Overly Verbal

I have something to bitch about!

So lately iTunes has been making me upgrade it frequently, and it recently decided to consolidate my music library or something, and it changed everything around so that many, many songs are suddenly classified as parts of a compilation when they are not, and Wednesday night I spent easily two minutes of my life trying to find a song by looking for the artist, and I eventually found it, but not where it belongs at all. Why does iTunes keep screwing with me? I’m busy, and I don’t have time to fix their wacky categorization.

(However, I’m sure that you’ll be pleased to know that if you were wandering around my newly miscategorized music library, you’d find The Buzzcocks right before Captain & Tennille, followed swiftly by Cheap Trick. How are you not gonna be happy about that?)

Actually, I do have time to fix it, because soon I’ll be on a plane, on my way to Texas. My most valiant attempts at locating and then purchasing a pair of cowboy boots to wear to Texas failed miserably, but Wednesday I purchased the most adorable dress in the history of dresses, which happens to match perfectly a pair of shoes that have been sitting under my dresser waiting patiently to be matched to the perfect dress, and so this evening I will be the (admittedly self-declared) Queen of Adorableness. Which is, well, pretty much as we expected. (And also better than the title I earned at work the other day. I am apparently the Empress of PowerPoint, but this title seems to carry with it responsibility for teaching everyone and their mother how to actually use PowerPoint. While I appreciate being recognized for my skills, it just so happens that almost every single feature of PowerPoint* serves to make things ugly and difficult to comprehend, and it pains my soul to make things ugly and difficult to comprehend – Animation? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should - so I’m trying to figure out how to abdicate that particular throne.)

In any event, I feel certain that at least one person will feel compelled to photograph me in the most adorable dress in the history of dresses, and if you’re nice, I’ll share.

Also, Sara asked me to do this book thingy – you’ll find it below the, you know, fold.

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* Each of which one can find assistance in using by, say, trying the “Help” feature. (I’m just sayin’.)

“The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.”**

I look like an uneducated boob without further manipulation of this list, and I was tempted to change the color of the books that are actually in my home to red, which would make me look smarter if you consider that I am more likely to read those books eventually since I already have them and all. I also wouldn’t be able to resist changing the books that I have seen rendered on film to blue, so some of the books would have to be purple, and the Atlanta airport is loud, and I can’t focus, so you’ll just have to believe me that I own many of the books I haven’t read, and have seen many a movie based on a book. So here you go:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (As if.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Is there something stronger than “As if” I could say here?)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (There’s a song – I’ve heard that.)
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 (I’ve started reading it at least four times, but I cannot tell a lie and pretend that I intend to read it. I intend to start reading it again, maybe.)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Um, no. Sonnets are short, so I’ve read all of those, but the plays? Whatever.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I’m just gonna keep on typing “As if” until I think of something better.)
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 (I’ve never even seen the movie, and you can’t make me.)
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 - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Did I like “Frog and Toad are Friends” better? I did.)
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 (As if.)
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 (If “As if” wasn’t so short, I’d be using an acronym for it by now.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 (If I have read this book, and I suspect I have, I swiftly put it out of my head entirely.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 [In a perfect world, the list I copied from Sara would have a 51 on it. And it would be a book I have read. But we have to live in this world, and so there is no 51. Someday I’ll find out what 51 is. Why do I always have to do everything?]
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 (Mostly I intend to read this book so Goethe will stop telling me I should.)
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 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 (Even though I own it I don’t really intend to read it - I just want you to think I’m cool.)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (I started reading this in a bookstore once, and after multiple trips got about halfway through it. I’m sure there was a better way I could have spent that time.)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (Um, Sara, you know how you gave me this book something like 15 years ago? It’s not that I haven’t meant to read it . . .)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (I both have read and love Frankenstein, though. Who made this stupid list?)
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 (Give me a break – I read Sentimental Education. Did you? Huh? Did ya?)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I understand that this is a book, but I can’t understand why one would read it. Maybe it’s great – I don’t know, and I don’t intend to find out. But I should find out who his publisher is, so I can send them “If God Wrote a Book, It Would Be Dedicated to You”. They’ll love it, I’m sure.)
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

So that’s done now. And here’s all I have to say about it:

a) Sara has officially read more books (on this list, at least) than I have.

b) Wouldn’t this task have been easier if this list was, say, alphabetized? Geez.

c) Comments about the fact that I somehow managed to purchase an Ivy League English degree (and am currently dating an English teacher***), yet have also managed to avoid reading any Charles Dickens or Jane Austen whatsoever . . . well, there’s really no better place for those comments than the comments section here, so have it.

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** I can find no evidence that this list was created by the NEA, believe it to have in fact been created for World Book Day, but can’t find any evidence about that either, and one of these days, in my spare time, I’m going to figure out precisely what this list of books represents, since it is clearly not a list of the top 100 books, even if you’re being really generous with the definition of “top” and “book”. I would do that now, in fact, save that I have a ton of other things to do, and had to write something here today before people start sending me e-mail or something, what with my actually running out of things to say being a sign of the apocalypse and all.

*** Which is why I’m too busy experiencing my life to have time to write about it here, etc. (And maybe you’d know more about the whole thing if you ever, say, called me on the phone, Sara.) (I’m just sayin’.)