How much do you read?

I got this from Jim's Notes:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

Instructions:
A) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
B) Italicize those you intend to read.
C) Underline the books you LOVE (or change the color to blue because I can't underline).
and then I add
D) change the color to pink if you've seen the movie (and perhaps that's good enough for you but remember to bold it if you read the book as well).
E) I'm going to add, color it green if you began reading it but couldn't finish it.

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 (I've read a few of them.)
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 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 (love it and saw the movie)
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 (love it and saw the movie)
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 (love it and saw the movie)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (how did this get in here?)
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
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 (long and depressing)
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 (if you are wondering what's wrong with the world, note that this book made the top 100 books list.)
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
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 (love it and saw the movie)
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

I have read 44 of the above titles. Whoohooo!

The Ten Year Meme

I got this from Razored Zen.

What were you doing 10 years ago?
Back in 1998 I was living in San Francisco near the Haight in a tiny little house in someone's back yard. I had an orange tabby named Kiko. The computer I had at the time was a "pizza box" Mac and I had AOL dial up. I was doing yoga. I had a garden. To get to work each morning I took a bus downtown and then a BART over into Oakland. The job was steady and not bad, but it kind of felt soul leaching at the time as it was all to do with numbers and I wanted words. I wanted to be surrounded by creative people.

Re-reading my journal (which I do on occasion to see if I've learned anything at all over the years), I found that I was brooding over guys I had brooded over from years before and kept brooding on for years after. Silly me. Like brooding does anything. On June 24 I woke up with a headache that wouldn't quit and called in sick to work, then felt like a louse for doing it, but I was caught up with invoices and bored and my headache wouldn't stop. I finally got out of the house in the afternoon to lug my laundry over to the laundromat over on Hayes to do laundry. I liked doing laundry, even though I hated hauling it (I used a luggage carrier and bungee cords to get my laundry bags down the hill and over a couple of blocks. The worst was bringing it back home again up the hill).

I'd had a dream where a former roommate of mine sobbed and wouldn't be comforted. I was living in a place from childhood, in Wenatchee. I didn't know what to do for her but found my violin case. It had no violin in it but had money instead. In my journal I pondered if I had sold out my creativity for money. Had I given up on my dream to be a writer just to have more money (yeah, now, I might not mind that job because it was mindless, like Lisa said, but at the time, it felt like a soul-sucker). My sister and a friend of hers were going to come over for dinner and hang out.

Five things on your to-do list for today
1. Rewriting Chapter 3
2.Check through my favorite blogs to read.
3. Vacuum, dammit! I really need to vacuum. I've been sweeping (too hot to run engines), but that doesn't cut it.
4. Work on a proofing and editing some short stories for a client.
5. Cross my fingers for work another client has promised will come through sometime soon (like today).

What would you do if you were a billionaire?
I’d set up a charity foundation. Not sure what it would focus on, or if it would just accept grant proposals from any in need who seemed worthy. Or maybe it would help pay medical costs for artists and writers without insurance. I don't know. But I would have a charity foundation. I'd also have a family fund set up - or set up accounts for my mom, my dad, my sister, other family members and friends. Other than that, I'd write, putter in the garden, play with my kitty, travel, maybe set up my own production company that worked on different kinds of creative projects from writing to film to art to music. I'd have a beachhouse, a cabin in the mountains, and a penthouse in the city and a jet that flew easily between each.

What are three of your bad habits?
1. Procrastination
2. Moodiness - typically from feeling as if I'd pissed off the world and it was taking it out on me, feeling like my friends are ignoring me and that I'll never, ever, ever, ever be good enough. Nobody likes me. Yeah, it can get bad.
3. Not thinking before I open my mouth or hit reply, or thinking but doing it anyway.

What are some snacks you enjoy?
1. toast
2. chocolate chip cookies
3. M&Ms

What were the last five books you read?

The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip. The prince of Hed, who recently returned from the Riddle Master College due to the death of his parents, falls in love with a harp and gets talked into following a riddle, just wants to answer one more riddle, and a harpmaster who seems to really understand him. Things happen, adventures occur, hi-jinks ensue, there's betrayal, love, loss, war, magic, and really good word magery.

The Sorceress and the Cygnet and The Cygnet and the Firebird, also by Patricia A. McKillip. In the first book, a young wayfarer boy is the only one in his clan to have corn silk hair. He tells good stories, but one day he falls into one and it sets him on a journey that could destroy the world as he knows it, but it's the only way to get back his true love. He meets up with the sorceress, Nyx Ro, and it's all mirrors, hidden rooms, and magic after that. In the second book, a firebird flies into Ro Holding one day spouting fire and turning everything it spouts on into jewels and precious gems. Everything turns back at moonrise when the firebird changes back into a man. Nyx Ro, ever curious, tries to help the lost firebird/man. In the meantime, Maguet Vervaine, her cousin, protector of Ro Holding, is abducted by a mage who wants a book that Nyx has but doesn't know how to use--yet. It's full of dragons and desserts and magic and love and loyalty and betrayal, and again, really good word magery.

So - that's five (3 + 2).

What are five jobs you have had?
1. Barista at Starbucks.
2. Receptionist/kennel cleaner at Fountain Veterinary Hospital.
3. Invoice clerk for a Chemical Company.
4. Keyholder at Waldenbooks.
5. Shelver, helper, proofer, etc at Wilson Library.

What are five places where you have lived?

1. Wenatchee, Washington
2. Bellingham, Washington
3. Seattle, Washington
4. San Francisco, California
5. Los Angeles, California

Yes!

That's it exactly! This is Thursday's Ugly Hill.

Just a reminder...

I'm still having a contest for a free copy of the 2008 Writer's Market on my Blogetary Blog if you're interested.

Also, I have a poem or two coming out in the summer issue of Electric Velocipede, and one out in this month's issue of Aoife's Kiss.

Send good thoughts to the people of Aoife's Kiss and Electric Velocipede and other small presses in the midwest. Things are a tad wet out that way. Let's hope they come out of it okay.

Circle the Helicopters!

Feels like the old west, except with helicopters circling overhead. So, I can't sleep. So, I'm online catching up on my blogging.

What should I catch up on? Well, first of all, at the BEA Writer's Conference, I got a new copy of the 2008 Writer's Market. I already have a copy so this one is extra so I decided to have a contest to give it away. If you're interested in that then go here.

Next, I have a poem coming out in the anniversary issue of Aoife's Kiss, which is a great magazine that everyone should subscribe to, even if they don't want to read my poem. (But you can buy that specific issue here.)

Last but not least I've been recently entertained by this test here and by this insult generator here. (I rated very poor on the housewife scale.)

And now, since the helicopters are STILL circling, on to my next blog...