Saturday, November 20, 2010

Book Nerds List

(aka more shameless pulling of memes from friends' FB pages because I refuse to ADD any information to what FB already knows about me. But I'll put it here, lol...)

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Book Nerds List:

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 blog post. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

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

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

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

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

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

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

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

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 - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

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

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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Hmmm.... I guess I'm just weird. I've read 32 of these. And, shameful admission, of the ones I have not read, most are books I don't plan to read.

Te be fair, I read (for the first time) The Time Traveler's Wife for a book club (and loved it!) . Rebecca (meh) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (blech!), too.

Oh, and I counted audio, too. Cuz if I'd read a paper copy of that Albom crap, The Five People You Meet in Heaven I'd have tossed it about 5 pages in, but it made okay background noise for my morning commute. Ditto Moby Dick, which was not awful, but all that (grossly inaccurate) whale talk in written form would've driven me mad...

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Music Mania

I avoid facebook as much as I can, but, sometimes, late at night, when no one is tweeting and it's not my turn in Words with Friends and I've already played the daily Qrank quiz... Well, then I'll load up ye olde FB app on my phone and see what people had to say...

Last week my friend Lisa had a meme that looked like fun, so here goes:

Expose your terrible musical taste!

by Lisa on Thursday, 11 November 2010 at 08:25

I'm playing along with the latest meme... here are the rules:

  • Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.

  • Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.

  • Write down the first 15 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. Just because you might skip the song when it comes up or be embarrassed for people to know you have it in your collection, you still have to list it.

  • Choose a lot of people to be tagged. It is generally considered to be in good taste to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I'm betting that your musical selection is entertaining, or at least amusing. ( I don't tag people on memes any more)
Without further ado...

  1. "Little Girls" - Oingo Boingo -- This song was a lot better when I was teenager wanting to date guys in their 20s. As the mom of a little girl now, well, I still like the song, but find the lyrics a bit perturbing...

  2. "Love You Out Loud" - Meat Loaf -- one of my faves!

  3. "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen

  4. "Copywrite (Do It All Damn Night)" - Strata G -- Everyone panned this goofy ad-rap album written by a copywriter, but the lyrics make me laugh.

  5. "But It's Better If You Do" - Panic at the Disco

  6. "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " - Nancy Sinatra

  7. "Found Out About You" - Gin Blossoms

  8. "Lucky Ball and Chain" - They Might be Giants

  9. "Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns 'N Roses

  10. "Walk Like an Egyptian" - The Bangles

  11. "Only the Young" - Journey

  12. "Why Isn't That Enough" - Meat Loaf

  13. "Love is Not Real / Next Time You Stab Me in the Back" - Meat Loaf

  14. "Don't Stop Believing" - Journey

  15. "I Got You" - Train
In my defense, my phone was still loaded with my pre-Meat Loaf concert selections when I did this last week...

And I <3 Meat Loaf.

The Journey? Well, I love Journey, too, even if it does make me old.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Tuesday Tirade: Walk much?

*sigh*

I live in Central Texas. Where the climate is, though it pains me to admit it since I really hate the heat, pretty easy to live with year-round.

Don't get me wrong. I hate the heat and, if I'm honest, after living here for the last 27 years I get a bit uncomfortable when things drop below 50, too. But it's all livable.

I don't live somewhere with torrential rains, ice storms (except for the occasional freak one), heavy (or even any) snowfall. Nor do I live somewhere so arid and hot (have you ever been to Death Valley, California? I have. It's pretty much hell on Earth. Literally.) that breathing the air hurts.

So, I ask you: WHY in the hell do perfectly healthy people have someone drop them off at the door to a store?

They are not aged, infirm, or toting a small child--the only three reasons I can think of for this sort of incredibly indolent behavior, given our climate.

So far as I can tell they are just bone lazy. And inconsiderate. The drivers invariably stop in the center of the driving lane, thereby blocking progress through the lot for those of us who know how our legs work. I am *ahem* significantly overweight and my fat butt can walk through the parking to and from my car.

If they had a large load of groceries it would still be aggravating, but slightly understandable. I've had the husband pull up to the store a couple of times when the weather was really nasty and I had a lot of groceries to load in the car.

My issue is with the people who are dropped off at the entrance while the driver goes to hunt for a parking place. Is it really going to make that much of a difference in their day if they take another five minutes to get inside the store? Are they going to drop dead of exhaustion after the 200-foot walk?

WHAT is wrong with these people?!


Photo courtesy of stringberd via Flickr.com

Yes, I had to go shopping this weekend, grocery and other retail outlets and my path was blocked by people doing this every where I went. Literally. *grumble*