The Big Read

Saw this on Deb's blog, and of course I had to do it.

“The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. Of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.” (I couldn't find the list at either of these links, but I just copied and pasted this.)

The idea is to mark in bold the ones you’ve read.

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 - parts if it
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 - Most of the comedies and tragedies, some of the histories
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
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 - CS Lewis - the first 3 or so
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 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 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 - 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

So there’s my list. I've read 53, and parts of 3 others. Some of them (like the Austen novels) I have read multiple times.

I do think it's strange that they list "complete works of Shakespeare" and also "Hamlet", and "Chronicles of Narnia" and also "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". I have never heard of some of these books, and don't want to read some of the others, but I've added quite a few books to my "to-read" list. Just what I needed - as if it wasn't already a really long list!

Stormy weather

After a few days of beautiful weather, we had a huge storm today. The sky was black and it rained so hard that you could hardly see houses on the other side of the street. I timed things quite well - I left work about 12:20 and came home for lunch, arriving seconds before the bottom fell out. During the worst part of the storm, my co-worker called from the office and said the power was out - and it is really dark in that office, with only a few narrow windows on 2 sides and cube walls in the middle. Even now that the rain has stopped, the power is still out, so we've been given permission to go (or stay) home. Yea for free half-days!

I'm really enjoying reading Robin McKinley's blog. I could have guessed she was a horse-lover from the way she writes about them, but her tales of riding kind of make me wish I had Athena back and could try dressage. Except of course for the horrendous cost. I think I will keep living that dream vicariously.

Here are my results for what kind of music I am. I'm not entirely sure how well this describes me. Feel free to let me know what you think. And if you take the quiz, do let me know your results.

You Are Classical Music

You are a somewhat serious person who enjoys studying subjects deeply. Art of all kinds interests you, and a good piece of art can really effect you emotionally. You are inspired by human achievement, and you appreciate work that takes years to accomplish. For you, the finer things in life are not about snobbery - they're about quality.

What Kind of Music Are You?

Car, Connections, Quizzes

Well, good news - sort of - about my car. The A/C blower was working again today. I took it in to the shop and they thought it might need a new ignition module, but had a fairly simple way to test to see if that is a problem in case it happens again. So they just kept it for the day and did routine maintenance. And ordered a part for the back-seat problem.

I just got distracted for a minute there. On Deb's blog, I found in her library a book by Patricia Wrede that I had never seen before. That led me to Amazon, and their list of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". I scrolled through some, and found this book by Robin McKinley - and then I found Robin McKinley's blog. She blogs about horses and bell-ringing and other interesting stuff - though her footnotes are very hard to follow.

I really like the books I've read by these two authors, and look forward to some new ones. Yea for rambling connections that lead to other connections...

Here's a quiz I stole from Deb. Sometime, maybe I should steal from other people...

The Road Trip of Your Life

You see companionship and loyalty as what's most important in life. You live life at a fairly leisurely pace. You take time to enjoy the sweeter parts of life, even when you're busy. You're willing to take a few risks in life. You may not take the road no one travels, but you're happy to take the road less traveled. You are able to find a fairly healthy balance between work and play. You work when you need to, but you never let yourself burn out. You could have owned an indie bookstore or boutique in another life.

The Road Trip Test

Blogthings quizzes

Quiz day! I thought these were fun.

You Are 30% Boyish and 70% Girlish

Even if you're not a girl, you're very feminine. You're in touch with your feelings, and your heart rules you. A bit of a emotional roller coaster, one moment you're up and the next you're down. But no matter what, you try to be as cute and perky as possible.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

Not sure how accurate that was, thought the emotional roller coaster is often part of my life.

\ Your Personality Profile

You are dependable, popular, and observant. Deep and thoughtful, you are prone to moodiness. In fact, your emotions tend to influence everything you do. You are unique, creative, and expressive. You don't mind waving your freak flag every once and a while. And lucky for you, most people find your weird ways charming!

The World's Shortest Personality

Moodiness and emotions again. Maybe that does describe me. Not so sure about the creative and "freak flag" parts.

Mosaic meme

I copied this from Deb, who copied it from several other people. Deb's was so pretty I had to try it. The rules are:

• type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search.
• using only the first page, choose an image.
• copy and paste each of the URL’s into the mosaic maker over at FD’s image maker.

The questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.

Here's what I came up with (clickable for a larger version).

Credits:
1. Hi Julie!, 2. Untitled, 3. Everything is in Bloom, 4. llibreria - bookstore - Amsterdam, 5. pierce brosnan, 6. Gravity, 7. Totaranui, 8. Bad News Ice Cream, 9. I See You, 10. Last day in Paris, 11. Running ahead of oneself, 12. Liffey Sunset a la Nokia

I really like it - but if I could change one thing, I would re-arrange the photos so the colors balanced better.