The Big Official Book List (-o-rama)

While reading Miss Elle’s Crafting, I stumbled across this booky challenge. The idea is, “most people” haven’t read any more than 6 (gasp! only six!) of these Official* Top 100 Books, published by a certain publishing company.

(* not sure how official, having stolen the list myself, but hey, at least we know it’s not Oprah picking the books, right? Right??)

So here’s my take on the list, avec comments.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (ah, Mr Darcy.)
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (sorry love. It’s a no-go)
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (so much love for this one!)
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (well, I read up to the very last one. So don’t tell me who dies. Even though I think I know. Okay, hang on. Is it Harry??)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (what, the entire thing? I’ve read bits of it in school…)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (have to say, found Cathy extremely annoying/whiny. And I was expecting to love it.)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (oh Joe, what larks!)
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (all of them? Crikey.)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (I can re-read this every year)
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (tried to read it in grade 4 when I was prompted to “choose a book off the classroom bookshelf”. Was not impressed upon discovering that the hobbit of the title was not the dragon on the cover.)
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (only read for school. Did not enjoy.)
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (voluntarily read it, but disliked immensely.)
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot (started it; couldn’t get through.)
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 (read and adored this entire series!)
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (nope, but read Scoop)
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (even did a monologue from the book in drama class one time)
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (I can never read it as it’s on freaking Oprah’s book list. But remember the episode of Will & Grace when J-Lo is reading it on the subway?)
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen (Emma & Persuasion are my two favourite Austens)
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Not really sure why this is here as it’s part of 33…)
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 (excuse me, WHAT?? Is there an option for “no way in all hell will I ever read this”?)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins (at one time I owned this, but never read it and pretty sure I got rid of it)
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (I’m sorry, how did this get here?)
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert (haha. I feel that after being coerced into watching two movie versions of this, AND listening to part of the audiobook in the car, it should count for having read it)
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons (I saw something nasty in the woodshed…)
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 (again, forced to read in school)
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (amazing)
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’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (okay. The thing about this one is, I’m sort of in the middle of reading it. And I have been for a couple years. Ahem. I’ll finish it, no worries.)
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker (read for school, and it was much better than I expected)
73.The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (I so wanted to be Mary when I was a kid. I even had my grandma knit me a red beret like the one she wore in the movie.)
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 (never!)
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 (I did two french projects on Saint-Exupery! He was cool! And a pilot!)
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (haha. In first-year english, we were about to read Waterland. I thought it was Watership Down and was surprised when there were no rabbits.)
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 (loved when I was a kid!)
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

PS: yes, adding “O-rama” at the end of anything inherently makes that thing more exciting. Hence list-o-rama.

PPS: I have read 32. If I counted correctly.

groceries

1. I love going grocery shopping.
2. When I go grocery shopping, I hate it when people park their carts right in front of the exact thing I’m looking for. I hate it even more when two people do this on either side of the aisle, as they have an inane conversation in front of the granola bars.
3. When I park my cart in front of something, I expect people to go around it.
4. Sometimes people move your cart.
5. That’s why I never leave my purse in the cart.
6. I’ve learned that you should always dress in your winter clothes when you’re going to the grocery store. Even in July.
7. One time I went to the grocery store and a man was walking through with a live parrot on his shoulder.
8. Always check the expiration dates.
9. My favourite food to shop for is cheese. I can browse the cheese aisle for ages, especially in ritzy grocery stores that have specialty cheeses.
10. If someone buys me a cheese platter, they have won my heart forever.
11. My 2 least favourite sections of the grocery store are: Seafood (always an unidentifiable but inevitably fishy smell…) and Meat. When I walk by Meat, I usually avert my eyes so it all blurs into a big reddish haze.
12. I also love looking at bath products and soap, even if I don’t need any.
13. Grocery stores that also sell cosmetics are a dream come true. You can find everything you need, as well as things you didn’t even know you needed!
14. They usually play really crap music. Even crapper than at the mall. Only once have I ever gone into a grocery store and heard, of all the random wonderful things, jazz playing.
15. I recently discovered the joys of going grocery shopping at night. Empty aisles, and discounted foods!

knitting up a storm

Question: What do you do when you’re getting ripped off of hours not getting enough hours at either of your two jobs?

