June 2008 Archives
Sorry for the long silence the past few weeks. I've been busy blowing my nose.
Yes, the whole time.
Bar none, the worst summer I've had for this stuff that I can remember.
Via De:
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.
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 -- Halfway through all three.
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 -- been sitting on my too-read shelf for years...
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -- seems like I read another of his books as well, Freshman year in college
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 -- redundant list, much?
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 -- I am a bear, he is a bear... only seems natural
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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 -- again, thank you Freshman Honors English
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
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
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath -- ... don't think I'll thank Freshman English for this one...
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 -- we were a well-read bunch of college prats, we were... I remember discussing her obsession with a needlestick puncture at some length in class
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 -- I tried, but man it started out slow.
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 -- haven't read the complete works, but did read this. thank GOODNESS they put it on here twice.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -- In English, and about half of it in its native French
My name is Jonathan Coulton and I’m a musician, a singer-songwriter and an internet superstar. This site is chock full of music, news and me-related merchandise - if you’re not that familiar with who I am and what I do you can use the links above to get started.
First: Johnathan is a great musician, and his songs are fantastic. You should be listening to him.
Second: this is a really smart series of pages for introducing new fans as well as suggesting where to go next. Steal this idea, internet people.
Like the picture?
It's like my life at the moment: cool, but complicated.
I didn't mean to be ignoring you, internet, and as a matter of fact, I really haven't been -- there have been a number of emails to large (and not so large) groups of people going out, and lots of posts to various forums, and even a couple posts to my gaming-related blog.
I just ... ahh ... forgot to post anything HERE. Right, then, moving on?
Work (in which I am currently building an interactive online course for basic Outlook use... which is a lot cooler and MUCH harder than it sounds) is going swimmingly, though it is jamming up quite a lot of my FM dial, so to speak.
We, the newlyweds are good -- we've got almost everything unpacked that needs unpacking, and next week my parents are in town and we're going to replace almost all the carpet on the first floor with laminate flooring, because there's nothing I like better than coyotes on iceskates excited dogs on a hardwood floor.
Kaylee begins preschool next month. She is very excited. We are very excited. I think it's going to herald a true sea-change for her in terms of development. And diapers. Did I mention the excited?
Anything else? A lot of geeky gamer type stuff, but nothing worth noting at the moment.
Oh, just as a historical note: Obama's going to be our Democratic nominee, and I'm voting for him. Also, someone in the House filed papers of Impeachment for George W. Bush. Now if Cheney would only resign for medical reasons, it'd be a pretty good month.
It's going to be very interesting around here, come the election time -- mine might be the only Obama sticker in the parking lot at work... perhaps in the whole neighborhood. At least they're all relatively cordial about it.
