etc.

Am I the last person in the known universe to find out about the Twilight series? I’ve been spotting excited bloggers talking up Breaking Dawn on their blogs and I hadn’t bothered to pay much mind (who has time to read?, I asked myself), but then the mister gave me a copy of Twilight (Book 1) for my birthday last weekend. As of today I’m about a third of the way through Eclipse (Book 3). When I went to pick it up yesterday, I also grabbed Breaking Dawn because the thought of finishing one and not having the next on hand for immediate gratification was too painful a notion to even consider. As for that “who has time to read” voice, all I can say is it’s keeping me up far too late (2.30 last night, 2 the night before, 3 the night before that) as I steal whatever reading time I can before bed.

If it turns out that I’m not the last person in the known universe to have discovered them, then I commend them to you enthusiastically! With exclamation points even! But, caveat lector: do yourself a favour and don’t start in on this series unless you have a few hours a day to feed the impulse. It’s absorbing, heady, get-under-your-skin stuff, folks.

Lean in close and inhale deeply for full effect.

I have this on-going dream of an imaginary vacation that consists of 2 weeks in a remote cabin on a lake, a bag full of yarn, no TV, a stack of books, fine crisp air, and no commitments. I recently stumbled upon this meme at Not an Artist and I’ve since seen it in a bunch of other places, and for some reason, my imaginary lakeside vacation springs to mind every time I see it. Must be something about the indulgence of having the time to read all those books I’ve never read or started but didn’t finish.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Pop a note in the comments if you’ve done this one (and help me keep the dream alive).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

To-day? Pretty much the same as yesterday. Yesterday? Cool, almost cold, and dull. In a not-bad way. I’m on vacation this week and I have no plans. No vacation-type plans, that is. I spent yesterday grading essays and tabulating final marks that were to be delivered to the faculty by day’s end (done!). To-day I’m reading a wad of documents in preparation for an all-day committee meeting tomorrow that is only loosely work-related. Tomorrow I attend said all-day meeting. Thursday through Sunday? Wide open. For vacation-type plans that are still in the hopper (and will probably amount to little more than three books and a couch).

Speaking of books, at the moment I’m reading Consolation by Michael Redhill. It’s been longlisted for the Man Booker (new word for me, that) and it is quite brilliant. Although I’m a complete pushover for novels set in Toronto so, of course, I’m biased. The other two books for the week? Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Also? I’ve got sore fingers and dirt under my fingernails from weeding and watering the front garden. The dry spell around here has been a blessing only because it has foiled the weeds’ plans to overtake our front garden and front walk. We’ve got Irish moss growing between the stones on our front walk and a certain weed (I think it might be White Clover. And, look, I found a whole weed gallery for Ontario!) has been conspiring to overtake the entire walk and, most likely, kill off the moss. I usually let it get Bad before taking action because they’re tiny little buggers and standing there, looking at the lot of them all at once sends me into a spell of paralysis, but to-day I realized that focusing on tiny patches at a time gets the job done in good order. Is this how people manage their gardens? I’m never sure, I just play at gardening, you see.

Oh, and, also? While I was out there attending to the weeding and watering, our neighbour came home and asked if we heard a ruckus outside our door a couple of nights earlier. Apparently her bike was stolen right off her front step — the bike that she leaves chained to our downspout (our houses are attached; it’s all very intimate). I said we hadn’t heard anything (because we hadn’t) and we proceeded to tut-tut at the ridiculousness of someone going through the trouble of sawing through a lock to thieve a ratty old bike. And take her son’s Tonka trucks while they were at it. It made me feel fortunate that the only thing we’ve had stolen is a green bin and had me puzzling over the apparent incomprehensibility of the concept of personal property all over again. I still don’t get it.

Up next: a walk to the library to return 7 gravely-overdue books. I might never learn.

I think I am becoming a domestic goddess. To-day for lunch I threw together the following ingredients: fresh pasta, diced tomatoes, summer sausage, ricotta cheese, garlic, fresh basil, salt, pepper. If you know me at all you know that I don’t ever “throw together” ingredients and end up with a startlingly delicious meal. Bow before me.

One of my most frequent typos: satursday.

Just in from a colleague: The Mildred Wirt Benson (aka Carolyn Keene) Collection.

Recently read, thoroughly enjoyed, heartily recommended: The Professor and the Madman (Simon Winchester), The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion), Gentlemen and Players (Joanne Harris).

Currently reading, thoroughly enjoying, heartily recommending: On Beauty (Zadie Smith).

Two good words that begin with “c”: criminy, caterwaul.