Answer: Knit. Knit a LOT.

The past month has been one of few working hours. Don’t get me wrong: I love relaxing at home watching endless episodes of What Not To Wear as much as the next girl, but at the end of the day, you’re also not making tons of cash. Which sort of puts a damper on my other favourite pastime: shopping. (Heehee). So I’ve managed to make a bunch of things. And here they are.

First: socks. In October (Socktober), I finally got over my fear of starting socks, spurred on by a spontaneous purchase of the most yummy yarn ever. It was a lovely purply blend, and I fondled it surreptitiously during the car ride home. (No, I was not driving). Well, actually, I’m lying. Or at least, telling a half-truth. The real truth is, I wanted to knit a test-run pair of socks, but I was too cheap thrifty to shell out for the good stuff on my first pair. Enter Bernat’s Sox Multi, a “one ball makes one full pair of socks!” bargain. Also enter Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Basic Sock Recipe, the result of a Ravelry search for “EASY sock pattern”.

Now, I wish I could say the first (test) pair of socks turned out magnificently. They did not. Through no fault of the recipe, (I now realize it was a multi-layered error on my part, a combination of yarn thickness and needle size, both incorrect), I ended up with a GINORMOUS first sock.

(it only looks non-ginormous because I have stretched it beyond belief. But believe me. It’s big).

So I went down a needle size, gritted my teeth, and knit up the second.

This resulted in… a less-ginormous-but-still-too-big-for-human-feet second sock.

Anyways. They’re not horrible, they just fall off a lot. But I totally still wear them around the house.

After learning from my mistake, I bought the Casbah yarn and cast on for my second pair of socks: the lovely Jaywalkers.

Well. Hadn’t I just become hooked on socks, now! I immediately decided to make another, this time as a gift for Himself. After having him pick out an ever-so-soft merino skein of Mirasol Hacho in a wonderful foresty green colourway, I made these:

It’s the Silk Garden Socks pattern, found on Ravelry. In this pic the sock is being modelled on my much smaller foot, but they fit him well. (Incidentally, if you are wondering, they took about 2.5-2.75 skeins).

Aside from the sock obsession, I also cast on and finished two (TWO!) cardigans!

On the left, we have the Cropped Cardi from Stephanie Japel’s Fitted Knits (my very first foray into top-down garment construction, as well as a one-day bulky knit). On the right, Mrs. Darcy, a pattern by Mary Weaver. Mrs. Darcy was a project fror the Jane Austen Book Club knit-a-long. I’ve finished the sweater, but haven’t opened the book yet. Let’s just say the last time I read Sense & Sensibility I sort of wished I was re-reading Emma. Or Persuasion. But I’m going to give it a try… right after I’ve finished the new Marian Keyes. And Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me. (hee)

Oh yeah! I almost forgot. I also knit two cowls– one which I don’t really love, so I won’t put up a pic just now, and also the Philly Cowl:

It was also a pattern I came across on Ravelry and had to make. The yarn is cheap– Bernat Satin Solids in Heathered Plum– but soft for an acrylic. This cowl took about half a skein.

Anyways, I’m now currently working on an afghan, which may or may not be completed by the time warm weather rolls around next spring. Oh, and a scarf for a Christmas gift. (It’s Shifting Sands, if you must know).

We’re having extremely strange weather for November: for the past few weeks I’ve been busting out the scarves and mittens, but today it’s too warm (!) to wear any of my cardigans. Either way, there’s more knitting to be done. So, I’ll write later.

PS- I’m really looking forward to a couple movies coming out this month. Happy Go Lucky, and Australia. If you see them before me, let me know what you think!