BBC Booklist game/tag

Rumor has it, though I can't find anything to substantiate it, that the BBC thinks most people have only read 6 out of the following 100 books. I'm sure my two readers will more than meet the average.

Official Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.


Here's the list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Now that's THREE books, isn't it? Not fair, I read one!
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 (x,+)
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 (x) - OK, I read 3/4s of it, then read the back which gave away the ending and I refused to read any further. I know what happens. Men are jerks, especially in England and especially Way Back When. There, now you don't have to read it either.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller(x,+)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x) Ugh, I hated this book.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (*)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
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 (x)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (x,+)
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 - (*) I try and try.
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 (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x,+)
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 (x)
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 (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (*) I love Bill Bryson. Read nearly everything else he's written.
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (x)
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 (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
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 (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x,+)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

SCORE: 17 and 1/3 read,

OK, so this list is a little Brit-centric, as evidenced by the million Jane Austen books and the absence of any Vonnegut, but still, a kind of fun game. Your turn! (I won't actually tag anyone)

Shameless advertising

My roommate is really into hurling these days. Hurling is an Irish sport that looks similar to field hockey or lacrosse. I came out to practice once and have a stick of my own that I play with every now and then, but really, I'm more into Gaelic football so I don't pay quite as much attention to our local club as I might. In any case, the club has a new website and Google doesn't seem to be recognizing it yet, so I thought I'd post it on my blog to generate some sort of reaction to the url. Here goes:

Columbia Red Branch Hurling Club. The website is hosted by the GAA, which makes it more official, but also means it has a complicated url that no one is going to remember to type in directly, but can Google for.... if Google knows about it.

Poo

So I didn't finish one of my papers. There were two due, back when I wrote the last post, but one of them proved a lot more difficult than I anticipated and by the time I got it written and dealt with the hexed electronic equipment (more on that later), it was far too late to start the next paper. This means that I have to withdraw from the course and I won't graduate when I had applied to (June). I was planning on going to school in the summer anyway, since I still have G.I. Bill funds left - and why not use them? - but I was so looking forward to taking a fiction writing class and maybe a foreign language or something. Anything but anthropology and it's stupid papers. But that's the way it goes I guess.

Have I mentioned that I'm going to Europe at the end of March? The term is over (obviously I was hoping I'd be done), I have a week of spring break to clean up my room, gather funds for rent while I'm gone, make some plans, buy some gear.... and then I'm off for 2 and 1/2 months! I'm so excited I really can't articulate it. I'm probably going to spend all of my savings, but oh well. Really, have you seen the economy? My savings is gone anyway; now it won't just dwindle away on rent and booze and supporting myself between crappy jobs. I would resent every single day my bank account edged a little bit lower on absolutely nothing.

Oh yes, the hexed computers. I refuse to accept that computers are inanimate objects. There's just no way all the shenanigans that went down the morning of the due papers was all a coincidence. I wrote the paper on my desktop. I dug it out because it has a fancy keyboard and so I could use the laptop for internet research and anything else. The printer our house uses is down in the basement, so I'd have to move the files to my laptop when it came time to print. It's a bit of a pain since the desktop has Word Perfect and the lappy Word, but nothing too serious. Except that two different thumb drives wouldn't transfer the files in any form! WHY????? So I dug out a printer in my closet, but that was out of ink. So I went down to the basement, climbed on top of the refrigerator and got a face full of fiberglass from insulation on the wall while trying to unplug the printer. But then! The desktop wouldn't recognize the printer and refused to work until it had the installation software CD. Luckily, my roommate had it handy and found it before he ran off to his own class. Twenty minutes later the stupid thing was printed and I was twenty minutes late to leave the house. All before even starting the other paper! Tell me it's a coincidence.

#$%^&*(*&^%$# Papers!!

Have I ever mentioned how much I despise writing papers for school? I am, first off, somehow completely incapable of writing them during daylight hours. Oh, I try. Not a word will come out. I always have to wait until the night before, and often, like tonight, there will be more than one paper due the following morning. This usually results in me typing a few useless lines, going to sleep with the alarm set for five, hitting snooze until seven, when in a panic, I'll get up and type something that borders on coherent.

It's gotten to the point where I don't like writing at all. I hardly write in my journal anymore and I only seem to update my blog so that people know I'm not dead. I can't wait until I can enjoy writing again, because I do love it, when I'm given the freedom to do what I want with it. I worry though that the joy may not return. Will it always be a chore? Agghhhhhhhhhh.