Feb

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X+
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X+
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X+
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 X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X+
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X+
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
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 X
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt X+
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
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
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath X
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X+
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole X+
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

67 – what can I say, I love to read!

This is a very odd list … almost like they pulled 50 random classics and 50 contemporary quasi-respectable works of fiction out of a hat. Still fun, though.

My score was higher than Craig’s and Tony’s put together … obviously I need to get a life! %-) I’m tagging some fellow readers so hopefully I won’t feel like such a freak for long…

  

Feb

There are lists online of the worst songs ever – who knew?!! Wow, what a fun way to waste a few hours, which is what I did this afternoon. It all started because I was making a Valentine’s playlist for Craig – context: he ***HATES*** Valentine’s Day, whereas I do NOT, so this is always a stressful time of year for us! I said I was looking for love songs on iTunes, and he started teasing me about whether or not my songs were on the lists of worst songs ever.

I was skeptical at first, but a little Googling showed me that he was in fact correct – there are TONS of lists of Worst Songs Ever. Here are some that are particularly fun:

1. This year’s “Valentine’s” list from ABC news – why worst songs ever is a news story is a bit beyond me, but the snarky comments make this list very worthwhile (plus, it’s hard to argue with their choices). I guess to balance their “unbiasedness” as a news source, they also include a companion piece on the BEST love songs ever (and that list is MUCH less funny).

2. I had never heard of blender.com before, but this list of the 50 Worst Songs Ever is extremely enjoyable due to their embedded video clips … you don’t have to take their word for it, you can SEE for yourself why the song is so bad. As for the songs themselves … well, it’s a mixed list. While they accurately target things like Clay Aiken’s “Invisible”, Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart”, they also have crazy things like Right Said Fred’ “I’m Too Sexy” and the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” RIGHT BESIDE EACH OTHER on the list! And “Sound of Silence”?!! Seriously, Simon & Garfinkel, Billy Joel & The Doors, even on a bad day, are NOWHERE NEAR the retch-value of Gerardo’s “Rico Suave”, any song by New Kids on the Block or Lionel Richie, and the many, MANY others left off this list (Richard Marx, Spandau Ballet, ‘Macarena”, Ricky Martin, Vanilla Ice, more Country songs than I can count … I could do on all night)

3. VH1′s Most Awesomely Bad Love Songs – first of all, the name of their list is … well, awesome. Plus, they included several that make you go “Duh, how did I forget THAT song?!!”. Such as NSYNC’s “God Must’ve Spent a Little More Time on You”.

4. Some random Seattle blog – interesting because it asks people to list their best AND worst song. Shows nice interesting individual differences.

5. Dave Barry’s Worst Song List – ’cause he’s Dave Barry, and very, very funny.

One thing to note – I think it is important – VERY important, actually – to distinguish between a truly awful song and a song that becomes a hit and then is (some MASSIVELY) overexposed. A worst song ever needs to be a song that was gag-worthy from the very first spin, NOT somethine you just got sick of hearing after the 1,000th time.

In the end, lists of best and worst music are always destined to be controversial. God bless subjectivity. But, I am TOTALLY RIGHT that Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” does NOT belong on a list of worst songs ever!

I think one of the commenters on CNN’s call for nominations of the worst song ever sums it up best:

“There has been so much hideous crap released by record companies that choosing the worst song is like choosing the world’s prettiest snowflake. It can’t be done. The competition is too great. Good luck anyway. (Just to make sure it’s represented, I’ll nominate Paul Anka’s “[You're] Having My Baby.”) — Tim W.

  

Feb

Watching (or at least listening to) kids’ movies is something I do WAY too much, thanks to having two little ones about, so this week’s topic is a very salient one for me. Some of the kids movies are much less painful to watch 20,000 times than others! Here are my favorites:

1. The Lion King – possibly the best last scene in a movie ever (well, at least a kids’ movie), and just great throughout; the combination of story and music works well here in a way it doesn’t always.
2. Mary Poppins – I had never actually seen this until I had kids, now I LOVE it! What great parenting messages, and the interplay of color with the black & white is fascinating at multiple levels. Plus Dick Van Dyke steals the show as Bert.
3. The Incredibles – STRONG female characters, enough said; my kids and I have been waiting impatiently for a sequel on this one!
4. E.T. – my kids actually don’t like this one as much as some of the others, but it made a HUGE impact on me as a child, so gotta have it on the list.
5. Mulan – again, strong female characters, rare in a Disney film! Very engaging story, too, for both girls and boys.
6. Finding Nemo – phenomenal characters, and more good parenting messages
7. The Wizard of Oz – love this one as both a psychologist and a mom!
8. Transformers – okay, I know, this one is inexplicable, I just love this movie somehow…
9. Harry Potter – I know, they’re really books, and the books are MUCH, ***MUCH*** better than the movies. But, still, the movies don’t do a bad job of capturing the magical world – some of the visuals are stunning, and key plot elements are there. My kids still aren’t quite old enough to read the books, so the movies are a good stand-in until then. Order of these movies in terms of favorites so far – 1, 3, 4, 2, 5.
10. Shrek – great messages about inclusiveness and being true to yourself, and at least puts an interesting spin on the whole “rescue the princess” shtick.

Please note, even though I did love them as a child (and continue to as an adult), I don’t consider the Star Wars movies to be children’s movies (in the sense that I don’t think they were made FOR children). If they were children’s movies, they would definitely be at the very top of this list (in the order 5, 4, 6, 3, 1, 2). Other favs that almost made this list – Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Monsters Inc.