129. Books...

That has got to be the worst title I've used yet... Oh well.

My life goes on, and it's been full and busy and I do have blog thoughts to share, but my mom is coming to visit tomorrow so my thoughts are to preparing for her arrival. "If that's so," you ask, "then why are you blogging?"

Good question.

I'm procrastinating. And in procrastinating, I found this on Quasifictional, so I thought I'd play along.

The rules are as follows:


*Look at the list of books and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE.
*Put an asterisk (*) next to those that you hated.


So, here goes.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (loved everything but the end, which felt too... neat or something)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Of course.)
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 (I've tried several times to read this book because it's a classic, but I get so bored every time I give up a few chapters in. LOVE the old movie with Katherine Hepburn though)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I agree with Michelle... how is this one book?]
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 (don't want to say I "loved" this one, but I did really enjoy it)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (an interesting read where there was not one single character that I liked, but I still wanted to know what happened to them... A sign of good writing I think)
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 [And Through the Looking Glass too!]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (If I could underline these twice I would... these are my favourite books. Ever.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this on the list twice?)
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 (Only read the one chapter that so many people insisted would 'change my life'... but even that one chapter was bad. How did this book become so successful?)
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

I'm not going to tag anyone specific, cause... well, I'm done procrastinating now. But, if you read this you can consider yourself tagged, okay? Have fun!

128. Happiness

In celebration of the world not ending today, I thought I’d post some happy things… starting with this video of Ellen’s wedding footage which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.



In other lesbian wedding news, one of my best friends (and only remaining friend from high school) who has been with her girlfriend for at least 8 years is finally getting married. I have been waiting for this announcement for years – honestly, every time she called me, some part of me hoped it would be ‘the call’. Which meant that I actually guessed before she got the words out when ‘the call’ finally happened. And I cried and squealed like a girl. And then she told me that I am a co-maid-of-honour, which made me cry even more. Heh, just typing that out made me get all teary. The wedding won’t be until next summer, and it’s clear on the other side of the country, so I don’t know how many maid-of-honour type duties I can actually perform, but I will do my best.

Not much else going on in my life. I’m working, and working out, a little play now and then too – oooh, I just bought a new HD tv, which will be fun when I eventually get HD cable (right now, it’s just acting like a regular TV with a lot of potential). Work is good, life is good. And one of my best friends is getting married. I’m happy.

And the world didn’t get sucked into a black hole, so that’s good too.