memeish

[jdbl]

Bold means read it, underlined means intending to read it, italicized means started but didn't finish, strikethrough means hated it, asterisk means read it more than once.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights* (I'm all about the Nineteenth Century novel, baby, particularly the goth and goth-influenced ones)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (loved)
Moby Dick (unexpectedly loved)
Ulysses
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice* (pretty much my favorite book)
Jane Eyre* (see above re: 19th C novels)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (Jeff was a TA for this guy)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway (not a huge fan of the stream of consciousness thing)
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (felt meh about it, but at least it makes sense)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead

Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch (a little slow and not enough vampires - could be greatly improved by the addition of vampires)
Frankenstein * (love)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula* (love, even though it's deeply flawed in some ways, so wonderfully entertaining)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King * (a favorite of mine as a child)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 (so scarily prophetic)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility* (not quite as good as P&P, but still so tasty)
The Picture of Dorian Gray* (love)
Mansfield Park* (perhaps Austen's least likeable protagonist, but still worth reading more than once)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse (see above re: stream of consciousness)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (all I really remember about this book is the cheese)
Oliver Twist (hate Dickens but this isn't too bad)
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune * (so many annoying things about this book but I still find it fascinating)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir

The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere (Gaiman's a better comic book writer than a novelist, I think, but I still enjoy his books enough to keep reading them)
A Confederacy of Dunces (meh)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (one of the best books of the 20th C, but I can't say that I love it, no matter how much I admire it)
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (one of the creepiest books I've ever read)
Persuasion * (it's Austen, so I love it, but I rank it just above Mansfield Park)
Northanger Abbey * (love so much)
The Catcher in the Rye (meh)
On the Road (sometimes you wish that things that are influential weren't, so much)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in much-simplified french)
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down (mean bunnies!)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Home improvements are going very slowly. More things with the wiring have popped up, and the chimney and foundation need repointing. Joy. Have resigned self to poverty forever. Am at least building equity, la la la.

Still spending a lot more time dealing with details of various problems than writing. Did a meditation/yoga class yesterday and may join a new meditation group that's starting in the area. I need to start doing either yoga, or tai chi, or some kind of physical exercise that won't overtax my joints, because I've gotten really weak. My back in particular, which explains why I've been having back trouble, I'm sure. Am somewhat sore today from holding poses, but it's the good kind of sore.

Got some editing work, polishing a grant proposal for some non-native English speakers. It's probably worth a hundred dollars or so, enough to help pay for my haircut & color, at least. I've got a lead on some other freelance work, as well, so here's hoping.