Me, Here, Now

Rob tagged me for this particular meme. I read his post while at work, but could not take the pic until I got home; so as soon as I got home, I dropped my coat and found the camera.

This is me, here, "now" (actually about 40 minutes ago- I had to read to Oldest before bedtime, so the post is delayed.)

Now for the rules:
1) Take a picture of yourself right NOW!
2) DON'T change your clothes, DON'T fix your hair... Just take a picture.
3) Post that picture with NO editing.
4) Post these instruction with your picture.
5)Tag 10 people to do this..

I don't think I can come up with ten who would both read this and bother to do it. But just in case, here we go: Andrew, VeeganMD, Tami (who has more important things on her mind just now but may find this later), jayananda, SciFi Pie, Greg (Oh!! Wait- Greg already did it. Never mind.) Janet, and the next four people who show up here via Google- please leave me comments so I know you were here.

The Big Read- UPDATED!

From ktbuffy via jayananda:

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, *or not, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. (SEE UPDATE BELOW)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk (*) the books you LOVE.

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 Bernieres
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 Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
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
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

I added another category - an ! in front of books that I started and either hated or they didn't hold my interest, so I didn't finish them. (In the case of #66 and #43, I got at least 3/4 of the way through and just dropped them.) I've been told to give #82 a second chance, and maybe I will. I think I was too young to appreciate #57 when I tried to read it- maybe it deserves a second chance, maybe on audio.

I also added a string of symbols after #9, which I did finish, and was so disappointed in that I was angry at the author and the time I wasted. Those symbols don't mean anything; I'm cursing Phillip Pullman out.

So, I've read 28 of them. Not bad, I guess, for a future librarian. How'd you do?

*- after Bob pointed out that I didn't post #44 and #51, I did some research to find them and cannot discover who made this list. It seems to be based on the list of the BBC's The Big Read, not the National Endowment for the Art's Big Read, which is an entirely different project. I did, however, find some posts with a complete list so I added those books back. So, it's not really based on an NEA project, but it's certainly someone's idea of fun. Still cool, huh?

If anyone finds proof that it's an NEA project, let me know and I'll correct again.

Tagged

I was tagged by Nordette, the Jersey Goddess, for the Eight Random Things meme. I need eight random facts about myself that you probably don't know, then I must tag eight of you to follow up as well. Hmm....

• I hate slugs. I really, really do. When I was a kid I brought in the dog's food dish from the back yard and it had a couple slugs in it; I thought they were snakes, and I was really upset. I can handle snakes much better now, but I still can't take slugs. I love my garden, however, and that makes things difficult.


• I'm allergic to kiwis. The fruit, not people from New Zealand.


• My first hair cut by a professional was when I was 28 years old. My mother always cut my hair when I was young, and through college and after I drafted friends, boyfriends and my husband to trim the back for me.


• My own mother once said about me "You're not just frugal, you're cheap." Bet you figured that out after the haircut item, didn't you?


• I took two semesters of Chinese in college. I remember almost no characters, but I can still understand greetings when I hear them.


• I don't have the patience for Monopoly anymore. I used to play it constantly with a friend when I was 11 or 12, so maybe I've burned out on it. I can play long involved games- we ran the same D&D campaign for almost eight years- but just not Monopoly.


• My husband is my best friend.


• I've lived in three different counties in New Jersey, four towns total, and I'm not leaving. I can't imagine living somewhere else. I didn't pick to live here- it's just where I was born- but I love it for all its faults. Sometimes I am fiercely loyal to things I didn't originally want or I just got stuck with, and maybe Jersey falls into that category, but I am fiercely loyal to it.

Now the harder part- tagging eight folks to meme.

• Rob S. Laughing at the pieces indeed!


• Janet When you have time to blog again, no hurry.


• Tata Do you meme, Princess Tata?


• Andrew Never has time to blog anymore, but still.


• DJ Rix Has been putting up some great poetry lately.


• VeeganMD is back on a new page.


• *Rob or Brenda Or maybe both!


• Greg! Back from the deep?

I will be not offended if you cannot or choose not to participate. I must say it was more fun and a little harder than I expected.