I aspire to be well read, and you know, have a general understanding of the world, society, and all those pop culture references that permeate media like giant inside jokes. I got a Toronto Library card last summer and have never looked back. You can read as many books as you want for FREE and they will send the books you want to read from all over the city to wherever you want to pick them up. Yeah, I'm lame, but I like free stuff a lot.
For the most part, I just read casually while I'm on the subway or waiting somewhere for a while, but in a couple of weeks we'll be going away to the middle of nowhere, so I imagine I will have a lot of time to read while we are there. We'll be a couple of hours out of Thunder Bay so we will not even have internet for essentially a week and we have a super long drive on the way there and back. I'm taking the opportunity today to update my library hold list so I'll be able to pick up books next week before we leave.
I like to watch TV and things while I'm sewing and doing other half-attention activities. There is a lot more to watch during the September to May TV season, and thus in the 2011-2012 season I watched a lot of shows. The trouble is that I start to do it compulsively after a while and just keep watching episodes of things even if I don't particularly like them just because I watched them before. Now that it is summer the process has to change a little because there isn't quite as much being shoved onto our screens by networks.
I haven't been too terribly into anime since high school and yaoi and Beyblade G Revolution, but ever since I finished university and had some more time, I've been trying to get back into it in some way. I watched some of the beginning of Black Butler, Hetalia, and K-ON, and every once in a while I put my Dragonball Z DVDs on because it has always been the perfect thing to work to. I do always watch English dubs though, because my Japanese isn't nearly good enough to understand and not stare at the screen to read the subtitles. Right now, I'm one season into Avatar. I never watched it the first time around and it has been recommended to me countless times. I'm also three DVDs into the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I've been borrowing it from the library, so I can watch it while the internet is being slow. I've been considering doing cosplay. Otherwise, I recently started watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, partly to see what all the fuss is about. It is really cute and it's giving me some cute ideas so we can look forward to when I have time to try them out.
In terms of live action, my boyfriend and I are currently watching Breaking Bad, Firefly, and Game of Thrones. I've also been watching Sister Wives sometimes on the internet.
Below is an amalgamation of lists of books that I posted to my old Livejournal a while back. I use it as a guide to what I should read next if I'm not sure. I also have been reading the Hunger Games series, although I'm still waiting for my hold on Mockingjay to come in, so I've been avoiding spoilers.
Top 100 best loved novels from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
For purposes of organization, a legend:
= - indicates books in both of the first two lists
books I have read
books I have read part of
books I like a lot
*** -books I intend to read in the near future
Books with one asterisk afterwards are ones that I've read this year.
=1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
=2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
=3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
***=4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
=5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee*
=7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
=8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
=9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
=10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
=11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
=12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
=13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
=14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
=16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
=17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
=18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
=19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
=20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
=21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
=22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
=23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
=24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
=25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
=26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
=27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
=28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
=29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
=30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
=32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
=34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
=35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (We did part of a unit on this in 8th grade)
=37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
=38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
=40. Emma, Jane Austen
=41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
=42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
=43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald*
=44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
=
=
=48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
=51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
=52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
=54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy*
=55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
=57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
=60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
=62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
=63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
=66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman*
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
=
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
=75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
=76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
=77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
=78. Ulysses, James Joyce
=79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
=87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
=88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
=90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
=97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
=100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
I've read seventeen from this list now.
The missing entries on another top 100 list from someone's blog entry. I think it's the one that went around a while back.
The Bible (The Gospels, and the Torah up to partway through Numbers, + assorted other passages mostly for school back in the day)
Complete Works of Shakespeare (Everyone has read some Shakespeare. I dislike it because everyone is stupid in it.)
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger*
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown*
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
The Inferno – Dante
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker*
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – EB White (In fifth grade...>.>)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery Several times, since fifth grade, in both French and English.
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (but in French, and because I love the musical a lot)
This brings me to 24 books total, out of 135.
100 books you should have read in college-- Includes more than just novels so that's cool. From http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2009/07/30/the-100-essential-books-you-should-have-read-in-college/ Some of these are repeats of above. I went to school for fashion, so I didn't read much of anything except in a couple of philosophy courses.
ANCIENT
Beowulf, Anonymous
The Iliad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
The Republic, Plato (I've read most of this for my "Social Thought and the Critique of Power" course, in which I learned that fashion school made me stop using my brain.)
Oresteia, Aeschylus
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
The Aeneid, Virgil
CLASSICS
1984, George Orwell
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Candide, Voltaire
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville
***The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita, Vladamir Nobokov
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
FICTION BASED ON HISTORY
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck*
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
"BEYOND THE STANDARDS"
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
I Served the King of England, Bohumil Hrabal
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
"MINORITY AUTHORS"- SO LIKE, NOT BY WHITE GUYS
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Native Son, Richard Wright
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
(I have read parts of some of the books in the following sections but I can't remember which so I guess it doesn't count.)
BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND SOCIAL THEORY
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
***The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Bible
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Edith Hamilton
Confessions, Saint Augustine
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, Friedrich Nietzsche
Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
***Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
DRAMA AND POETRY
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov
The Divine Comedy, Dante
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The Misanthrope, Moliere
Faust, Johann von Goethe
Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
The Double Helix, James D. Watson
A River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
ART
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
The Lives of the Artists, Vasari
On Painting, Alberti
Poetics, Aristotle
Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich
MISCELLANEOUS
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
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