Summer reading list

2.10pm 11 July 2008 Friday

Thank heavens it's Friday. My hormone-addled brain is incapable of absorbing more information so the weekend is a relief, since H and I pretty much bum around or go out together.

MH just sent me a list of popular classics, if you can call them that, as follows:

Instructions:
- Look at the list and bold those you have read
- Italicise the ones you want to read
- Underline the books you really loved and strikethrough the ones really didn't enjoy
- Reprint this list in your own journal if you want to... you know you want to.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip 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 - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
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 Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
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
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In A 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's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
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 - 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
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
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

On ironing bedsheets

3.59pm 29 May 2008 Thursday

The clock on my desktop is stuck at 3.59pm. I glanced at it before starting on this post, thinking, "What a coincidence I'm writing this right before the top of the hour, but I bet it'll turn to 4pm even before I can manage a word."

I typed, and I typed, looking at the clock after every keystroke, expecting the numbers to jump forward, but the release didn't come until I stopped focussing on the dial.

Thus is my life, obsessing over minutes that trickle by...

I never thought I would belong to the crazy Western European set, you know, the ones who iron their bedsheets. I make it a rule never to iron anything unless I'm supremely embarrassed by appearing in public in it, and I have never gone out in bedsheets. Unfortunately I have, however, slept between the crisp, cool, soft and impossibly smooth sheets at my in-laws', and that was the start of my downhill slide into decadence.

We had spent two weeks with the little ones and had the parents over for dinner the same day the kiddies left, because the older ones were en route from Bodensee back to Wendtorf. You can imagine the chaos that ensued before and after the dinner. We wanted to crash into bed, nary to do with cleaning up, but what did the missus do? She just had to iron the gosh darn sheets.

Now, I have piles of unironed clothes rivalling the Leaning Tower of Pisa hidden in my closet and all who know me know that I hate ironing. But at 11pm that night, I just had to sleep on ironed sheets, and by golly, that was what I was going to do! I dragged the beastly ironing board out of the tiny closet with 4 pairs of rollerblades rolling over my feet, as there was simply nowhere else to stash them while I got the ironing board out, and started ironing.

If you have done any kind of ironing, you would know that ironing masses of straight, uncomplicated bolts of cloth is one of the easiest thing ever, and after 20 minutes, I was done. We dressed the bed quickly, plopped our big butts on it, and savoured the sensation.

An unironed bedsheet is nothing bad. You feel the creases, but usually exhaustion takes its toll on you and the Sandman claims your consciousness before you are too bothered by the uneven material.

An ironed bedsheet, however, is a totally different ballgame. The boring cotton is transformed into a cool yet warm material, not unlike satin without the static or cold. Our light summer blankets sit in the duvet covers snugly, not once bunching up into a ball like they usually do. Instead, they enclose us in their fluffy, airy goodness without stifling, and as you drift off into Neverneverland, you think, "Ah, this is how royalty live..."

A Journey of a Thousand Li Begins with One Step

1.34pm 21 April 2008 Monday

As a child I loved learning idioms and proverbs. I glommed on the idea of using a short phrase to convey an entire idea instantly, and it used to tickle me to no end reading all the cheng yu and xie hou yu I could lay my hands on.

As a writer I usually have a scene in my head that guides the flow of the prose. In this case I have an image of a footprint in sand to correspond with my title but unfortunately the tide keeps coming in to wash my footprint away.

Usually words shimmer in my head as I write. I'm not a very organised writer so words that dance most vigorously in my mind appear on screen in a heap as my fingers do their thing across the keyboard. Most of the time I have an idea I want to communicate and the jumble of words relate to each other by this idea, and I organise the words to form a coherent sentence.

But the tide keeps coming in to wash this little footprint that was meant to be a long journey, away.

I have never stopped to consider how profusely I normally read, until my access to English literature was limited. It also follows that I have never realised the profound impact of reading, on writing.

These days when I write, I have to rein in my thoughts so that they trickle out slooowly as I find the right words to describe them as accurately as I feel them in my mind. It was easy when I wrote and read in a proliferate manner because the words were in a primordial soup I could easily fish out to form a sentence.

Now the same words I used to know so intimately are mocking at me from within their dirty little fish tank. I can barely discern their sillouette; I know they are there behind the grimy glass, in the murky waters.

I can hear the gargle of their taunts as clear as you hear someone speaking from land while you are underwater. Glop, gulp, gulg.

The ideas in my mind pound against the little hole I allow them until they run out of energy. Slowly, they leave the room one by one until only a wisp of their scent is left.

---

As I write, I wonder if I can find my beloved little streams of thought again. This blog has undergone quite a drought recently and perhaps with small amounts of rain, I can reinstate a nice little sunny meadow.

Do you think the cows, sheep and frolicking puppies will return at one point too?

Hobson's Choice

12.27pm 22 January 2008 Tuesday

A true Hobson's choice refers to taking that one choice available, or taking none at all. Actually looking at the situation, there wasn't even any need to evaluate except in my mind. So my conclusion is that I'm too free and thinking too hard...