Thursday, July 31, 2008

I was in the UK for about two weeks with the choir. We did evensongs at St. George's, Windsor, Christ Church, Oxford, and Canterbury Cathedral, along with some necessary touristy stuff. I'll say this:
1) I have a whole new appreciation for the choir and how hard they work.
2) I will not be going on an organized tour of anything for a very long time if I can help it, particularly not with an intergenerational crowd. Some people actually want to sit on a bus for hours and would rather see from a bus than walk. Maybe I'll understand one day, but at this point it's unfathomable to me. I would rather spend a small amount of time in one place walking around rather than see a whole lot.

I'm about to leave again for a preaching conference and for "vacation" with my dad and parts of his family. I'm nervous about the latter, as it'll be my stepmother and all her various and sundry offspring (two adult children and some of their kids). It's very weird for me to see my father relate to a child as his grandchild that I feel no connection to whatsoever.

Book update:
Book #25 Inhuman Bondage. A book on the history of slavery. Excellent. Singular complaint: I listened to this book while driving. The reader said "hueman" New-Jersey style, a pronunciation that makes me crazy for no good, but some very real, reason.
Book #26 Those Preaching Women! 4th ed. Pretty good sermon collection, as far as sermon collections go.
Book#27 Ladies of Liberty, Cokie Roberts. About influential women during early presidencies, not including Martha Washington. Pretty good. Grammatical errors in book, which annoy me. Do your job, editor.
Book #28 : Predictably Irrational. I really liked this book, probably because I majored in economics and always wondered if assuming people behave rationally is the best assumption to make.
Book #29 : Suite Francaise. Thought it was really good. I feel like all I hear is French Resistance this, French Resistance that, when, clearly, most people just rolled over.
Book #30: Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Wu is a lawyer, through and through, and writes as if he is one. I enjoyed the book but don't know that I was looking for as much depth as he gave.
Book #31 : A Briefer History of Time, Stephen Hawkings. A parishioner gave this to me after I preached on Einstein's theory of general relativity. It's good, though still hard to understand, even though it's supposed to be easier to understand.
Book #32 : Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Rosenthal. eh.

Side Note: On this England trip, I discovered my mother basically no longer reads. This disturbed me to my very core.

Other side note: The thought of fiction has left a bad taste in my mouth as of late(besides Suite Francaise). I think I've had some traumatic experiences...? .

Friday, July 4, 2008

Books

Per Erica and Pastor Peters...


The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They’ve come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don’t explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I’ve used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

Here goes…What about you?

(note: I haven't been able to confirm that this list is indeed from the organization that it says that it is, but I suppose I'll play along anyhow).


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 Traveler’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 (started it. didn't like it)
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 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
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 (I absolutely refuse to read this book, and its presence makes me question the entire list. I started one of his other saccharine "books," and I despised it.)
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 (if the complete works is on here, why is this one?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

***