Meme time.

[gurdymonkey]

Meme The First: Three Things

Rules: Post 3 things you've done that you believe nobody else on your F-list has done. Make it however many you want. I'm in that kind of mood tonight. Indulge in remorse if someone calls you out on a listed item. Remorse should not be wasted on such trivia. If you've done it too, high five!

1. Stood with my family on a freezing cold street corner to watch President Kennedy's funeral cortege make its way from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery in November 1963.

2. Spent a week riding a green-broke 3 year old gelding named Aldo from Apt to Ste. Maries de Mer in Provence and the Camargue.

3. Accidentally backed into Jeremy Irons in the lobby of a New York theatre during the intermission of Ian McKellan's "Acting Shakespeare."

4. Read aloud, in Middle English dialect, several lines from The Miller's Tale while peering through the glass at the Ellesmere manuscript in the Huntington Library. (Geek moment!)

5. Been "buzzed" by a man in a pink unitard with hood and teeny silver cape on a unitard while busking with the hurdy gurdy on the median in front of San Francisco's Ferry Building. He circled me three times, flapping his arms gracefully as I played, then took off down the Embarcadero.

Meme the Second: The Big Read

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below. [The Big Read does not know my friends!]

01. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
02. Italicise those you intend to read. My journal, my rules - I'm skipping this part because I have a big-ass stack of "To Be Read" items of my very own. If you're reading this, you probably do too.
03. Underline the books you LOVE.
04. Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them. Why? You can lead a horse to the library but you cannot make him read.
05. My journal, my rules, Part The Second: Strike through books you read and hated. What you hate says as much as what you love. Or what you bother to read.
06. My journal, my rules, Part The Third: editiorial commentary as the whim strikes.

001 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
002 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (all three)
003 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
004 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (first three only)
005 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
006 The Bible (does inclusion in this list mean the compiler believes the Bible is fiction?)
007 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
008 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
009 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass only)
010 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
011 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (no, but I did read Return of the Native.)
013 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
014 Complete Works of Shakespeare (make that selected plays and sonnets because I've gotta sleep some time).
015 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
016 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
018 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
019 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch - George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
022 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (What, no Hemingway?)
023 Bleak House - Charles Dickens, just for the opening paragraph on fog.
024 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
027 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
028 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
029 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
031 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
034 Emma - Jane Austen
035 Persuasion - Jane Austen
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis I'm not a cheater, this will not be counted twice! See 033.
037 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
039 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden Do not get me started.
040 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
041 Animal Farm - George Orwell (did read 1984.)
042 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
045 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
046 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
       (also rest of series)
047 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
048 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
049 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
050 Atonement - Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
052 Dune - Frank Herbert
       (plus two or three more of the series)
053 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
054 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
055 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
057 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
058 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
          (Also The Pearl, The Red Pony, same author)
062 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
067 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
069 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
070 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
071 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
072 Dracula - Bram Stoker
            (Also Frankenstein - Mary Shelley)
073 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses - James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal - Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession - AS Byatt
          (Also Angels and Insects, same author)
081 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
083 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
084 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
085 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert, in the original French, no less.
086 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte's Web - EB White
          (Also Stuart Little, same author)
088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
091 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
092 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
093 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
094 Watership Down - Richard Adams
095 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
096 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (did read On The Beach)
097 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
098 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[razor-dancer.livejournal.com]

Does it count if it was another tale? It hasn't been open to the miller when I've been there.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Heck yes!

IIRC, Gaius was laughing at me on basic general principle and a couple of other people were in earshot and thought it was kinda cool that I could read it.

[razor-dancer.livejournal.com]

Heh...woot for geek pride!

I'm actually teaching the General Prologue and the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale next week to my summer session class (the Miller and Nun's priest are optional reading), so they'll be subjected to more Middle english out loud

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Have you let them in on the fact that the optional reading is some of the most fun stuff?

[razor-dancer.livejournal.com]

I did tell them that the Miller was crude and funny, but we'll see how many of them go for it. We're reading them in the middle english, so I think some of them may just be too busy with what we have assigned. I told them to pretend (although I know that it's horribly irreverent) that hooked on phonics didn't work for chaucer and to sound the words out if they got stuck.

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

I note a number of your "also reads" would be on my list, even if I didn't read the listed book. :)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I think I mom did #1. I'll have to ask to be certain. She was living in DC then (worked as a secretary at the Pentagon). As I recall she was out of town when he was shot, and it was difficult to get home, but I don't recall the details...

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I've heard back from my mom, [Bad username or unknown identity: <darttn"], she says:

"I was there. I was out of town when he was assinated, but flew back the same day his body was returned to D.C. It delayed my flight, because the one coming from Dallas was overflying Mobile, Ala, which was where I was leaving from to go back to D.C. So yes - I did watch his funeral procession with the caissons, etc.

Then later when Jackie put up the eternal flame on his grave, I watched that ceremony as well."

I have a good excuse for missing it all--I wasn't born yet...

[laurensa.livejournal.com]

Anne of Green Gables has been popping up in conversations a lot lately.

And then I went to Ollie's (a discount merchandiser), and there was a beautifully bound copy, for a ridiculously low price. (3.99) I figured it was fate, took it home with me, and re-read it, while sitting under a tree in my back yard.
Still love it.

[czina.livejournal.com]

This list does seem to have some 'issues' with it, though - listing series as 'single items', and then 'singles' from within it, too (your CS Lewis reference, for example).

I mean - if I have read the complete works of Shakespeare (read much of it for a Shakespeare class, actually) - would I have 'forgotten' to read Hamlet? Just sayin' ...

And sorry - but knowing that you were with Gaius when you did #4, reading #5 put an image of him dressed that way in my head! Scary and funny at the same time.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Unicycle Guy was fortunately built to wear a one piece Pepto Pink unitard. At least as much as one ever might be. It was pretty funny.