Meme

From Janice:

Instructions:
- Look at the list and boldface those you have read
- Italicize the ones you want to read
- Underline the books you really loved and strikethrough the ones you 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 - J R R 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 - J R R Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J D 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 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
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 - A A 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  [It's "Meany," not "Meaney!]
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L M 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 - A S 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 - E B 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  [Technically NOT a book, and already included under #14!]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Meme

Tagged by Constantine the Younger.

The rules

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about himself.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.


What was I doing 10 years ago
Learning how to handle my stick-shift around San Francisco.

Five things on my To Do List today:
1. Lubricate and re-assemble a circa 1996 Shimano RD-M950 rear deraileur.
2. Install said deraileur and tune it.
3. Go for a test ride.
4. Find some solitude.
5. Get enough sleep


Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
* Take 1/3 and buy my own island-country
* Install cell phone jammers across my territory
* Invest the rest.


Three of my bad habits:
1. Suffering fools too gladly.
2. Contradicting my actions due to compassion.
3. Pushing myself too hard.


Five places I’ve lived:
1. Malaysia / Singapore
2. America
3. Indonesia (if you count long tours)
4. New Zealand (ditto)
5. Australia (ditto)


Five jobs I’ve had:
1. waiter at a bar
2. bicycle mechanic
3. dive shop staff (later, divemaster / assistant SCUBA instructor)
4. teaching assistant (TA)
5. documentation company staff


Five books I’ve recently read:
1. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
2. A Retreat with Gerald Manley Hopkins, S. J. and St. Hildegard of Bingen, Gloria Hutchinson
3. Hitler's Women, Guido Knopp
4. The Silent Cry, Kenzaburo Oe
5. Zinn's Cycling Primer, Lennard Zinn


The five I tagged:
1. I break rules all the time.
2. I don't do tags.
3. See 1.

Meme, meme, meme

Book meme!
(Thanks, dear!)

i.   Grab the nearest book.
ii.  Open the book to page 123.
iii. Find the fifth sentence.
iv.  Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
v.   Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

My line is:

There the history of salvation is evoked by the sounds of words, here the same history is enacted in the liturgy's sacramental symbols.

This is fun!

:-D

Meme

'Might as well take a break from the exposure. Thanks, dear :-)


10 Firsts

1. First best friend: Kai, aka Mr. E., aka first mountain bike cycling buddy, aka partner-in-crime, aka fellow coconut harvester, aka fellow pyromaniac, aka Ultima brother-in-arms, aka incinerator of Pong Pong seeds, aka Death-bringer-to-ants, aka Destroyer-of-fungi, aka fireball-in-sewer conjurer, aka molotov cocktail alchemist, et cetera. Still is.

2. First car: A Toyota Supra Turbo that earned me too many speeding tickets (and had me handcuffed once, but I am getting ahead of myself here); gained me favored status with the local HKS, Greddy, Spearco, Redline Oil, TRD distributors; and made me pull into gas stations way more often than I wanted to.

3. First love: a really wild chick who ultimately broke up with me over her best friend, whom she encouraged me to get it on with. Go figure.

4. First vacation: Some pond in Malaysia where I learned that Water Lily leaves do not support the weight of a human child and nearly drowned (details buried in an older post if you can find it).

5. First job: waiter, then bartender at a pub along Orchard Road, where I experienced all the nightlife I need for a lifetime. E.g. ever had an oily fellow slip you a fifty to switch his date's order of a Coke to a double Bacardi Coke?

6. First piercing: Voluntarily, never. Yes, if you count the time I involuntarily shot an arrow — made from a bamboo chopstick — through my left hand from a homemade crossbow. I never experienced such quick service at the A&E before. (Shut up, bro.)

7. First concert: Eric Clapton 1991 Journeyman Tour. Still wear the T-shirt occasionally.

8. First record/CD bought: A-ha's "Hunting High and Low." (Anyone remember "Take on Me" and "The Sun Always Shines on TV"?)

9. First real love: Joanne, Mitchell, Ivy, Cloe (all my bikes).

10. First screen name: Souprata, the dreaded ops who automatically bans anyone from AOL (or drives a Honda) whenever he comes on.


7 Have You Ever

1. Dated one of your best friends: Yes.
2. Been arrested: Yes, for being clocked at 126 mph (201 km/h) outside Moffett Field, Mountain View, CA (see entry above on being handcuffed).
3. Fallen in love at first sight: Yes.
4. Been in a TV program: Nope. Been in the papers, yes. Twice (once for cycling, once for scuba diving).
5. Had your heart broken: Yes.
6. Said you love someone without meaning it: Nope.
7. Made a prank phone call: Hell, yeah! Still do.


3 Choices

1. Black or white? The question is absurd. Black, of course. Everything fades to black in the end.
2. Winter or summer? Winter. Nothing like biking or driving with the targa off in winter (and hot spiced cider thereafter).
3. Chocolate or chips? Chocolate. Dark Chocolate. Godiva Dark Chocolate Ice -cream.


2 Things to do Before you Die

1. Own and dive a closed-circuit rebreather past 100 m (328 ft).
2. BASE jump.