I took this from Tryphaena
Below is a list of the 106 books most likely to languish, unread, on the bookshelves of people who only want to seem cultured and well-read. If you want to play along:
bold the titles you've read on your own,
underline the ones you had to read for school,
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish,
bold and italicize the ones you hated,
bold and underline those you'd recommend
strike through those you'd like to/plan to read
Let the List begin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Similalliron
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Ulysses
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
Moby Dick
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Illiad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - Excerpts
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Well, after a long, unplanned hiatus, here are the books I have read in the last two months.
BTW, Mary Jane Maffini, the author, is also the owner of the Prime Crime Mystery Bookstore in Ottawa.
Along with local mysteries, I really enjoy reading historical mysteries, particularly those set in the dark and middle ages. The proprietor of The Mysterious Affair in Waterloo, ON, recommended this series to me when he was out of the book that I went in to find. I was really looking forward to read this book, but it didn't really grab me the way some of my favourite historical mysteries have. It is pretty well written, but I didn't take to the main character, Sister Fidelma. I like the main character detectives to be the constant in the book. I like it when I can have some insight into their character, and how they will act in different situations. I found that I never was able to get to that point with Sister Fidelma. I think that the learning curve also had something to do with it. This one is set in 664 AD in a place that I don't know much about. I much prefer novels set in the 11th to 14th centuries, because I can more easily imagine how the time period looks.
I've had this book since 1992, and did, at one point, get halfway through it. This morning, I finally finished it. I found the first half of the book a little dry, it was difficult to get through. I almost put it down again, but I am so glad that I didn't. The ending was so bittersweet, that I couldn't tear myself away from the last two chapters. I also have the next book, but I don't think that I will read it just yet.
My brand new all-Canada guide book arrived recently, and I am trying not to rush through reading all of the history and culture sections, and just focusing on the Nova Scotia and Newfoundland chapters, so that I will still have something to read when we are on our trip this summer. The book itself is beautiful. It has a colour section about the National Parks of Canada. Having just had a quick glance through most of the chapters, it does seem to do a great job of covering the travel opportunities in such an immense country. We'll be travelling to Newfoundland this summer for two weddings, and we'll also be touring the province. I think we will be going to St. Pierre as well, which should give me the taste of France that I've been longing for ever since I visited in 2005. Lonely Planet guides are my favourite guide books because they include tips and information about how to connect on a more local level. The only thing that could be challenging about this book would be trying to complete some of the itineraries that they include. The Ontario four-day itinerary would be extremely tough for any traveller, even a well-seasoned one who travels lightly. Canada is just too big for a four-day trip, anyway. You would never get the true sense of this country by visiting 4 cities in 4 days. You would really be spending your entire trip on the road.
High: -33ºC with a wind chill of -47ºC
Low: -35ºC with a wind chill of -51ºC
Wind: NNW 24 km/h
Conditions: Mainly sunny
Sunrise: 8:20
Sunset: 16:41
No more blizzard, to bad. Although, next week is professional development week, which is almost like vacation. There won't be any students there. It feels very, very cold. I think it has something to do with the dew point (which is -39.8ºC today), as our temperature is usually colder than the dew point. Here is Environment Canada's Definition of dew point:
Today's Weather:
High: -22ºC with a wind chill of -36ºC
Low: -31ºC with a wind chill of -48ºC
Wind: N 45 km/h gusting to 54 km/h
Conditions: Blizzard!! Blowing Snow.
Sunrise: 8:23
Sunset: 16:38
Warning:
Had to go to work this morning, the wind was pretty strong. It was really hard to see when walking home at lunch, and then the schools were closed for the afternoon. It should be cleared up by tomorrow morning.
High: -26ºC with a wind chill of -37ºC (It's warming up!)
Low: -33ºC with a wind chill of -46ºC
Wind: NNE 22 km/h (this is what it is usually like, right in our faces all the way to work)
Conditions: Ice Crystals (this means that there is more humidity than usual, but that it is too cold for the humidity, so it looks like an ice crystal fog)
Sunrise: 8:25
Sunset: 16:35
High: -34ºC with a wind chill of -40ºC
Low: -40ºC with a wind chill of -50ºC
Wind: SW 10 km/h
Conditions: sunny
Sunrise: 8:28
Sunset: 16:32
The days are deginitely getting longer! It was really daylight when we left for work this morning.
I missed yesterday's weather post. It was cold, very cold.
High: -36ºC with a wind chill of -46ºC
Low: -40ºC with a wind chill of -53ºC
Wind: WNW 13 km/h
Conditions: clear and sunny
Sunrise: 8:33
Sunset: 16:27
It's still very cold out, I think this is the longest we've had this extreme cold in the three years we've been here. Last night, my toes got cold walking home from a friends house, even though I was wearing my giant boots. Today, we took some pictures outside, and if we had been out there any longer, I would have gotten freeze burn from my camera. I've also discovered that I need to start keeping my keys in an inside pocket, I have a burn on one of my fingers because my keys were too cold, and one on another finger, that I can only figure came from my wedding rings.