Category: Untidy Heap

Via De:

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

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 — Halfway through all three.
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 Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger — been sitting on my too-read shelf for years…
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot — seems like I read another of his books as well, Freshman year in college
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 — redundant list, much?
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 — I am a bear, he is a bear… only seems natural
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 — again, thank you Freshman Honors English
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
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
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath — … don’t think I’ll thank Freshman English for this one…
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 — we were a well-read bunch of college prats, we were… I remember discussing her obsession with a needlestick puncture at some length in class
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 — I tried, but man it started out slow.
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 — haven’t read the complete works, but did read this. thank GOODNESS they put it on here twice.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo — In English, and about half of it in its native French

It does not bode well for your activity level during the day when you resort to hitting “Random Entry” on Wikipedia in hopes of reading something interesting.
Particularly sad when, upon doing so for 10 minutes, the most interesting entry you get is on a former Real World star-turned-professional-wrestler, and the other random entries include three appearances of the same small township in Germany.
After all the hubbub surrounding the wedding/New York trip/sightseeing with the family/visiting with my agent, the last few weeks have been nigh on bucolic… complete with wolf-attacks*, granted, but still… It’s been a lot of house-cleaning, donating of old stuff to charity, planting new things in the front yard and on the back deck.
In a few days, Kate and I head to Los Cabos for our honeymoon — the sort of vacation that involves very little activity and a fair number of books and margaritas — if anyone has any fun suggestions on things to do or see while lounging under the seaside sun**, please drop them in the comments.
Aside from that, I’d like to talk about this little writing project I started up, but not quite yet: I think I’m going to work on it a bit, first, and then reveal it once it picks up a bit more steam. This I will say: like Storyball, it’s a kind of writing outlet (and game, of course also a kind of game), combined with my own dependable addiction to futzing around with new web technologies.
More later: in the meantime, I’ll keep typing away and might have something fun to share in a few weeks.
* – There was no actual wolf attack, though my grandchildren might hear a far different story when and if they ever ask about the no-doubt handsome scar running along the side of my left thumb. And the back of my hand. And the ones on my feet. And big toe. Ouch.
** – Ahhh, sun. The dependable sun of a desert resort, not the inconstant and fickle Denver sun, which is blazingly uncomfortable one day, and hiding under a cloudy blanket of sleet and rain the next. The great irony of the phrase global warming is that the specific results are more shocking locally, and only involve extremes of heat about half the time.

It’s 1987, you’re a child, and your family videotapes you dancing to a then-popular song.
What do you do, 20 years later?
You dance with your childself.
Watch all the way through. Guaranteed to make you smile, even if you’re covered in bruises and lacerations from breaking up a dog fight a few days ago.

Last night, for no particular reason, I moved from ‘folding laundry and putting things away’ to ‘cleaning out the closets’ mode, and ended up putting four bags of (clean, entirely serviceable) clothes out by the front door to be donated to charity. We’ll probably drop them off tomorrow, since we’re also dropping off some old computers for specialized recycling, and donating the chairs from an dining room set that we replaced during the wedding (the old table is going to meet a circular saw and become a couple of bookshelves in the kitchen area). In addition, we’re replacing our suddenly-non-functional dishwasher this weekend, and need to figure out a way to get the old washing machine and a (regrettably) broken elliptical machine out of the basement. It’s a spring cleaning extravaganza, and has me eyeing the rest of the house with a hungry, contemplative expression.

Time to get rid of a little clutter…

Now, to be fair, neither I (nor Kate) are generally predisposed to clutter in the first place, so it’s not as though the house is that bad. Large stacks of papers don’t last very long. Counter tops stay relatively clear. Rooms themselves aren’t usually burdened with too much furniture: I’ve lived here for over half a decade and the front living room has gone entirely unfurnished for that entire time – until it came into service as a play room for my daughter. The wide, empty space suited me just fine — it was one less thing that needed straightening or organizing when people came over.
I like open space in a house, and Kate’s lived in New York apartments most of her adult life, where a walk-in closet is worth more than a bedroom the size of a walk-in closet — I think she’s still getting used to the idea that our living space has square feet measurements with four digits. (You should see her in the local supermarket; it’s like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson.)

Not Kate.
And yet… what few knick knack shelves I have brim to overflowing with current and not-so photos of friends and family, and I definitely have problems with keeping things that I will never, ever, EVER use or interact with again in my life, but which carry some nearly-forgotten sentimental importance; while the open space in my house is pretty clear, closets and drawers often brim to overflowing.
Every so often, I give such things a stern look and start tossing.
That’s how the closet clearing came about. By rights, I shouldn’t have any more old clothes left to throw out — I’ve dropped 60 pounds in the last five years and kept it off, and have long since donated any and all clothing that old-me needed around; well over a dozen trash bags of L, XL, XXL, and even some XXXL stuff over the last half-decade — what I’m taking to Goodwill tomorrow are bags of t-shirts with logos I no longer find funny, shirts I still like but will never wear because they’re four sizes too big, gifts that I never wore and never will, and even a couple old suits and sports jackets that I kept around ‘just in case’, even though they make me look like a dressed up scarecrow in a fat man’s field. It was all just junk I didn’t really need but didn’t have the guts to throw out at the time.
Weeks like this are freeing and a bit traumatic at the same time. I really, truly, LOVE clearing junk out of the house — I love the feeling that there’s more air to breathe, thanks to the open space created — at the same time, everything we own has a memory and emotion attached to it; we like the person who gave us that shirt, even though we’ll never wear a doubleknit maroon macramé tank top. If I could look at a pile of stuff and know which things I’ll need and which I’ll never use again, things would be simple, but it almost never is.
It helps (tremendously) not to think about the STUFF itself, and focus on what you want to accomplish, but it’s still hard.
Hopefully, the pay off (a clean, shiny, junk-free -reduced living space next week) will be worth it.
Edit to add: Kate wanted me to mention a book that came in for me via Amazon this morning: It’s All Too Much, by TLC Clean Sweep guru Peter Walsh. Its arrival is a nice bit of synchronicity, but I didn’t mention it in the post because (a) I’ve only read the marginally schmaltzy introduction and (b) the book was actually purchased as research for a “working smarter” training project I’m developing at the new job.