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"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read.
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog
Well, my own reading is not extensive but I dont mind. There are a few that I intend to read and other I just enjoy hearing about
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (Nothing against them)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (not the whole thing of course, Songs of Solomon? no)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nine-Teen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip 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 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife (just because I had an adventure at the library)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (does the movie count for half)
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 - Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (no thank you)
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
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 Milner
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I did advanced english senior year and was able to avoid this one)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany-
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (I loved, loved loved this book. It taught me about symbolism in literature and I found a lot fo connections and application in my life. Love it)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (not a favorite, but don't hate enough to strike. wierd)
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 (yes! and a fave now with the serendipitous visit to Quatre Gats! It really was very neat to have a connection to this book. I want to read more from historic Barcelona)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (...have begun)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (no, precisely because everyone says I should)
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 (started it because it was in the sleeper of one of my dads trucks while I was out working for several days. An odd trucker book eh?)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (I own and have no desire to read)
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
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (started it then finished with the movie. good lessons in it though)
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 St. 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
Show us your last text message.
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"Well I just heard today that you can donate a testacle for $250,000. Tempting."
"We havent got all day"
"We havent got all day"
"Do you know who put my boots under the sink?"
"So apparently Hotrod has a box of chocolates in his car for all those girls he gives a ride home"
Show us your favorite YouTube video.
Ok, we are youtube fanatics in our apartment. My roommate Adam has seen every single video ever to be put on youtube so it is very difficult to choose just one. But I will have to go with... Poodle Workout!
Poodle Workout exemplifies the variety, randomness and quality of videos available for our veiwing pleasure on youtube.
24 May 2008 President Thomas S. Monson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced today that the Church plans to build a new temple in Phoenix, Arizona. This will bring the worldwide total number of temples built or under construction to 140, including five in Arizona.
"There are currently two temples in Arizona, in Mesa and Snowflake. Two additional temples were announced last month for Gila Valley and Gilbert, Arizona.
"The Church’s Temple Department reports that the Mesa Arizona Temple, close to the city of Phoenix, is attended by more worshippers than any other Latter-day Saint temple in the world outside of Utah." http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/new-temple-for-phoenix-arizona-announced
Last weekend Threadline threw a party. It was supposed to be a bonfire and concert at the Sand dunes but it was raining, bummer! So we moved it to the Rockland Lounge. Our buddy Cris Crabb and his band, which includes our roomate Cliff playing bass with the black threadline shirt on, headlined and a few others played. It was awesome!
It was so packed that you could barely move, there were people crowded outside and lined up outside the building waiting for people to come out so that they could get in. Several hundred people were there. This week Threadline Clothing got picked up by a local vendor, no doubt due to good buzz from the party. Chris Crabb's band as well as the Duo known as Scott DeVine are sponsored by Threadline and sport the apparel at each performance. Scott DeVines new CD features a prominent Threadline logo on the case.
Me and my roomate Cody at the party. His hair used to be really really surfer long but his teachers started taking points off his grade so he cut it. This was pretty much his debut of the new do. We are going to our roomates concert tonight at a local vendor but we have to pay 5 bucks, lame. I mean I like to support my buddies but I hear them play everyday, do I really have to pay?
Happy Mothers Day Mom!
Even though the weather is being stupid and good days are sporadic, we have decided it is summer anyway. We went camping last week and it was a lot of fun. Even though the place where we went "camping" was a park on the river, sometimes down wind from the reclamation facility, next to the airport and when you stood on the pic-nic table you could see the temple on the bluff, it was fun.
To entertain ourselves we were trying to throw sweedish fish over the fire and catch them in our mouth. Needless to say, Kenzie and I retain the champion title at that game in all of its forms and have for 4 weeks straight. Thank you.
Yesterday:
High 72, Mostly Sunny
Today:
High 39, Rain/Snow Showers
I represent Arizona's 6th congressional district in my legislative simulation class. My district comprises south east maricopa county, mainly Mesa and an obviously predominately conservative constituency.
We held elections for house and party officers today. I did not want to run for speaker of the house, that means more work, but I did want to run for republican party leader. 3 people ran for speaker and all gave a stump speech and I gave a speech at the same time. I did a really good job and asked not to be included in the vote for speaker. The two losers from that then ran along side me for party leader. The girl had 8 votes, I had 7 and my buddy Dan had four. They announced the girl the winner. Now, I didnt want to sound like a desperate, poor loser but I think a run off would have been appropriate. More people did not vote for the girl than those who did. And, since me and Dan are buddies, most of his votes, I predict, would have gone to me. Im sure I would have won in a run off. I conceded though and still had the opportunity to run for party whip. But seeing as how Dan had run for speaker and party leader and got third in both I felt kind of bad for him because I knew how much he really wanted to be involved so I let him have it uncontested.
Thoughts: I believe I could have ran for speaker and won soley on a good campaign speech. I could have out campaigned, out smiled and out schmoozed all of them- and won. That kind of scares me. Scares me because I knew I didnt want it as much as them and also would not do as good of a job as them (not because of ability but because of interest and dedication) But I could have got it anyway... hmm.
Tonight we had a ward Family Home Evening. We had a bake off. I found out this afternoon so I didnt have much time to prepare. I decided to go with a classic, No-bake Cookies. we were supposed to put our apartment number on a sign next to them. As I looked down the table I noticed chicken scratch scribbles of apartments on pieces of paper. Perhaps it was my loss earlier in the day that motivated me to step up my game a bit, but my sign was neatly drawn on folded peice of paper like a placecard. I changed the name from no-bakes to English Pub Cookies with Elizebeth Bourbon Concentrate (thats not true but its marketing. I could name my kid Laquisha and she doesnt have to be black, right?) When people asked if it really had bourbon in it I said that it was a secret recipe and I was not at liberty to discuss it. I encouraged people to vote, not for me necesaily but the personal contact surely helped in their decision. Needless to say I won first place. Now honsestly, you cant tell me I dont know how to run an effective campain. I mean seriously, who wins a BAKE off with NO-BAKE cookies.
Lessons of a monday.
Last fall/winter I worked at Cruiser's Cafe back home. While I was there the owners told me that they were remodeling and asked if I would come up with a design and a concept for them. They were very excited as I presented my ideas to them. They were frightened when I told them that I had to go back to school and could not be there for the actual demo/remodel work. I left them with drawings and notes and my phone number. I wasn't sure what to expect but when I returned home for spring break I was able to finaly see what they had done and I have to say I am very impressed. It looks fantastic! They followed closey many things that I had suggested. There are a few things (mostly minor, a few major) that I would have liked to have seen done and a few details that I know, if I had been there, could have been worked out. I took "before" pictures but they are at home. All I have are the after pictures.
The booths have been recovered, the tables painted, teh flooring re-done, new siding. diamond plate steel on the bar. There used to be a second stairwell up to the bar where the far booth is underneath the round coca-cola sign. I suggested that be taken out for more seating
Since the second stairwell was taken out a long bench seat was able to be built along that half wall. Increasing seating in the bar area. The "motorcycle style" bar stool was the owners find, I give him credit for that, its pretty cool.
Before the walls were cluttered with sings and memorabilia from teh golden age of Route 66. With the new design only authentic and real vintage items were kept on display. This gives the overall aesthetic more flow without feeling too structured or contrived.
The entire restaurant has sheet metal siding at chair rail hight and the bar itself was covered in diamond-plate steel to look like a tool box. Notice the original tin ceiling; it really pops out with the new coat of high gloss black paint.
