I can't get this song out of my head. Possibly because the whole song has about two lines.
How far? You never seem to know
Couldn't Resist
I love love love lists. Granted, most of the bolded ones were for high school required reading. I now absolutely hate dystopian fiction because that was basically the curriculum for all of high school.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? *Allegedly* the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2 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
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
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
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
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 - A.A. 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 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
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
Reads
Here's a list of books I want to read in the upcoming months/weeks or whenever I get around to reading:
Barney's Version
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Atlas Shrugged (long!)
Room
They seem like pretty heavy books so I want some lighter fare too. Around Christmastime I like to read Christmas-related books, so I've got Holidays on Ice on hold and I also want to get my hands on The Stupidest Angel.
Here's to good reading!
Aguirre, the Boringness of God...
I apologize if the title offends anyone, but I was just playing on words.
Anyway, yesterday I was so stoked because my German film class was going to screen Werner Herzog's 1972 Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I love looking forward to watching classics because it's like eating a savoury full meal instead of chocolate cake for dinner.
Then last night I watched the film and though I liked the opening scene, that was it. Oh, I tell myself, am I not to be a movie fan? Another classic that I don't like.
Alas, maybe I had too high of an expectation for the film. I forced myself not to look at the clock on the wall, but time ticked on and on. I thought the runtime must've been 2.5 hours but when I checked this morning the maximum runtime was 1 h 40 min! It was that strenuous to watch.
You might say to me, "Maybe you just don't like arthouse films." Maybe not, but then I could list some arthouse films that I do like. "Maybe it's just that you grew up in the MTV generation." Maybe, but I like other slower-paced films. I'm just disappointed by this one. Unfortunately. Well, I've been watching mediocre films again lately but I'm always on the lookout for the next gem!
Ich liebe FM4
Why does it take an Austrian radio station streamed through the web at their 1 AM in the morning for me to hear local Canadian artists?
Other than campus radio stations, I have never heard of The Acorn or Sid LeRock and I find it amazing that they're from the backyard of Ontario, yet you won't hear them on the airwaves unless you're in Austria (or on the Internet)! I find it hilarious.
On Laughing Cats and Weeping Bats
I'm currently reading a classic called The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov from Russia.
Apparently it's a critique about Stalinism. Well, la-dee-da because with that knowledge I feel like I'm in way over my head and I every time I pick up the book I feel like I need a copy of SparksNotes to my right and never has leisure reading been so nerve-wracking for me. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of symbolism and allegory and whatnot.
Most of the time, though, I try to relax and take it as another entertaining read, taking everything for what it is - the whole magical realism and people turning into witches and the devil coming to town as a fantasy story. And it works, except for the little voice inside my head saying that I should've had so much more background before diving into all this...
B&W
I love well-cinematographed black and white films. They harken to theatre style of lighting.
The depth of field that you can see, the play with shadows and light.
Colour doesn't show that as well. For colour films that are filmed with film and not video, even if you see the focus and the blur in the background and you say to yourself, "Ah, so it's film and not video," there seems to be a more paltry sheen of flatness to it.
I especially love looking at still shots of black and white films because of the lighting.
