In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.

angel932 @ 2008-06-24T14:32:00

2008-06-24T18:57:03Z

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (My favorite book of all time!)
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 [all of it.]
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 (If you adored it as a child DO NOT READ IT AGAIN! You will be disappointed.)
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 (I tried to get through this - honestly I did!)
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 (Now, East of Eden would have been underlined!)
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

angel932 @ 2007-07-29T17:10:00

2007-07-29T21:20:25Z

Actually, I'm NOT AT ALL that kind of gal, although I was a camp counselor for several summers in college. But my Mom and Dad live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on an island near Canada which can only be reached by FERRY(!) in the summer and I always try to go for a visit around this time. My little sister is having a big birthday, so the whole family will be there for the party on the 4th and that will be great.

Auntie Mame is my role model when it comes to my nieces and nephews, so I'm off to wrap presents and such. I'll spend a few days just with my twin's kids and I'm trying to think of all sorts of fabulous stuff to do. (Hairspray? Harry Potter for the 3rd time?)

Mom and Dad have dial up so I'll be out of touch for two weeks - can't wait to catch up on all the reading when I get back!

PS. I got the CD's of the new Harry Potter (last time I can say that *cries*) put into my iPod to listen to on the drive. It's about 20 hours from here to the cabin, so that will keep me awake and alert, if I can only keep from weeping during the final chapters. I also downloaded Emma for the drive home. I already have Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, so I'm slowly getting the complete Austen set.

angel932 @ 2007-07-22T22:38:00

2007-07-23T02:39:14Z

I’m back from New York and we really had fun.

New York was a blast! Literally, as I’m sure you heard on the news. The steam pipe broke just one block from Grand Central Station at Lexington and 41st Street. We were staying at the Hyatt on Lexington and 42nd Street so we could see all the emergency workers and vehicles when we looked out the window. Sadly, one or two people were killed and forty or so were injured in the explosion. Luckily, Diane and I were in Times Square when it happened, so we didn’t even know about it until we tried to catch the subway to the hotel.

By the way, the hotel immediately switched off all the air vents to the outside and just re-circulated the air in the building, so we felt pretty safe breathing the air. The trains were shut down for a day, but it was really amazing how fast the city organized the rescue, the repair and everything else. Very impressive!

On Tuesday we walked around the city a bit before we went to the first play. For lunch we went to Lupa’s which was recommended by Gabrielle. It turns out this was restaurant week, where you get a three or four course meal for a fixed price at some of the most fancy places in the city. Since that was the case here, I tried oxtail, which I NEVER would have ordered and it was really good. We both loved our meal and felt very cosmopolitan.

Across from where “Wicked” was playing (and next to the Winter Garden theater) we had dinner at Ellen’s Stardust Diner. What a hoot! It is decorated with old posters of “Miss Subway” from the 40s and 50s and the wait staff performs Broadway and rock & roll songs with a karaoke machine. They are really good, too. The food is diner stuff – comfort food and the desserts were incredible. We ate there three times during our stay because it was just so much fun.

“Wicked” turned out to be wonderful. I had downloaded the music for all four of the shows so we could listen beforehand, but neither one of us was prepared for how touching the story was. We both were crying at the end. The production was amazing. At the end of the first act the Wicked Witch sings a fantastic song and it really looks like she is flying. The monkeys actually did fly, some of them right over the heads of the audience. And the best part is that it all ties together with the book at the end.

On Wednesday we had tickets to two shows so that took most of the day. “The Drowsy Chaperone” was absolutely adorable. It is sort of a parody of a 1920s musical comedy, but the authors clearly love the era and so it charms as it pokes fun. The dancing was great (lots of tapping) and the comedy was broad and very physical. The costumes were a complete treat.

That night we saw “Jersey Boys” which was quite a contrast. In this case the set was very simple (unlike both of the others we’d seen) and so were the costumes. It’s the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and it really was wonderful. I didn’t realize how many of their songs I knew and how well I liked most of them. The original cast (two of whom won Tony Awards) was still there and everyone gave outstanding performances. The whole thing was deceptively simple and yet it built to the moment when the four guys finally got together to sing and the entire audience just stood up and cheered. Very, very cool!

