Just checking.

I was looking around on the internet the other day, and I found the most surprising thing - my blog! I had forgotten all about it.

Looks like several of you (or at least your RSS feeds) did not.

So maybe I'm back. We'll see.

Hello?

Hello?

Fixing the book list meme

This is a meme I've seen drifting around on the Internet for a little while now. The idea is that you take the list, mark the ones you've read with an X, then post it on your (usually) Facebook page so everyone knows how well-read you are (or aren't). The origin of this list is often attributed to the BBC, but I haven't done any actual research into it.

The problems with this list are, in my opinion, many. For one thing, it lists The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Chronicles of Narnia as two separate books, whereas one is the first book in a series, and the other is all seven books of that series. So one of those has to go. It also lists The Complete Works of William Shakespeare as one (heavy) book, likewise Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Which is it list, is it one book or a series? Does Harry Potter count as seven? And if you're listing the complete works of Shakespeare, why did you list Hamlet separately?

The list is also very heavy in what is deemed "classic" British literature (bearing out the BBC origin, I suppose) - but that really skews the list in ways I don't agree with.

And you don't agree with it either, do you?

No, you don't. So let's fix it.

Here's the deal. I'm posting the list below, but with the corrections of taking out each book series and replacing it with the first book in that series - except for the Narnia books, which are already represented separately. That one I'm replacing with Prince Caspian. Your job is to remove as many books as you think don't belong there, but with one catch: for as many books as you remove, you must replace them with a book you do think belongs. Post your changes as a comment on this post. At the end, I'll compile everything (if needed) and see where we ended up.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - 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 Romeo and Juliet - William 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

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 Prince Caspian - 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 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

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

Suzanne likes to . . .

The saga of the broken finger will appear one of these days, complete with photos! In the mean time, I'm posting fun stuff I find on the interwebs. Clark posted this on his blog, so I thought I'd do it too. Basically, you Google yourself, but with the phrase "[Suzanne] likes to." [You'd insert your own name, of course.] Then you write down the first ten things.

So, without further ado, Suzanne likes to:

• Suzanne likes to say, when asked how long she has been singing, she answers "since I was in the Music Womb".
• Suzanne likes to be part of the action.
• Suzanne likes to contemplate interesting phenomena, like how the three guppies in her aquarium became 161 guppies in five months. [goodness. So far my two are threatening to become more, but haven't as of yet.]
• Suzanne likes to travel and take long walks with her dog, Charley.
• Suzanne likes to serves these popovers with a salad for a light lunch. [Suzanne likes to haves grammar problems, apparently.]
• Suzanne likes to be with her two children, taking them outside and to music festivals.
• Suzanne likes to stay active. [well....]
• Suzanne likes to mix classic elements with something fresh and new.
• Suzanne likes to say that her eight siblings were like having eight built-in best friends.
• Suzanne likes to exercise, watch (and make) movies, travel, spend time with family and work on various writing projects.

So there you have it.

television, television

Today I was reading an article on the New York Times' website, called "Why are there no good parents on TV?"

I liked it. It was a good article. However, what I want to address here is one of the comments posted after the article, by a reader who goes by 'K.'

"Why in the world would an escapist medium like TV bother with anything that was "normal”? I don’t turn on the TV to revisit my boring day. My current favorite shows can be summarized as follows:

• the human race running from robots in spaceships.


• a spy who is stuck in Miami.


• airplane crash survivors on an odd island.


• FBI agents investigating strange phenomena.


• renovating old houses.


• the trials and tribulations of geeks living together, with an attractive neighbor who drops in from time to time.


• a nearly retarded man who lives in Rhode Island and offends nearly everyone on some level


• an often fascinating hour of television devoted to some kind of science.

I can’t say there’s anything good in it, but boy is it entertaining (and sometimes educational, as well)"

Which led me to ask, "how would I summarize some of my favorite TV shows?" Since Big Bang Theory and This Old House were done above, I'll try some others.

• one man's flashbacks to his single days in New York


• who knew that the crap in the attic was valuable after all?


• the most dysfunctional workplace, ever


• the most dysfunctional TV show, ever


• deeply weird doctors who work in an often surreal hospital


• In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.

What are your favorite shows?