Hillary and I Move On

I didn't watch Hillary's speech last night, the second speech this week that I wish I had watched. My brain and body were too tired last night--brain from a busy second day of school and body from walking 4.9 miles. Also, I think that I got kind of burned out on politics during the primaries and haven't completely re-engaged, but I am getting there.

Sitting here this morning watching the CBS morning show, I have seen a former FBI agent criticize Hillary's body language, which according to him didn't show enough emotion about Obama, and some Hillary supporters who were there last night and had reactions from still on the fence to gung-ho Obama supporter now. None of the coverage really spoke to what I think about the whole situation, and I don't have time to write what I think this morning. Luckily, I looked at my feeds on Google Reader and saw that Dorothy Surrenders had a new post. I think that the second paragraph of her post speaks to my feelings about Hillary and why I have to support Obama now.

Now, I am officially moving on and will be contributing some funds to the Obama-Biden campaign when I get paid this week. (Valerie, don't let me forget.)


Obama - Biden '08!!!!!!

BBC 100

I don't usually do memes, but I really like best books lists. It makes me feel good to see how many I have read. If I haven't read many, the list will give me titles of books that I want to read. I got this from Danielle at A Work in Progress.

The instructions:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you love.
   
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (I have read the first book in the series.)
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 (I have read many of the plays and not just the popular ones, but I have not read them all. I will read Comedy of Errors soon.)
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 (Valerie is very impatient for me to read this; she has been waiting for me to read it for a long time now.)
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 (I started this during the summer, but I haven't made much progress yet.)
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 (Really?!? Who put this book on the list?)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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 (I might have read this in school, but I'm not sure. I do know the story very well, but my knowledge could be from lit crit and curriculum materials that I have read over the years.)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt (Another book that Valerie recommends to me.)
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 (I really do intend to read this, but I will probably take Edward Albee's advice and read along with an audiobook.)
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 (I just can't help but think of this book as touchy-feely dribble, and I just can't believe it belongs on a list like this.)
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

Reading Interrupted

I started back to work last week, and I have been watching too much Olympics at night to get much reading done. Twilight, my bedside table read right now, is good but not good enough to keep me awake into the wee hours, and I have wanted to keep reading more than once.

Even though I didn't make much progress in War & Peace, I felt pretty good about reading 13 books this summer. Then I read that Danielle at A Work in Progress has almost completed 1000 pages of Les Miserables, and I realized that I have a lot of reading to do if I am going to complete the Russian Reading Challenge by the end of the year. The problem with War & Peace is that it is too big to read when I'm lying in bed and too big to tote places with me. I wish that I was awake enough when I first come down stairs in the morning, then maybe I could make it a habit to read for a certain amount of time each morning. Reading would be more productive than lying on the couch watching the Weather Channel and dozing while my first cup of coffee cools and I get ready to get ready for work. And yes, I do realize that I could just come down stairs, get my coffee, go back up stairs immediately, and get ready earlier, thus giving myself some time to read before I leave for work. Yeah, I don't see myself making that a habit because I'm not enough of a morning person (read: I'm too lazy). I think my best bet will be to try to make it a habit to read some each afternoon when I get home from work. Of course, I'll to wait on that plan until Valerie's work schedule switches back to the one where she gets off work at 5:00. If she's home when I get here, I won't be able to concentrate on reading. ;-)

Now I'm going to get off the computer. I promised myself that I would not play any games tonight while I watched the Olympics. Maybe I can read some during the commericials, right?

Back to work

I start back to work today, and I am surprisingly ready to go. I would already be there except I have to go to pinkie therapy first. Even though I am not going in to work until late, I got up early this morning and did a bit of Internet surfing and discovered that what I already thought was going to be a great season of Inprint readings is going to be even better. I am so excited!!! I can't wait for the readings to begin. I am going to try very hard to post about each reading here. Actually, I have enough free time now that I could/should be posting regularly here, but for some reason, I haven't been. I'm going to try to post here more regularly.

Over the weekend, I finished The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt, number thirteen for my summer reading, and started Twilight, finally. I have been putting off reading Twilight for over a year now. I just am not the kind of person who wants to read what everyone else is reading. Yes, I'm snobby like that. I'm the same way with movies. I figure that if a broad spectrum of people like something that it's probably too mainstream for me. I have been this way since I was a teenager--a very long time ago. I distinctly remember when Kramer vs. Kramer hit the theaters. All my friends told me that I had to see; it was the best movie ever. I saw it and didn't like it at all. When I went to college and grad school as an English major, I developed into a literature snob--sad but true. Of course, I am sometimes surprised by mainstream hits, both books and movies, and I hope to be surprised by Twilight. I've only read about 50 pages so far.

Wow, look at the time. I have to go to pinkie therapy now. Later.

Something quick and fun

Hat tip to Valerie.

The end of my summer

This is my last week of summer vacation. Next week, I go back for my second year as a junior high librarian. I had planned to read a bunch of YA books this summer, but I only read a couple so far. I might read one or two more before students return to school two weeks from Monday. I have read several books this summer. I need to blog about them and post reviews of the two that are Early Reviewer books at LibraryThing. For now, though, I will just list what I've read this summer.

1. Hero by Perry Moore
2. Eleven Minutes by Paul Coehlo
3. Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking by Aiobhean Sweeney
4. Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
5. Skim by Mariko Tamiki and Jillian Tamiki
6. Love Marriage by V.V. Ganeshananthan
7. The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney by Suzanne Harper
8. Drown by Junot Diaz
9. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
10. The Murder Room by P.D. James

Wow! Ten books in just over two months. Pretty good for a slow reader like me. I will finish at least one more this week, Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum. Plus, I have read about 100 pages of War & Peace. I need to set aside 30 minutes to an hour each day to read some of it because I want to finish it before the end of the year.

Now, I need to go beat Valerie at Rummikub. :-)