March 2008

links for 2008-03-16

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Again with the book meme

Heh. Another book meme I’ve been saving, this one from Sassymonkey – the librarything books most likely to be marked unread:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations

American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man

Love in the time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange

Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984*
Angels & Demons

The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest*
To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables

The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things*

A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island

David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Again with the book meme Read More »

Have I done this meme?

I’m cleaning out my feedreader and trying to block out some really bad synchronized swimming music and I see I saved this post from kperfetto from ages ago… 100 most influential women in books meme. Weird that I don’t seem to have done this meme. I wonder why. Let’s do it now, just to kill time and block out the suck.

I found this meme at the wonderful the hidden side of a leaf. These are one-hundred of the most influential books written by women. Bold the books you’ve read; bold the author’s name if you’ve read something else by her (I added “TBR” – to be read — to books I want to read):

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando

7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia

16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying 

17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time

24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland

28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife

37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved

51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession

59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

Have I done this meme? Read More »

Can You OD on Mucinex?

My life feels weird right now and I’m not sure why and my sleep schedule is really, really screwed up and I really, really don’t know why that’s happening. I’d like to blame it all on losing an hour but I can’t because I’ve lost an hour every year and not felt this weird and not slept this weird.

Yes, I’m working a lot but I always work a lot.

Yes, I have a lot of stress in my life but I always have a lot of stress in my life.

I have to do something before I really do OD on Mucinex.

See last night, I was exhausted. I turned off the light at about 9:30 last night. TW was already asleep and I was pretty exhausted so I thought for sure I’d bet plenty of sleep. But I tossed and I turned and the dog was howling in her sleep and I kept getting up to make sure she wasn’t trapped in a blanket or being attacked by a killer cat or something. Then my legs were really restless and I felt a little headache coming on. So I reached over for the bottle of tylenol and shook out a few. I didn’t have a drink next to my side of the bed so I walked over to TW’s side and downed the pills which felt funny in my hand but whatever, I took them and got back in bed. I looked at the clock, 12:30. Ugh.

At 3:30 TW woke up ’cause she heard the dog howling in her sleep. I woke up and my ears felt all gummy and my throat hurt and my nose hurt and my eyes hurt and I thought “WTF, I didn’t go to bed sick, what is going on…” and I went right back to sleep ’til the alarm went off at 5am.

It was then that I realized I had taken three Mucinex and not three Tylenol. Yea. No wonder my ears and nose and throat and eyes hurt. It was doing a job on all of the liquid in my body. Geez.

I guess I’m just lucky TW’s drugs weren’t on my night stand, I could have OD’d on immuno-suppressants or something.

Can You OD on Mucinex? Read More »

Barefoot:A Novel

Barefoot is chick lit and it is also cancer chick lit. Always a good combination. What I appreciated about this one was the fact that the other two women, the cancer free women, were in more trouble than the chick with the cancer. Awesome. I mean, in a novel it makes for awesome reading.

You don’t spend the whole book commiserating over the poor mom of babies who has cancer. Instead you’re distracted by the pregnant chick whose husband is a dirtbag, the young professor who not only slept with her student but damaged a Jackson Pollack and the teenage boy whose mom killed herself when he was 12. Awesome.

Also it was a little bit long. And it didn’t have chapters. It was divided by month – June, July and August and then Winter. And those summer months were long, long, long. I need chapters, darn it.

Looking for good cancer chick lit – Barefoot will fit the bill.

Barefoot:A Novel Read More »

links for 2008-03-13

links for 2008-03-13 Read More »

A Gainesville PSA

They mean it.


I drop Michelle off at this spot, several times a week. OK, not this exact spot – this is the parking lot exit and I tend to drop her off at the parking lot entrance which is like 30 yards back – and every time I drop her off I say “Damn, I really need to bring my camera.” And today. I did.

Michelle works at the place that has such great burritos that people risk being towed to grab a bag full of them. You see, parking is almost non-existent in downtown Gainesville and it’s extra non-existent directly across from campus so that tiny little Target Copy parking lot is prime parking space for burrito hungry people.

Anyway. I love the sign. Both of them because there’s one at both the entrance and the exit and they both make me smile, every time. Even when the drop off time is 5:10am on a Sunday morning.

A Gainesville PSA Read More »