Books to read before you die

It was published over 40 years ago and its American author has lived as a virtual recluse ever since, but according to Britain's librarians, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird is the book that everyone should read.

The Pulitzer prize-winning classic has topped a World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around the country were asked the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?" The book, which has been a staple of schoolroom reading lists for many years, also came second in another poll released today on our favourite happy endings. It explores issues of race and class in 1930s deep south America, through the dramatic court case of a black man charged with the rape of white girl.

To Kill a Mocking Bird heads an odd triumvirate at the top of the librarians' list: it is followed by the Bible and, in third place, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Further down the rankings, a mixture of classics and popular contemporary titles feature.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code received just one nomination.

Mark Wood, chairman of the MLA, commented, "This goes to show that if you are stuck for something to read, you should ask a librarian."

(And, because I'm bored, the ones in bold I've read.)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

(Too much new stuff there for me to do better than that.)

Sore losers suck

Well, congratulations to Ang Lee for probably the bitterest and least gracious post-Oscar interview ever. I guess for all his statements about wanting Brokeback to just been seen like any other romance movie, it all changed when he thought he was gonna get an Oscar out of the supposedly controversial subject matter. Then suddenly he thinks he's made a "brave piece of film making" and should have been rewarded for it.

Bad luck.

More acceptable was four times Oscar winner Nick Park being a big nerd AGAIN.

George Clooney seems to have been a pretty gracious and un-pretentious winner too. Good on him.

In other news, work today has seriously pissed me off.

New poster design - comments?

Still tinkering but this is basically the poster design for the Cole Porter musical High Society that I got asked to do.

Not quite there yet, still missing some indo, but considering how crappy it looked yesterday when I was fooling around with it, and how convinced I was it was going to look crap, I'm relieved.

But comments please. I think there's still some room for improvement.