I Wish

Someday, I hope I earn your respect. For the meantime, let's just both shut up. :) ily.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

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

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 

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 

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collin

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

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

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 Bryson

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

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



So Much, Too Little

Contrary to what other people might think, I actually pray a lot.  I'm not the type to be involved in church or religious groups, but one thing that my DWTL weekend has taught me, is to pray sincerely and spontaneously.  Ask. Listen. Trust. 

I've been praying for a sign to help answer a dilemma.  I'm not really a huge fan of signs, but they've worked for me before, so I decided to give it another try.  I asked for a specific sign.  Jess answered it two times.  It was pretty scary when He answered it that fast (and twice).  But Dear God, if that's your answer then help me understand and enlighten me.  But nevertheless, THANK YOU. THANK YOU.

Sometimes, I pray for too much, but my faith and trust is too little for the blessings You are willing to give me.  I am sorry if I find myself overwhelmed with your blessings.  My heart is small sometimes, but Your love is eternally big--I hope I never forget that. And yes God, I will open my heart. :) 

On other news, I have resolved not to write anything for you.

  

For (Future) New Love

I think we only hate people with a passion when there was love to start with.  I know you're coming and I'm pretty hopeful that you are coming soon because my heart no longer feels empty--instead it is full of anticipation for our meeting. Because I want to hate you when I meet you.  I want to hate you fiercely and love you as intensely.  Come soon so we can hate each other as much as we love each other. 

I DO NOT LOVE YOU EXCEPT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you except because I love you;

I go from loving to not loving you,

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;

I hate you deeply, and hating you

Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume

My heart with its cruel

Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who

Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,

Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Setting Up the Tree

Lia wanted to set up and decorate the Christmas tree today. She's been begging to do it since Monday.  So we finally let her do it this morning.  More than a month before Christmas, and yes, we have a Christmas tree--decorated with love by a 4 year old and her 25 year old aunt (who is still as excited for Christmas).

After about two hours of intense decorating, we finally finished the first part of our tree.  Our tree decoration usually comes in about 3 or 4 parts, depending on the budget.  We now have pink, silver and red decorations. The ribbons, and lights will come after two weeks.  Finishing touches in another two weeks. I usually decide that the tree's really finished a week before Christmas.  So I won't be posting pictures yet, but do watch out for it. I'm especially proud of this year's tree because Lia did most of the decorating, :)

Lia is finally asleep now.  She got really tired after all that hard work.

Don't you just love Christmas and kids? :)

Saying Goodbye to Childhood, Saying Goodbye to NU

It's been years since I've had my radio on for hours. The last time I had it on, I was listening to the same station, crying over a stupid boy.


I'm streaming NU 107 now, and I feel like crying over a radio station. 


It's so hard to say goodbye to the first radio station I fell in love with.  NU provided me with the soundtracks to my failed romances, my Christmases and epic New Years, my sleepless nights spent and wasted studying for exams (and doing lesson plans). It's going to be awfully lonely come New Year's Eve, when I won't have NU to countdown with.


I can still remember the angsty teenage me--listening to Nine Inch Nails, Silverchair and Stabbing Westward. It was strange to be happy because you were angry.  I guess you're allowed to be angry when you're young.  How sad to realize that this generation's angsty teenagers won't be listening to the same bands that made hating the world less violent and less emo. 


I can also remember college days, when I'd listen to NU right after I got home from school. I was pretty updated with the local bands during that time.  It made falling in love hardcore.  The best dates were spent in PULP parties and gigs--all of which we knew because of NU.  Sugarfree, Imago, Barbie's Cradle, Mojofly.  I remember thinking how they knew exactly how I was feeling at that time. Holy crap, they all started with NU--no matter what the other radio stations say. Who's going to give a chance to new bands, now?


I remember finally stepping into the real world and feeling shitty, scared, excited at the same time. I guess you know what I was listening to before my job interviews.


They have Ebe of Sugarfree on air now. For the last time. I can still remember when not too many people knew about Sugarfree. And I did. Because of NU. 


He's singing Moon River now. My ultimate sad song. 


I will miss you NU 107 when you sign off forever. You will always be loved and remembered.

Fangirl moment. :)

BLAIR I'll never like you, either. In fact, I hate you. 

CHUCK I hate you, too. 

BLAIR I’ve never hated anyone more.