x_cat11

Meme nabbed from weesta
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
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
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte –  How can you love both Bronte & Austen? I don’t know I just do.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – Loved first three, thought it went down hill from there.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – If you are going to write only one, this is the one you want to write.

6 The Bible – Looking for verse that claims earth is flat.
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 – made to by English teacher which I have yet to forgive
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell – If you can overlook the racism, it is a fun read.
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 – made to by English teacher
29 Alice’s Adventures 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 – liked the movie
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 – How this pot boiler made this list is beyond me, where’s Peyton Place?
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 – was told he uses every English writing trick in the book
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens – made to by English teacher
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker – major disappointment, taught the difference between Classic & Horror Classic.
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 – prefer to watch rather than read
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

 

33/100 not bad for someone who reads only for entertainment purposes

 Okay, have you seen the Supernatural season 3 finale? No, then go away you are not ready yet.  If yes then you should enjoy In Aquae Vita by psychochick1 posted on fanfiction.net - it's everything you want at the moment providing you are not an actual psychochick yourself.

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Life is worth living again - Dean & Sam Winchester are back on the air! Nice to see Ed & Harry again even if they are dicks, but it was really great to see the Dean & Sam I remember back - first time this season. Only three more episodes this season - tragic, but at least season four is already picked up. Oh and Kripke, since you screwed up and are going to be 8 episodes short for the next box set - I expect to have an 11 1/2 inch Dean & 12 inch Sam to join my Barbies by Christmas like I promised them. Yes, I do hold you personally responsible for the writer's strike Kripke. Fair!?! What's fair got to do with anything Kripke. Dean is still hell bound and Sam is still clueless as to how to stop it. That wretched demoness Ruby can't get her story straight (btw I know it's been a few hundred years but still I think she should remember - first you forget your humanity then you go to hell - not the other way around.) And exactly how long I am going to have to wait to see Bela hoisted on her own petard for trusting everything she learns from a ouija board! And what about John's missing journal? The man keeps a journal for 22 years and suddenly stops just when the end of his hunt is finally in sight.! Do I look like I was born yesterday? I want to know what John was doing that kept him from Dean while Dean was dying of heart failure. And don't bother trying to palm off that he wasn't paying attention to his voicemail that is just laziness. A flashback episode with John, YED & Meg reprising their roles works for me. Kripke, you got a lot of work ahead of you to make up for that strike you didn't prevent so you better get to it.

Grimness of the day to day grind continuing, but on the upside the weirdness factor is sky-rocketing. Did you read my last post? You may want to so you can follow this one. The paid public fornicator's significant other may be a cousin of my significant other. I am not sure as I am not into the whole genealogy thing. But this is how it works - my significant other has an uncle who knocked up the aunt of the ppf's significant other and went MIA on the aunt. Yeah, it wasn't a surprise about the uncle, sounded just like his SOP. Anyway, it probably worked out for the best for the uncle's half breed (human mother/scum o' the earth father) as he was given up for adoption and has been spared the uncle's  non parenting skills. In the poetic justice department, the uncle's youngest daughter is an unwed mother herself living in her parent's basement. My significant other found out about it because the uncle tried to deny who he was to avoid his current family from learning about his true scuminess. At which point, my significant other was asked to confirm his uncle's true identity. The big joke is that the uncle's current family lives with him, and is no doubt aware of his essential scumhoodiness. I have suggested that abandoned bastards should stick together (my significant other is also a child born out of wedlock with a MIA father) and introduce the new cousin to his half sisters but my significant other is hesitant to become involved as the uncle had pointed out years ago, he did not consider my significant other a true family member. Strangely enough I view my sibling's children as members of my family, but I must admit to being out of touch with the modern viewpoint at times. My significant other has sent word to his cousin that the cousin's biological father is beneath his notice rather than the vice versa the biological father thinks. Meanwhile I must revise my opinion on the realism of soap opera plots, or maybe write a book entitled Significant Other's Family Babylon.  Your comments are always welcome.     

Well, after a ridiculous amount of effort I can begin.  The only problem is where do I start.  I don't even want to think about today - so that is out.  Tomorrow is looking to be even grimmer than today.  So I guess I will just pick something at random.  Let's get started with a bang (literally apparently). I am currently liquidating the estate of a family member and have sold an ugly chair.  It is circa 1970 and covered in red fake fur (seriously) but has character & a style (if you call ick, a style), so I wasn't surprised I could get money for it from an aquaintance.  However I have since been informed as to the proposed use the new owner has for it.  It is going to be used as the set for a live sex show on the internet (I suppose an icky purpose suits an icky chair).  Don't ask for the link, I don't know & I don't want to know.  You see the aquaintance & the aquaintance's significant other are the paid performance artiste's and this falls under my too much information category as it stands now.  Has this ever happened to you?  Not the too much information part, I get that all the time and assume you do as well.  Have you ever just wanted to sell a chair and find yourself aiding & abetting the porno industry?  I suppose you are now thinking that is quite some crowd I am running with, but honestly I don't know that many people and am surprised to learn that some of the few I do are paid public fornicators.  Would you believe I know them from a statistical baseball league, which I can assure you is a completely wholesale & innocent form of entertainment.  And every bit as geeky as it sounds.  How does this apply to the population at large?  Does everyone's personal acquaintance include internet porn stars, and I am just not with it?  If so, do I really want to be with it - isn't ignorance bliss?  Your comments are always welcome.     

Okay, I have managed to create a journal - now the next challenge my first entry.