that people keep taking things out and putting their own favorites in as they circulate the thing.

Geoffrey Plantagenet

Nanowrimo word count: 50288 words (2266 today)
Sponsor me!
Story draft available here.

Obviously there's a discrepancy between the way OpenOffice counts words and the way the official NaNo word counter software does it, but either way, I've passed the goalpost a day early. Time for a breather.

In this latest installment, Ricky convinces his illegitimate half-brother, Geoffrey, to accept a nomination to the See of York and enter the tutelage of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, who will one day be canonized a saint. Since Geoffrey is the son of Henry II (Norman lion) and Ykenai (Saxon dog, literally) he is a tall and elegant sight hound and has served as Henry's Lord High Chancellor for a number of distinguished years. He will resign that post to become Archbishop of York.

As we are about to learn, Baldwin of Exeter, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a hare renowned for his stubborn modernity and rejection of "superstition." Ricky has achieved a diplomatic balance, as he fills the two primates' thrones of England with a traditional hound and a liberal hare, who will be at loggerheads with each other for at least a few more months, or until Baldwin departs for the Holy Land on the Crusade.

Just to confound the issue (I'm not making this up folks. Well, I am, but the names and family connections are all true to history.) Richard also had a legitimate brother named Geoffrey, son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was Duke of Brittany. That Geoffrey, however, died before this story began, and will not appear except as others reminisce about him, which Ricky and Geoff do at the end of this chapter...

In other news, it's been pouring rain here ever since sunset. First real rain in many weeks, which is kind of odd. The proxy server that controls access to the internet for users' own laptops at the library has finally kicked the bucket. I'm diagnosing a failed motherboard, as it won't boot and signals the absence of any main memory, even though it has 2 GB installed. Swapping the memory chips around makes no difference. This will undoubtedly lead to a conversion to wireless for the library, but I've already made it plain that I will not be responsible for the selection, installation, configuration or maintenance of that. Nor am I going to deal with the inevitable "Why can't I connect?" complaints.

Gary is in the throes of a final project for a class, so of course the "student copy" of an outrageously priced and incredibly flaky commercial software product he is required to use has suddenly decided that it's been pirated and is refusing to run, or to uninstall or reinstall itself. Why we should all be using open source and thumbing our nose at greedy corporations, folks.

Now I get to decide what to do with the rest of my week, since the NaNo is over for me. Alas, the novel is decidedly not over. The first draft is not even half written at this point, I fear, giving it the potential to be the longest single work I've ever attempted.

Oh, and thanks to the donor who pushed my total fund raising over the $100 target this weekend. You're a good person, whoever you are.