Unread books meme

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand, and underline those you have no intention of reading (oursin's addition). The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done).

( Book List )

Strange mixture of classic novels, recent 'intellectual' bestsellers, and the odd sff novel, here. I'm surprised by the amount of Neil Gaiman - I wouldn't have thought of him as someone people buy without really meaning to read.

There are several on here I mean to read - some of which I own, even.

Odd how it felt like I'd read lots of these when I was marking up the list: when I looked at the preview I was surprised at the lack of bold.

New garden wildlife

There is a hedgehog in the garden! A hedgehog! In my garden! And I can sit in my lounge and watch it snuffling about the borders, although I didn't do much of that when I saw it because I was too busy bouncing around being excited at having a hedgehog.

I'm not entirely sure why I find this so absurdly pleasing, except that having a hedgehog is somehow proof that I've got the garden I've always wanted. I occasionally (once or twice in five years) saw hedgehogs trundling along the road, where I used to live, but my garden was too small and bare and relatively new to be of much interest to wildlife beyond the bolder garden birds. My parents' garden may well have had (or still have) the odd hedgehog, but there isn't really a room to sit and look out at the back. Now I appear to have both, and I'm really quite pleased.

I've also seen a squirrel (the cats were fascinated - they like the window to the garden a lot), blue tits, a great tit, blackbirds, magpies, wood pigeons and crows, and heard robins, wrens, a chaffinch and a bird I haven't identified yet, which is also rather exciting.

The next-door neighbours say that they found a hedgehog's nest earlier this year, and carefully covered it up again and constructed a bit of a barrier in the hope of dissuading cats from investigating too closely, which is even better - not only are hedgehogs snuffling through the neighbourhood, they also feel safe enough to move in!

Apparently there's also a fox around, and the neighbours said they'd seen one of the black-and-white spotted woodpeckers (not something I've seen before, although I know they do visit garden feeders), but as one of them also said that they thought it was 'one of those red-breasted tits' at first, I'm not sure I can rely on their bird identification skills...