On Thursday we rode through Central Park on a bicycle/rickshaw while the guy told us all sorts of fun historical facts. After lunch at a very fancy place (all the waiters were Italian) called Sandominicos which was right on Central Park, we headed off to the Museum of Television and Radio. I’ve been there before and it was pretty neat. Let me say here that by this time I was back in my cast full time because I just couldn’t take all the walking in my regular shoe. I was disappointed but I figured I would just go with the cast and not risk any damage.

That night we saw “Spamalot”. As a long time Monty Python fan I adored it, of course, but even Diane thought it was great. It was like a vaudeville show – they literally threw in everything but the kitchen sink. Bad puns – you bet. Silly love ballad – we got it! Swordplay and adventure – absolutely. What’s not to love?

On Friday we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I wanted to see the new Greek and Roman statue rooms and Diane went to look at the European paintings. We also went through an exhibit about an American fashion designer from the 1900s-1930 named Periot, of whom I had never heard. I loved looking at the clothes, especially the 1920s styles, so that was great fun. I could spend days at the Met, but my foot wouldn’t have let me anyway!

We got to Atlanta at 10:30 that night, expecting to get on a plane to Charlotte at 11, but everything was delayed. I got in line to buy the new Harry Potter at 11:55, started reading it at 12:05 and read through the flight and at home until 3:30 when I absolutely had to close my eyes. I slept for awhile, got up and read, then slept again and finished the book amid floods of tears at 6:30 on Saturday. Since some of you haven’t finished it yet, all I’ll say is that it was better than I even hoped it would be.

It was a whirlwind coupled of days, but I had the time of my life!

The Shaggin' Meme

2007-01-14T00:11:15Z

List ten fictional characters you would have shag (in no particular order) then tag 5 people to do the same.

Tagged by karanina

1. Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice): The ultimate male. Hands down the best romantic character ever. EVER! And it doesn’t hurt that he was played by plumy-voiced Laurence Olivier, adorably sexy Colin Firth, and lickably delicious Matthew Macfadyen. *pauses to let mind wander* Did I mention Colin Firth?

2. Jayne Cobb (Firefly): The mercenary with the heart of… well, maybe not gold, maybe not even copper, but it’s there and I wouldn’t mind looking for it under that incredibly hot exterior. There’s just something about the way Adam Baldwin* plays him so… gleefully? Sexily? All I’m sayin’ is he can fly into my port any old time he wants.

3. The 9th Doctor (Doctor Who): Okay, I’d take Ten in a pinch (or several pinches, if you will), but it’s Nine that sets my heart aflutter. And now that Christopher Eccleston is going to be on Heroes, I’ll probably have to kick someone off this list to make way for the Invisible Man. Here’s hopin’ anyway.

4. Luke Danes (Gilmore Girls): Despite the current storyline, I still adore Mr. Backwards Baseball Cap. In real life Scott Patterson was a minor league pitcher and I can’t help thinking what he could do with those talented hands. Hmmmm.

5. Spike (BtVS): It’s no surprise that two of my top faves were created by Joss Whedon. As with Jayne, it’s all about the redemption… not to mention James Marsters' they-could-probably-cut-glass cheekbones.

6. Aragorn (LotR): I have to say that the book didn’t do much for me, but Viggo Mortensen? Yeowza!

7. Han Solo (Star Wars): Ah, my first adolescent sci fi geek-out. *sighs* Good times!

8. Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls): Wonderfully iconic character, too bad we haven’t seen a great movie version yet. (Marlon Brando –who told you that you could sing?) Keep your fingers crossed.

9. Wolverine (X-Men): I’ve never read the comics, so this is based entirely on Hugh Jackman’s interpretation. What can I say? Every time those claws come out I just wanna jump him. In a good way.

10. Neo (The Matrix): Can you see me blushing? Yes, I really am this shallow. Oh, hell, I don’t care. Keanu Reeves is one of the best looking men on the planet. Especially in leather. Whoa.

*I decided to pick my favorite Adam Baldwin character and not fill up my entire list, good little Adamaniac that I am!