The need to procrastinate

[therealsnape]

This afternoon I’m supposed to write the minutes of a meeting (done now) and three not very interesting short interviews (one down, two to go). All of this unpaid, to make things worse. 

This is how it happened: last year, I was enjoying, in a quiet, mature, and responsible way, the monthly dinner cum lecture of the women entrepreneurs club I’m a member of. Then assorted committee members asked me to join them in an after dinner drink. I remember wine, Sambucca and, at some point, saying: “Yes, well, why not, could be fun.” And meaning it, too. Next morning I woke up, I was the new secretary.

So now I’m dutifully writing dreary RL-stuff AND I serve on a committee as well. I'm such a brick, you could throw me through windows.

Thank heaven for book memes. Stolen from procrastinator's delight, 

kellychambliss

 

 

 

 

Bold = read

Italics = valiant effort was made

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen  (several times, like all Austen’s books.)

  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Strangely, I love the film. Extended version, even. But the book? Bored of the Rings.)

  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

  4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  (you’d never guess I read this one, right?)

  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

  6. The Bible  (Did read quite a lot of it. But ‘all’ would be a lie. And I did get to the ‘thou shalt not’s’. No lies in this list.)

  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

  8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

  9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Am fascinated by Miss Havisham)

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (About seven or eight plays, I’d say, and the sonnets of course.)

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

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 (Usually read a Dickens each winter. To me, he’s a one-season writer. Like Maupassant for autumn. Might put this on the list for this year. Are there more people out there who can relate to the notion of ‘seasonal author’, or am I terminally batty?)

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 (Ah. Childhood love, this!)

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis  (stopped after the first book)

34. Emma - Jane Austen 

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen 

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis  (given as a separate title, but I thought this was ‘Narnia’? Well, this is the bit I read.)

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden  (Ok if you find it in the 50cents section of a second-hand bookstall. Would not throw serious money at it, though)

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I noticed that Kelly verges on the negative when mentioning Brown, so I’ll try to balance that a bit. If your choice in reading material consists of the instructions on a packet of Rigatoni, a four weeks old Italian sports journal, and the Code that-must-not-be-named, then, by all means, try the Code.)

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 (First book only)

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 (Why is everyone so crazy about this?)

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 (Funny, but not a patch on Adrian Mole)

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 (Everything by Burnett, including The making of a Marchioness.)

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce  (Is there anyone who honestly loved this?)

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola in French

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (mean to try again, I read it in a time of too much mandatory litt.reading for university.)

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (annually, the day I decorate the tree)

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert in French. And she irritates the hell out of me.

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White (Aaagggh! Childhood trauma. The cover was illustrated by the peerless Garth Williams. He of the Little House books. So I thought I had discovered a new House book and hopped home, hugging the thing joyfully. Picture my disappointment. No, really, picture it; it would make an onion cry. Never got beyond the first page.)

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (This sounds like a ficfest-prompt.)

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Quite a lot of them, but I don’t know whether I read everything. A simplified version for foreign language students of The Speckled Band was the first English book I read – age 12. Loved it.)  

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton  (Never heard of this. In Holland we just had Malory Towers and the O’Sullivan Twins. And the utterly boring Five Detectives.)

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in 3 stages: looking at the pictures of my Dad’s Dutch version, much intrigued, age 4. Read it in Dutch, age 6, I guess. Finally read it in French, age 15 or so, quite pleased that I could. Discovered many things I missed aged 6, too.)

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 in French.

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo (All 1486 pages of the édition Pléiade. Really.)
101. Since they cheated in the numbers 14 +98, I may add another favorite. Dangerous Liaisons – Choderlos de la Clos.

102. And since I strongly suspect they cheated in 33 + 36 I add a second. In a dark wood wandering – Hella Haasse.

 

A strange list, though. If this comes from the Beeb’s search for the Nation’s Favorite Novel, one wonders about Ulysses. And Memoirs of a Geisha? But where does the story come from that most people have read less than six books from this list? I’m a non-native speaker, and I was put through more in secondary school.  Still, it is fun. No doubt Ulysses was put in so that no-one would score 100. And the ‘ six books read by most people’ is to make us all feel smug.

And if the Favorite Novel search was what prompted this list, I guess I should be glad there are French novels at all, instead of secretly bemoan the absence of Camus, Voltaire, Racine, Molière, Sarrault and various others. Why this British preoccupation with Dumas?

Comments

[queen-of-snapes.livejournal.com]

"Next morning I woke up, I was the new secretary."

Loool!

Happy procrastinating! These two websites always help me wasting time:
http://www.dontevenreply.com/index.php
http://whywomenhatemen.blogspot.com/

[therealsnape.livejournal.com]

Thanks! As soon as I return from holiday, I will be awash with dreadful RL stuff, and this will be a life-saver!

[cranky--crocus.livejournal.com]

Adrian Mole! I am glad someone else knows to mention it. Smiles. I ran into my copy the other day when I was cleaning. I still don't have the heart to part with it.

I really need to read more of the books on that list.

[therealsnape.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loved Adrian. Still do, by the way. He and I are more or less of an age, so I also love the regular updates. The Cappucino years was brilliant -there's a lovely parody on Bridget in there.
And never mind that list - this is the time in your life for the 'activities' list that you were doing so well on!

[cranky--crocus.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, the activities list that I always forget exists until I go back to fill it out and realise what I have left to do is growing smaller. Frightening thing, that! But fun. However, I do quite enjoy reading, so I do try to even it out a little bit.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

I have my doubts as to whether the BBC said anything at all about this list. (I looked on their website at one point and found nothing.) In my opinion, people put down Ulysses because they think they are supposed to, not because they really read and/or liked the thing.

I'm seriously impressed by your Hugo and Dumas in the original.

[therealsnape.livejournal.com]

I'm seriously impressed by your Hugo and Dumas in the original.
Well, I did read French at university. And this was what that was supposed to be about. Knowing the best Parisian foodshops was just an extra-curricular activity...