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“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books that they’ve printed.” Bold those you have read. Italicize those you intend to read. Underline the books you LOVE. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read six and force books upon them … 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 (Well, I read a lot of it. I was a medieval studies minor.) 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Okay there are one or two plays I haven't read yet.) 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 – 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 – Evelyne 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 Graeme 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 – C.S. Lewis (Doesn't this fall under 33?) 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 38 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne (Ahem. There should be hyphens in the title.) 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 – L M Montgomery 47 Far From the Maddening 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 (COOL! I worked on this one!) 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 – Garbiel 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’ 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 (I read some of this in college) 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - A S 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 – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (Let's just say it's unlikely. I had to watch Debbie Gibson in the Broadway musical and it tainted me.) Tags: memes
Current Location: my desk
Current Mood:  tired
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Oh, not one currently in theaters. One I saw on cable last night. It wasn't even a SciFi special. I knew from the reviews it was going to be bad--I remembered how badly it got slammed when it came out. And it starred Lindsay Lohan. Yes, I watched I Know Who Killed Me. And T, who knows me so well, after hearing about how ridiculous the reason for the change in personality of the main character was, said, "And it was glorious for you, wasn't it?" Indeed it was. So, our main character is kidnapped and tortured by a sadist. When she's found, with an arm amputated at the elbow and a leg amputated at the knee, she remembers nothing of her previous life and insists she's someone else. Her personality is completely different. ( spoilers, just in case any of you decide to watch this and think there might actually be some sort of suspense in the movie--don't say I didn't warn you it was really bad )Also, Lindsay Lohan is a bad actress. Even when she was playing a stripper stoned on booze and pills, which you'd think she'd be really good at. But if you like bad movies, this is such a cheesefest with such an implausible--nay, impossible--plot, you've got to see it. Just DO NOT pay for it. Tags: bad movies
Current Location: my desk
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: History Detectives
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It was indeed a new show. And I learned something pretty damn fascinating. There's this body long referred to as Windeby Girl. The body was found with another body, which was that of an older man. Her hair was cropped at two different lengths and there was a blindfold over her eyes. It was assumed that the blindfold and cropped hair were punishment for an adulterous relationship with the older man and that's why they were both killed and interred in the bog. Except nobody really studied her in a long time. W.G. and the other body were put in the bog at different times--the time difference is around 300 years. So much for the adulterous relationship. The woman who was studying W.G. specializes in the biology of bog bodies (how's *that* for a specialization?) and she realized that the body might not, in fact, be female. That the assumption she was female might in fact have been because of the hair and the body's slight build. But we now know that men, especially young men, wore their hair long with a headband--the blindfold--to keep it out of the face. So she took some measurements. The one of the pelvis was the most telling. Men and women have different size and shaped pelvises. Yeah, so Windeby Girl isn't. He's Windeby BOY. About 14 to 16 years old when he died. And not native to the area judging from his stomach contents and other information I missed because I was so excited about this and talking to T that missed the other info. I'll catch it when they rerun the show. And Windeby Girl had always been one of the bog bodies that fascinated me. Not as much as Yde Girl, who may have been interred because of scoliosis, but something about W.G. just always resonated with me. So I found this extra exciting. AND they found fibers and clothing patterns on the skin of Huldemose Woman, who is one of the only bog bodies found with clothing of any sort. But that proves that she had on something under the cloak that didn't disintegrate in the bog. Probably linen, which the bog would have made short work of. It was rather freakish to see how the pattern of the clothing had set into her skin as the skin hardened. Yet it was also cool. Tags: bog bodies
Current Location: my other desk
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: NPR
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Dear woman in front of me getting off the subway at the W. 4th St. station, I'm *thrilled* you coordinate colors so well! And it's a damn good color too. I adore forest green. However, I suspect you may not have wanted the world to know you coordinated your bra and your skirt (given your rather frumpyish appearance) so perhaps a white blouse was not the best choice to wear over that forest green bra. Oh, and may I recommend some bra shopping--complete with fitting--in the near future? Because it's quite obvious that bra was way too small for you. Wondering where you found a bra that color, Me Dear guy sitting next to me on the bus tonight, If you insist on falling asleep on the bus, please learn how to sleep upright or alternatively, to sleep and slump to the side without a person sitting next to you. I do not look like a pillow therefore I am NOT a pillow. If you insist on slumping on me when you fall asleep, this will be remedied by me shoving you. HARD. As you found out. The only people privileged enough to use me as a pillow are people I like. I therefore must know them. And honestly, I'll most likely be laughing at them the entire time (unless there's sickness involved--although if sickness is because of drunkenness the laughing increases). Not even your arm rest, Me Tags: bad fashion, commuting
Current Location: my desk
Current Mood:  hungry
Current Music: something T's got on TV
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I forgot to mention I found the coolest headband ever this morning. It was on one of those carts in Port Authority. It's black, with skulls and crossbones on it. I debated the red, but really for $3, I can always pick that one up tomorrow.
And I just spotted, in someone's inbox, not on a free shelf, alas, a copy of Ink and Steel. Gorgeous cover. I really should start that series at some point soon. It's not like I don't have the first two books or anything. Hell, it's not like I don't have a huge pile of books waiting to be read. Although next is one of the Early Reviewer books from LibraryThing. It's by Spencer Wells, about the Genographic Project. Which is so cool, cause my dad's DNA is in that now. And I think it's completely awesome to know where half of family was back in the Neolithic.
I'm rambling again. That's because I'm looking at the size of what's sitting in my inbox. Current Location: my other desk
Current Mood:  busy
Current Music: NPR
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One thing about the show really confused me. They spent so much time showing how the sarsen stones were moved and dramatizing so much of everything, but there wasn't one single mention of the bluestones. Whyever not? Maybe if I read the article it'll tell me. I do think I remember they came in later than the sarsens, but they also came from farther away and at least some mention should have been made of them. I also really thought that someone, at some time, suggested Stonehenge had something to do with ancestors. I could be wrong, obviously. Maybe it was just that it wasn't an archaeologist. Maybe I just thought it because it made sense and I was equating it with Newgrange on some basic level. The links between Stonehenge and Woodhenge are pretty nifty though. Maybe Woodhenge will get a bit more restoration. The only reason we went was because I knew about it and I was looking for the signs. This was back in 2001, so it's possible things have changed dramatically already. But basically it was an area with concrete posts showing where the post holes were. No guides, no plaques, no explanations. You park the car and wander on your own. Which can be cool (it was the most awesome thing about Tara, but there were guides if you wanted them, and guide books if you wanted those) but it can also be a bit disconcerting. The lump of rocks near the middle. "Uh, I think that's where they found remains they think was a human sacrifice, but I can't remember for sure." Anyway, pretty cool, but really, they should have at least mentioned the bluestones. (Oh, and the icon is from our trip back in 2001. We got there before the bus tours. T takes good pictures.) EDIT: My bad: the bluestones were there FIRST. Tags: stonehenge
Current Location: my other desk
Current Mood:  confused
Current Music: NPR
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dreadpiratetait's journal
Aft
