The Infamous BBC Book List

A friend of mine posted this up on facebook. I had to paste it into here...

The BBC believes most people will have only read six of the 100 books in this list (mixture of popular books, kids books, and "literature"). How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'X' by those you have read. Tag other" Book Nerds".

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X (I have read everything by her, I'm obsessed)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible - Anonymous <---only parts

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (like, three times--UGG)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell <-- tried to read it, but I was a little young at the time

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Only Dickens I've read is Tale of Two Cities)

Total: 7

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (I read LIttle Men....)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Mayor of Casterbridge count?)

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare < --- 14 plays and a handful of sonnets

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (the only book assigned in school I didn't quite finish).

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (not really a fan)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (Silas Marner is much shorter...only Eliot I've read)

Total: 2

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (the first half)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total:4

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (only LWW)

34 Emma - Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

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 X

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafo

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon X

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 5

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebol

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 X

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (I have a frightening obsession with this book)

Total: 2

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce X

76 The Inferno - Dante X

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (half way through I just couldn't take the satire anymore...)

Total: 3

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

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

Total: 3

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

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 X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 2

Grand total : 35, if you count halves about 37

The Name of the Wind

Everyone has to read this book. I am beside myself impressed with it. It is possibly the first book ever that I wanted to read a second time immediately after closing the back cover. Normally if I really like a book, I look forward to reading it again at some undisclosed date in the future. However. This book. Well, the only reason why I am not reading it again right now is because it is a library book and I need to return it.

I have been putting off writing this entry, because I haven't had the time or coherence to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. However, a few highlights:

He uses the narrative within a narrative structure with amazing skill--it makes sense within the novel and he neither over- nor under-uses it.

The main character is amazing and brilliant and haunted...I am obsessed.

He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of storytelling (related to the narrative-in-narrative structure, but worth mentioning as it's own point) without letting the telling get in the way of the story.

His use of language--I swear he had the exactly perfect amount of description and dialogue and detail... You hear the character's voices very distinctly...

The tone was just, dreamy. (I'm trying not to say amazing, brilliant, or perfect...)

Lastly, partly due to the structure and partly due to the quality of his character and language... there were pithy, wise statements, but they did not feel stuck in by the author, but natural parts of the story.

Needless to say, I'm vaguely in love. So. Go to the library, or the book store.

The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss.

Go Now!

Books may be dangerous after all...

I have learned in all of my reading that you should try to live your life so that you have no regrets and that there is no moment like the present. So when I found a dead bird in the 500 gallon water trough that my horses drink out of, instead of just getting the poor thing out, or even taking it out and then dumping the water and rinsing the trough. I spent a good 1.5 hours scrubbing the thing down with hydrogen peroxide and then rinsing it out and refilling it. During a thunder shower--the rain wasn't too heavy, the wind wasn't too strong, and the thunder was far away.

But the whole time I was out there it was just like, you know, if I were a normal person I wouldn't be doing this. Especially with a button-down shirt tied in a very odd manner so my right/scrubbing arm didn't have a sleeve getting in the way, but the rest of my torso was at least a little protected. I feel that people who are always worried about not looking too crazy are just missing out on so much in life. Like the absurdity that I daily live :P

Not too long ago I was asked to pick three words to describe who I am. I chose, Physical, Intelligent, and Absurd-Loving. I was asked to explain what I meant by the third, and the best I could do at the time was, "Life is absurd, and I love life." It was not the time, nor the place, to get into the fact that my life may possibly be more absurd than that of most other people--though I don't really believe that. I just believe that I think it is absurd because that is my word and my way of understanding it all.

Oh. And I did read a book today. Buddha Boy. It is a very nice, short, YA read. I read it once a while ago and since I've been reading things about meditation and such I decided to read it again. It is good, brings in some basic facts about Buddhism in general, but it is mostly another high school story... Dealing with all the drama and trying to learn right from wrong and figure out how you want to live your life...

And now it is time for some more reading!!

The Lightning Thief

According to a teacher on the radio, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan is the first in a series that both genders in her classroom are ripping through since the Harry Potter phenomenon. So, of course, I had to read it.

It was very fun. Several parts had me laughing out loud. But the funny thing was that the main thing it helped me figure out was something I've been trying to figure out with a different book I've been reading. It is called The Name of the Wind. It is an absolutely incredible book. Beyond amazing. But I am hardly into it (it is a thick book so being in the 100s isn't that far in) and having such a hard time reading it... Reading Riordan's book helped me figure out while. The Lightning Thief is great. Don't get me wrong. But it follows it's genre perfectly and is a simple read. There are not really that many gorgeous paragraphs of description or short meditations on human nature. There are fun, goofy comments and every now and then a couple sentences that could draw you into some deeper thoughts. Perfect for a book written about a twelve year old boy with dyslexia and ADHD who is off on his first quest, figuring out that his father is Poseidon. I actually really like how he views ADHD as something that backfires horribly in school, but is what keeps him alive in battle. It really is a fun book with some interesting ideas about how the world might work :)

Back to The Name of the Wind though. This book is so incredibly well-written that you cannot but feel everything so incredibly deeply. The pain and the wisdom. And the crazy trouble-making curiosity of a kid way too smart for his own good. I love the main character. I love the world, even though I only have some hints about how it all works and fits together. I love it all so much it is everything I can do to keep my distance. I feel things so deeply that I am often scared away by the things that make me feel the most. I am almost scared of this book because I'm afraid it will make me feel too much--suck me into its world so that I don't get the stuff done that I need to get done and make me completely unfit to be seen in public.

If I was going to say anything else, I don't remember what it was. I'm sleepy. Good night.

The Required Bio

So I've been reading this book entitled The Path of Practice: A Woman's Book of Ayurvedic Healing. The practices you follow are based on your body type or dosha. To determine your dosha you are invited to answer various questions. The questions for the Pitta are:

Do you excel in doing more than one activity at the same time?
Do you tend to remain completely focused on your tasks?
Do you learn quickly and forget slowly?
Do you gain weight easily and lose it easily?
Do you get ravenously hungry and love to eat?
Do you like to be around successful people?
Do you sleep lightly and moderately?
Do you have violent, fiery dreams on occasion?
Do you tend to be ambitions?

For me, the answer to all of those questions is Yes--generally a resounding yes echoing through a large chamber with one exception. My dreams are not vivid. Ever. I rarely remember them.

So we then turn a little ways farther along in the book and find this description of the Pitta person:

Element: Fire/Water
Energy: Hot
Texture: Oily, Soft
Temperament: Fiery, Vibrant
Emotional Strength: Materially Adept, Visionary
Emotional Weakness: Indulgent, Aggressive
Body Type: Athletic, Well Shaped
Complexion: Yellowish or Reddish

It is about as accurate as any of these sorts of things ever are. I have two different sides to my brain (more than that really, but just two I want to focus on for a moment). One side is very rational. It is the well-educated, deliberating, scientific, and skeptical. The other side is open to everything: including magic, unicorns, and a belief that the good in the world vastly outweighs the bad. My mystical side believes everything, including contradictions, until it is convinced to disbelieve. I can't say until something is proven wrong, because proof does little to sway the mystic in me--the feeling must change and that is as precise as I can be to explain it. Mind you, when I use the word "feeling" it is more than an emotional feeling. It is also a mental and physical and metaphysical sense as well. It is the holistic impression.

Mostly, however, people only see the rational side. And they don't always think it is all that rational because I tend to come up with very crazy schemes for moving across the world and living in my own personal utopia with a select few friends who may come and go as they please.