I copied this from Rebekah's site. How well-read am I (as far as the canon goes)? Books I have read are in bold. Books I've attempted to read (at least) are italicized.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Angelou, Maya - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bhabha, Homi - Nation and Narration
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - O Pioneers!
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Derrida, Jacques - Of Grammatology
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - Silas Marner
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd
Havel, Vaclav - Largo Desolato and The Garden Party*
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
Ionesco, Eugene - Rhinoceros*
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady (and What Maisie Knew)
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Billy Budd
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - 1984
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Sartre, Jean Paul - No Exit*
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion and Major Barbara
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - Ethan Frome and The Buccaneers
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Importance of Being Earnest
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I added * and did change some of the titles by authors to ones I'd read. I guess my education did help me, as far as "the canon" is concerned, as I read the large amounts of these in high school. My freshman year I went on a literary kick where all I read were "the great works". I enjoyed a large number of them, too.


| | link

I have added commenting ability to this blog. I don't get many comments on my more popular blog, so I doubt I'll get many here, but if you wanna, you can now.
| | link

Last night, Melissa and I were part of a first group in line to see Hans Blix. All the local media was there, and one of the FOX reporters was asking people in front of us for their thoughts on Blix and our current situation in Iraq. We kept talking about how we would refuse to comment, as FOX is evil. We kept repeating "FOX is evil" in our conversation, especially when the older man in front of me was being interviewed. I wondered if we kept saying "FOX is evil", would the editor notice it when preparing the tape for airing? Would he be inspired by our subliminal messaging to quit? We doubted it, but we tried anyway.

I'm just basically disappointed by the local media here in Austin. KVUE is owned by Belo, and FOX News is just as bad as you would expect. KEYE, the local CBS station, is fairly decent (at least they have good evening anchors), and I don't know enough about KXAN to comment on their style. The local paper is too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals, so I don't read it (plus I can't afford to subscribe). I basically get my local news from KUT, the local public radio station. My national news I get off of blogs, the New York Times, Alternet, etc. I also get news from the two magazines I subscribe to: Harpers and Mother Jones. It's sad that I've become so distanced from the mainstream media, but it's their treatment of the war with Iraq that did it. It pissed me off so much, I just stopped watching.

Plus - The Simpsons are on at 6pm here, and I have my priorities.
| | link

Which Family Guy character are you?

| | link

Reflections on my turning twenty-six

I'm four years closer to 30. I thought it would feel different, but it doesn't. Although, I have gone out more for this birthday than any other one. I went to Trudy's Friday night with Melissa and Joseph and had a Mexican Martini. Then we went to see 13 Going on 30, which was a very funny film for the first 4/5. The last 1/5 was so corny, it comes close to making me dislike the film intensely.

Saturday night, my parents took me out for Italian, along with our friend Mark. I had lobster ravioli, which was marvelous.

And tonight, we go out for Middle-Eastern food with Brian (and Mark) and Janette. I'm looking forward to it, as the closest I've had to Middle-Eastern food is the Ethiopian food I had in Minnesota.

Yesterday, I ran into Ginny at InStep's annual tent sale. She told me that Will is 16, Grant, whom I babysat for when he was a baby, is 12, and Helen is 9. Ack!

sidenote - I bought a really cute pair of Birki's at the sale.
| | link

Alice's lyric survey

I know lots of lyrics to different songs, but I don't know if I could take this survey and do it right.
| | link

Last goodbye

I can't believe it's been almost 10 years since I first heard "Last Goodbye" by Jeff Buckley. I first heard it on MTV as a buzz cut. I remember seeing the ads for the video while I watched re-runs of My So-Called Life. I'm pretty sure I recorded the video on a tape at my parent's house. I think I found it about a year ago and almost started crying while watching it. His was such an amazing talent. When he was missing, I called KGSR and asked the DJ about him (this is before the internet was such an immediate source of info). Then they found his body drowned in the Mississippi.

