The Big Read - Updated!

Courtesy of ktbuffy:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk (*) the books you LOVE.
Courtesy of SharonGR, I'm adding:
4) Exclaim (!) those you HATED.

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
!!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 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 - Evelyn 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 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 - AA 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 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

Happy Friday!

Free Tuition for Harvard

Definitely wanted to pass this on...

From their Financial Aid website (emphasis added):
"Building on the success of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI), which eliminated the parental contribution from families earning $60,000 or less, Harvard recently announced major financial aid enhancements to ensure greater affordability for middle- and upper-middle income families. Beginning in the 2008–09 academic year, parents with incomes of $180,000 or less will be asked to contribute significantly less to the cost of a Harvard education. Additionally, home equity will no longer be considered in determining a family’s ability to contribute and students will not be expected to take out loans, which will be replaced by need-based Harvard scholarship."

Cool stuff.

Wow! I Can't Shut Up Today

I just found out that George Carlin died.

It may seem counter-intuitive to those who know me (hmmm, what do I do for a living again?), but this is one of my favorites of his routines (especially the bit from about 2:50 to 6:05):



Rest in peace.

One More Thing Before I Go

I want to link to this before I forget.

Another blogger found this 1984 New York magazine article about the gentrification of the East Village. It's sort of eerie how much of it still rings true today. I guess gentrification takes a long time...

The Lower East Side: There goes the neighborhood

While I'm Gone...

Read Andi's blog!

It's been sitting over there on the righthand side of this page for ages, but she just recently recommitted herself to blogging regularly (something I need to do, I know).

By way of quick introduction, Andi and I roomed together in college for 2 years. And, given that the famous people in history always seemed to have known each other (think the Algonquin roundtable, Edith Wharton & Henry James, Al Gore & Tommy Lee Jones--also college roommates), I have always considered this to be my guarantee that I will one day be famous...because she is way too talented to remain unknown.

So, go forth and enjoy one of the most elegant and lyrical writers I know. But do promise you'll check back here occasionally. I mean, c'mon, you knew me first.

I'm Off...

...to Cleveland! (I know, I know, contain your jealousy, please, it's very unbecoming.)

Anyway, for your entertainment, in honor of the fact that Cleveland is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I give you Joan Jett: