So apparently the NEA thinks that the average American has only read six books from the list of 100 titles below. Only six?! This makes me sad, sad, sad. Because 1) so many Americans are non-readers and that makes their worlds and their minds VERY small and then they go out and are allowed to do things like dictate what can be in school libraries and, say, vote for our next president. And 2) I've obviously spent years and years of my life on a couch or in a bed or in a nook with my nose in a book. This helps explain the width of my arse.
So someone out there on the web turned this list into a meme (I only recently realized that that means "me! me!"), and of course I had to steal it and share it with you guys because I am a book whore. Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you L.O.V.E.
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 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
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
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 complete series - 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 - AA 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 Meany - 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 - EB 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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en Francaise, no less!)
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
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Engage-a-versary
It pleased me more than is probably appropriate that y'all liked my littled knitted projects! Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. (Let's see if you all still like it once you're saddled with wearing things I've made that maybe don't turn out quite as cute.) I've already started my next item, but it's a secret/surprise so you'll have to wait for details and pictures.....
Meanwhile, in other news, two years ago today my sweet Matthew asked me to be his wife. Saying yes was the best decision of my life. Thank you for "choo-choo-choosing" me, Bug. I love you.
Meanwhile, in other news, two years ago today my sweet Matthew asked me to be his wife. Saying yes was the best decision of my life. Thank you for "choo-choo-choosing" me, Bug. I love you.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Getting in Touch with My Inner Caroline Ingalls
People, I have a new obsession: Knitting. Carol taught me while we were in Colorado last month and I got started straightaway on a beautiful baby blanket. Which I promptly tore out after I'd completed about 5 inches. They say that baby items are good projects for beginning knitters because they're small and you get the satisfaction of completing a project fairly quickly. But they should clarify that baby blankets don't count, because man do they go slowly. And when you're done with all that hard work basically all you have to show for it is a big square. What fun is that? Answer: No fun. 
So I tore out my blanket and started over on a simple boat-neck (read: no shaping around the neckline, so easy-peasy) baby sweater. I knitted up the front, back, and two sleeves in no time flat. See the sort of wonky stitches here and there? My new BFF knitting teacher at Unraveled yarn store in Monrovia assures me that those will magically straighten out after the first hand washing.
Next came blocking, which is when you pin out the pieces to their correct dimensions and either steam them or dampen them and let them dry in place. As you can see, I went a little overboard and used like a million pins. Because I'm a perfectionistic freak and wanted it to be just right. Then I sewed the pieces together, which required a little in-person assistance (hence my bonding with the gals at Unraveled last Friday afternoon), and voila! A baby sweater! 
It looks sort of drab and plain displayed such, so Henry came down to model for you. 
Look at that perfectly shaped cuff. I made that, people! Henry was especially excited about the next project I'd started--a little baby beanie--so he wanted to give you a preview. 
But then, being the anal retentive obsessive type that I am, I finished said hat a couple of hours later. So here it is, too. My second ever knitting project completed in one afternoon.
How cute is that? After seeing it, Matt asked if I know how to make anything in "normal sizes," so yesterday I went out and bought a big book of hat patterns. For grown up people heads. So if I know you, you can pretty much count on getting a big wooly hat or cap from me sometime in the future. And I don't care if we're in California where it rarely gets below 60 degrees on the coldest afternoon of the year: You will wear it and you will like it.
So I tore out my blanket and started over on a simple boat-neck (read: no shaping around the neckline, so easy-peasy) baby sweater. I knitted up the front, back, and two sleeves in no time flat. See the sort of wonky stitches here and there? My new BFF knitting teacher at Unraveled yarn store in Monrovia assures me that those will magically straighten out after the first hand washing.Next came blocking, which is when you pin out the pieces to their correct dimensions and either steam them or dampen them and let them dry in place. As you can see, I went a little overboard and used like a million pins. Because I'm a perfectionistic freak and wanted it to be just right. Then I sewed the pieces together, which required a little in-person assistance (hence my bonding with the gals at Unraveled last Friday afternoon), and voila! A baby sweater! It looks sort of drab and plain displayed such, so Henry came down to model for you. Look at that perfectly shaped cuff. I made that, people! Henry was especially excited about the next project I'd started--a little baby beanie--so he wanted to give you a preview. But then, being the anal retentive obsessive type that I am, I finished said hat a couple of hours later. So here it is, too. My second ever knitting project completed in one afternoon.How cute is that? After seeing it, Matt asked if I know how to make anything in "normal sizes," so yesterday I went out and bought a big book of hat patterns. For grown up people heads. So if I know you, you can pretty much count on getting a big wooly hat or cap from me sometime in the future. And I don't care if we're in California where it rarely gets below 60 degrees on the coldest afternoon of the year: You will wear it and you will like it.
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