Wednesday

February 25

Salty chocolate is delicious.

Friday

February 20

It seems that 2009 is the year of the survey. Here's another I felt ambitious enough to do:

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

x = those you have read.
+ = the ones you LOVE.
* = those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (complete? no. a lot? yes.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
9 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy * (I mostly just feel like I need to read this)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
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 X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (seriously, what's with every Jane Austen book ever written?)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (this was made into a terrible movie)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (the only John Irving book I haven't read. Screw you bbc list!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins*
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (obviously, I'm half Islander, it's required).
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X+ (one of my most favorite reads)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
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 (fuck off, Jane!)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
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 X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X (I can easily say this is my ultimate, number one favorite book. Ever.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (unfortunately)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X (if you've never read this, don't. If you feel you MUST read Joyce, read one of his shorts. They're equally as painful - just significantly shorter)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X+ (oh, sylvia. how I adore thee).
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X (several times, I loved this book as a child)
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 X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X+ (awesome book and entirely shocking)
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X+ (also a fave of mine).
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 X (why is this here and not included in the Complete Works of Shakespeare)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

34 in total. I'm impressed.

Thursday

February 12

This fantastic artist I know from Halifax was on Martha Stewart yesterday. Check out the clip here:

Michelle SaintOnge on Martha Stewart

I love Martha and now I can count one (1) degree of separation between me and her.


Wooo.

February 5

25 things you may not have known about me:
  1. I ate Doritos and a bag of mini Rolos for supper yesterday.
  2. I think This American Life is the cat's meow.
  3. I often spell the word, February, wrong. Although, I'm pretty sure that's a common mistake (really, does it need two R's?).
  4. I had crushes on two of my high school English teachers and almost all of my English professors.
  5. Literature gets me hot.
  6. I first heard the Cranberries' album, Everybody Else is Doing It, So why Can't We, in the summer of 1993 and it changed my life. I also became obsessed with road movies.
  7. My bed has flannel sheets on it. And a feather tic, which is apparently not a frequently used term (the word duvet can suck it).
  8. You probably make me nervous.
  9. I really liked the movie Sans toit ni loi by Anges Varda.
  10. The essay, On Running Away by John Keats had a really positive influence on my life. I still like to pull it out when I'm feeling defeated.
  11. I spend an unnecessary amount of time on this website.
  12. I once owned shares in a company called, University Girls Calender, Ltd. I made $250 off those shares and profited from the exploitation of college party girls from all over the Maritimes.
  13. I have a revolting obsession with the novel Lolita.
  14. I worry that I'm going senile.
  15. I think life as a Dryad could be kind of nice.
  16. I used to know a girl in high school who thought that bunnies laid eggs.
  17. 2002 was a really fun year for me.
  18. I tried to go see a movie the other night but failed.
  19. When I was nine I killed a frog because I wanted to have a funeral for him. I think I was about seventeen when I finally got over the guilt.
  20. Finch's Tea & Coffee House is my favorite place to eat in Vancouver.
  21. This is taking me a lot longer than it should.
  22. My feet stink.
  23. I would really love to have coffee with Holly at Steve-O-Reno's tomorrow.
  24. I once thought I would become a writer. Only I'd write about disgusting things, like splattered blood and smeared chunks of zombie limbs.
  25. I'm done.