The fifteen days in Karachi were filled with stuff to blog about – The legendary electricty breakdown, the allergic reaction to the weather of the very city I’ve called hoem all my life, the family, Mom, sis, cousins, the shadi, the various things changed, unchanged – but ofcourse blogging isnt the priority when you have a year and a half to catch up on, and have only fifteen days to do it!

So I came back, with posts half written in my mind, aiming to put everything on record ASAP – only to find a most interesting neighbor on the flight back home! The posts shifted, the aunty gaining the top slot with no competition. BUT, reaching home to find it literally coated in dust, pushed the aunty off the top slot.

Do you know, spring washing each and every room of your home can actually be a rewarding experience – especially when you have a husband as rocking as mine and a large Papasallis Chicken Tikka Pizza around!

With me missing a laptop abhi tak, the Great Wash story had to wait till I joined back – But office, ofcourse had another story!

Making the long story short, while I’ve been away, a reporter has resigned accusing the MD of sexual harassment, I have missed getting my statement recorded in front of the Gender Equality Committee, the performance of the Bureau has dropped by a neat 50% & the management seems to have lost all direction.

BUT, the thing that pushes everything else to the background is being told, after I have already availed the leave that I was not eligible for a leave in the first place. Why I was not told of this amazing, totally un-understandable leave policy when I filed my application a whole month before taking the leave? Nobody seems to have the least idea. The consequent arguments & the pathetic solution leave me disgusted.

So the month has ended with me looking at a possible 15 day slash in my salary – an HR department whose effective response has consisted of not picking my calls (The director’s aide actually told me that the great director has been in a meeting during the 9 hours and 15 calls that I made during one single day)

Since writing about this obviously isnt good for my blood pressure, I will dedicate this post to a book meme I found at Assorted Mundanities – here’s to hoping thinking of books might actually end up improving my mood.

Following is a list of books recognized by BBC as being the most read ones in the world. The ones in Bold  are the ones I have read.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen) -  Who hasn’t?
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien - Sigh! Sigh! Sigh! Even though the movies don’t come anywhere near, me and hubby spent hours watching all of them back to back, the very week that we were married.
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte - Ofcourse!
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling - Cant thank Rowling enough for bringing magic back into my life!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee - Have owned at least 3 copies of the book!
6. The Bible .. Tried but couldn’t get past the first few pages.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – One of the first books that actually left a tangible impression on me.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – Love it!
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens ­– Even followed the Urdu serialized translation that was published in Naunehal a decade ago!
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – The only one of the series that I actually enjoyed.
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – The most recent classic read, was presented the book on my wedding anniversary by a colleague.
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare … Nope! Nor have the strength to.
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – Have read, & forgotten.
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
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 – Read at a time when I was too young to appreciate, is on my list of ‘to be read again’.
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens – Own it, haven’t somehow.
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – Wish I had.
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Oh love it, love it, love it! When my research professor was bugging me to submit a proposal for my Master’s thesis I lost my cool and wrote a proposal totally inspired by Douglas style. Needless to say, it was not approved.
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll - The rule is Jam Tommorow!
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Siggghh!!!
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – One of my favorite Dickens’ books.
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen – A book I forced myself to read cause everybody had read it. Cant say I liked it much.
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen – Again, yeah well!
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Appriciated it much more after reading his second book.
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 - Was forced to read it cause it was a part of a friend’s course!
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – While the most popular, it remains the least admirable of all his books.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – HATE IT. No second thoughts about that!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – Lovely book.
46. Anne of Green Gables -  LM Montgomery – Ah! Still love Anne. Left most of my books home for younger siblings to enjoy, but couldn’t bear leaving Anne behind.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – Well, I guess I really don’t have a taste for classics.
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 (x)
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – One word, AMAZING! I love the way the book captures the mundane details of the character’s lives while still keeping us abreast of the greater picture of politics, Hindu Muslim riots, feudalism and what not. A work of pure genius.
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – Another Dickens favorite.
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  – Own it, but couldn’t make my self try another Garbiel Garcia.
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 – Again, have read both the book and the serialized Urdu version.
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding – No book has ever made me feel this shallow before!
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie …Read with great expectations. Found it okayish.
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville.
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – Not one of my favorite Dickens.
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker – Read at a very young age, remember only snippets of random paras.
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – A book second only to The Little Princess.
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – Sent me in a depressed mode for days. Extraordinarily powerful prose. Cant decide weather I love it or hate it.
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 – J
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
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 – Love the stories, hate the character, simply cause he is so smug!
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton  - Oh Man! Can still remember all the afternoons I spent fantasizing upon the possiblity of coming across a similar tree.
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 – Lovely!
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Dunno what to say about Hamlet.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  – Wanted to kill the idiots who made the movie, totally butchering the wonderful images the book was capable of evoking.
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Ha! Only Forty read – bah! Not even half of em, and I actually called myself a nerd!