bugsii

Haha.  I have been a blogging slacker.  Yesterday I spent most of the day finishing The Namesake and it made me think of all sorts of things I should write, but they were all depressing and it just made me cry thinking about writing them.  I didn’t have the energy to conjure all that up and write, so I didn’t.  Instead, I spent the evening watching True Beauty on Hulu.  What a fantastic waste of time.  Today has been similar.  I read, I tried to lay out in the sun (except that the clouds like to come just as I get situated) and then Dan made me watch Jersey Shore.  So awful.  I don’t recommend it.  I won’t even link to it.

Hmm.  Now, I’m trying to decide if using a gift card to Pizza Hut counts as “buying anything.” Since I said I was going to act like payday was Monday, I sort of think that if I really had no money, and found a Pizza Hut gift card, that I would use it.  Right?  Tough call.  And then there’s the conundrum that always occurs when Dan gets home from a week in Arizona.  I’m dying to get out of the house, and he’s dying to stay in it.

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly advised him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”
“She’s drunk,” Joe Bell informed me.
“Moderately,” Holly confessed. “But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully, and it was something he could understand. We shook and hands and held onto each other and he wished me luck.” She glanced at the clock. “He must be in the Blue Mountains by now.”
“What’s she talkin’ about?” Joe Bell asked me.
Holly lifted her martini. “Let’s wish Doc luck, too,” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc- it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”
-Truman Capote

So, the good news is that my brother, Ben, and his friend, Matt, are looking at places and jobs here in Columbus! Dan and I are pretty excited about importing a few friends. The bad news is that apparently, Standard American English (I think it gets all caps) is dead. I know, I was shocked too. What’s happening is that the short hand used in Instant Messager and text messaging is infiltrating our schools to the point that kids no longer know how to spell or write in proper Standard American English. This, at least, is according to one Language Arts teacher in one of my classes (okay, she’s a little extremist). In any case, I feel that I should do my part and stop typing in all lower case. Even though I think it’s cute and informal, I also think it’s probably better if I actually get used to typing correctly all the time.

On that note, I blatantly stole this next section from my friend Vicki who is getting her PhD in English at Rice University. I think it’s a cool little exercise.

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They’ve come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don’t explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I had to put an asterisk because my blog doesn’t allow underlining. How weird is that?)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

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 Traveler’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 (Danny is obsessed with Dune. I should probably read it soon.)
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 (well, I’m actually reading it now — halfway through)
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

24 isn’t too shabby. The worst part, though, I think I read a few more and forgot. Oh well. It will be fun to go back to this list in the future when I’m looking for something to read (but, not right now!).