November 29, 2010

It started off as bragging, but ended up as me needing to read more.


Meme I saw of fb, but I don't really want to post this there.  Mostly because I want to write notes about all of the books which I'm sure no one will read.  And because I'm procrastinating on writing my personal statement for grad school.

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. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (favorite.  book.  ofalltime.)
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 (sometimes I feel like I need to read the bible, but I never get past Genesis)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (recommended for any person of any age. If you think kids shouldn't be reading this series - or you want them to read the CS Lewis stuff instead - you're wrong.) 
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I thought I was Jo, and I hated Amy with a passion.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (nightmares.  oh and whatever you do don't watch the Polanski film.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (this is kind of misleading... there are what?  36 plays?  I haven't read them all, but I certainly have my favorites... As You Like It, Much Ado, Macbeth, Lear, Twelfth Night is a particular fav)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk 
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (am I the only one who thinks Holden is a total ass?)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (ugh.  just... don't.)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ("...so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.")
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 (I always think of the Harry Connick Jr. song where he sings about an old jalopy)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll  
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I can't even name how many times I've started this book.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 
34 Emma -Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (does it count if I'm reading it now?)
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis 
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (bought this along with another de Bernieres book, but I haven't finished it.)
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 (looove.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (still reading, but I'm about 400 pages in, so I think it counts.  this book SO reminds me of my grandmother's family.)
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 (On Chesil Beach is fantastic, too. McEwan is phenomenal.)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 
52 Dune - Frank Herbert 
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (interesting that they left out Northanger Abby and Mansfield Park.)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (I just remember the alleged musical - omg I just found it - that Jen told me about in high school)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (this book changed the way that I think about science fiction.)
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 (no.  don't.  don't ever read Hardy.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (been meaning to read something by Rushdie forever.)
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 was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")
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 (working on another Ishiguro book right now, but this one's next.)
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 (does it count if I listen to the musical, like, religiously?)

November 12, 2010

Netflix knows me better than I know myself

I probably never would have picked any of these up on my own, but they were fantastic, all of them.

November 5, 2010

Looking back, 2001 was actually pretty bomb. Just not for me.

What the hell.  Ghost World changed my life.  And now she's a sexy alien.  Whyyy

Read this on /Film earlier:
It looks as though Scarlett Johansson will be playing a big-screen villainess once again. According to Entertainment Weekly, the "Iron Man 2" starlet, who recently earned raves for her performance of The Black Widow in the superhero film, has been tapped to lead "Under the Skin."

The sci-fi comedy, which is set to be helmed by "Sexy Beast" director Jonathan Glazer, will reportedly begin filming in 2011. The news source reports that Johansson will play "a sexy space alien who kidnaps human hitchhikers and sends them back to her home world to be served as exotic hors d'oeuvres."

Fun facts:
Memento, The Royal Tennenbaums, Mulholland Drive, Moulin Rouge!, Waking Life, Donnie Darko, Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone and Amelie also came out in 2001.  Less than 5 sequels for the whole year.  Can you believe it?  Go ahead, go look.  Seriously what the helll

I'd say that a little part of me, the part that's had this expression


on her face since 2001, died when I read this.  But, sadly, that death occurred when I saw The Island.  Ugh.

November 4, 2010

Passive Me, Aggressive You

The Naked + Famous




Wanna hear the whole album?

Kinda sound like MGMT, Fang Island, and Beach House all had a baby.  A music baby.