*sigh*

You and I: jeffbuckley.com
| | link

26

I turn 26 on April 26th. I'm slightly freaked out about it. I haven't really felt anything about my other birthdays. Last year, turning 25 was no big deal. But 26 scares me. I think it's because it is closer to 30 (no, I don't think 30 is old). This upcoming anniversary of my birth is making me ponder the choices I have made in my life, and has me considering what I need to do with it.

Only slightly related - I talked to Kristina the other night and she told me I need to get married because my insurance rates will go down. I told her that it would help my taxes, too! I know she wants me to move to Albuquerque. Apparently the list that places Austin as the best place to meet singles has Albuquerque down at the bottom. She finds great humor in that.

I'm just kind of ambivalent.

The other weekend I went out (until 4am!) with some friends and we ended up at a gay bar. I have never felt more invisible in my life. I was surprised there was a women's bathroom at all. It ended up being more of a unisex bathroom, which was a new experience. Overall, the night was great fun, but I'd prefer not to spend so much time at that place next time.

Also - I think I saw someone from one of the churches I've visited outside the club. I wasn't too surprised. I don't think he recognized me.
| | link

Last night I was watching "Without a Trace" and Jack's dad was complaining about the doctor's inexperience. I think the dialogue went like:

Jack: "She went to medical school."
Dad: "In Grenada!"

or something to that effect. I had to laugh, because that's where Renae went to med school. Hey, you gotta go where they take you. Anyway, she fell in love there, got married there, and now is working in England. I think. I haven't heard from her in a while. I hope she's okay.

If you missed the episode, try and catch it in reruns. It was an awesome episode, dealing with euthanasia, cancer, and Alzheimers.
| | link

My favorite pic of Rosie

C'mon, she's cute!
| | link

Rosie posie

| | link

It's Rosie's birthday today! She's a tax day puppy.

edit: she's so cute, I had to include a picture.

| | link

My results from the Belief-O-Matic:

1. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (92%)
3. Bahá'í Faith (83%)
4. Orthodox Quaker (80%)
5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (71%)
6. Unitarian Universalism (71%)
7. Reform Judaism (69%)
8. Jehovah's Witness (69%)
9. Orthodox Judaism (65%)
10. Neo-Pagan (61%)
11. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (60%)
12. New Age (59%)
13. Seventh Day Adventist (57%)
14. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (56%)
15. Mahayana Buddhism (55%)
16. Theravada Buddhism (55%)
17. Jainism (52%)
18. Eastern Orthodox (52%)
19. Roman Catholic (52%)
20. Sikhism (51%)
21. Islam (49%)
22. Secular Humanism (47%)
23. Hinduism (45%)
24. Taoism (42%)
25. New Thought (40%)
26. Scientology (38%)
v
| | link

Cheese Test: What type of cheese are you?

| | link

| | link

I thought of this song last night. It's funny, it comes up as "The Riddle Song", but I learned it as "The Stone Song." Here's the way I learned it, with my changes in parentheses:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone.
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone.
(I gave my love a story that has no end
and I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.)

How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
How can there be a chicken (without a) bone?
(How can there be a story without an end?
and how can there be a baby with no cryin'?)

(Well,) a cherry when it's bloomin', (it has) no stone
A chicken when it's peepin', it has no bone.
(A story, when it's a lover's, it has no end
And a baby, when it's sleepin', has no crying.)

I think I like my version better. It makes more sense as a lullaby that way. I used to sing it to my campers when I was a jr. counselor, and learned it when I was a camper myself. It's a pretty, simple, little song.

| | link

The first Monday after "spring forward" is HORRIBLE.

Russell's chocolate raspberry cake is WONDERFUL.

And that is all my muddled brain can come up with for today.
| | link

Never mind that there were only about two major female characters. . .

Lord of the Rings!


What movie Do you Belong in?(many different outcomes!)
brought to you by Quizilla

| | link

I thought I was so cool . . .

You are a MASTER of the English language!


While your English is not exactly perfect, you are still more grammatically correct than just about every American. Still, there is always room for improvement...


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

| | link