I came this close to posting a photograph to fulfill to-day’s blogging commitment, but then I remembered saying that this month would be about words, not images. Thank goodness I didn’t make any promises regarding memes.

This one is called Friday Random 10 (FR10) and the point is to set your MP3 player to random and blog the first ten songs. I first saw FR10 in action on Blatherskite, where Moni does a lovely job of sprucing up her FR10 posts with album cover thumbnails. Unfortunately, you’re not getting any of that value-added content here because I’m lazy. What you do get is a brief, parenthetical reaction to each song, because that’s a lot easier to do than scout out for album cover thumbnails.

• Missing You, Jem. From Finally Woken (Good!).
• Le Cou de ma Bouteille, Les Charbonniers de L’Enfer. From Wô (This is the French band I mentioned a couple of posts ago. Scary how my iPod knows just what I want to hear).
• The Oracle Said Wand, Sufjan Stevens. From A Sun Came (Meh).
• Diamonds from Sierra Leone, Kanye West. From Late Registration (Why, thank you, Mr. west).
• The Bleeding Heart Show, The New Pornographers. From Twin Cinema (I’m really not happy that I had to put that word on my blog; just you stand back and watch as the trackback and comment spam comes pouring in).
• I’m your Villian, Franz Ferdinand. From You Could Have it So Much Better (Brilliant!).
• Time is Running Out, Muse. From Absolution (Oh, I miss this song!).
• Mr. Brightside, The Killers. From Hot Fuss (More brilliant!).
• Life, Our Lady Peace. From Spiritual Machines (Our Lady Peace just came out with a Best Of album and I didn’t have to buy it. Why? Because I own everything they’ve every recorded so I just cloned the tracklist and created my own playlist!).
• Slow Pony Home, The Weepies. From Say I Am You (I lovelovelove this album. In fact, I’ve just decided that it will be the soundtrack for my ride home this evening).

And, before I leave you, don’t forget what to-day is. Act accordingly.

Cold, cold, cold to-day. So cold that I pulled out the mittens, so cold that we brought out our two little space heaters, one for the basement, where we spend most of our waking hours, and one for the bedroom, where we spend our non-waking hours. We usually wait until the Very Last Minute to turn our heating on (which came ten days ago) and it’s got to be pretty damn cold in here for us to pull out the space heaters. And guess who still hasn’t prepped her front garden for winter? Yay me, I win!

At the moment I am listening to a fabulous album by a group called Les Charbonniers de L’Enfer, which is, according to their website, “the only québécois a capella group specialising in the research and interpretation of the oral tradition repertoire.” I was supremely happy to see that cogent description on their website because I have no idea how to describe this band to you. I borrowed the CD from a colleague (who has the most brilliant and eclectic taste in music) and she described them as performing in the “call and response” tradition with some very experimental vocal arrangements. Again, pretty meaningless until you listen to them, but suffice it to say that they are absolutely ace and I can feel my musical horizons broadening as I type.

You know what I like to do? I like to trawl for new blogs every once in a while. Because, you know, there are more than 60 million blogs out there on the internets, and millions and millions of busy bloggers blogging away at them, so I feel that it is incumbent upon me to get out from behind my regular reads to find some new ones. It’s been a few months since I last went trawling, so last Saturday, after I sucked my aggregator dry of all its fresh newness, I set out to discover a few more delights to add to my daily roster, and discover I did! Here are a few new-to-me blogs in which I have been delighting all week:

Anna Maria Horner
Designer and Mum of 5, Anna Maria’s recent post about her kitchen remodel snagged me and I’ve been reading ever since.

Antarctic Journal
A group of researchers travel to Ross Island, Antarctica, every winter to study the Adelie penguin. I started reading this one last year but added it to this list because they’re back for the new season, so it feels like a brand new blog! The photographs and tales are fantastic, when I first stumbled upon this blog last year, I read through all the archives in one go. You will too.

The Hypothetical Wren
A grad student in New Mexico. I’m particularly enjoying her posts about her students & teaching.

Kerflop
I think I first discovered kerflop in 2004 and, for some reason, it dropped off my radar until I stumbled over it again last week. Like finding an old friend!

me, my life + infrastructure
Another grad student blog, a genre I’ve been oddly drawn to lately, in that “oh, I remember the pain” way. I loved grad school, really I did, but there sure was a lot of angst.

weapons of massdistraction
Stunning photography and good prose is an excellent combination.

What’s Alan Watching
Alan watches a lot of TV and he talks about, in entertaining detail, on his blog.

——

And you? Read any good blogs lately?

Oh, yes they are! Here’s another that has been in draft for a while (I don’t think I was tagged for this one, I just grabbed it off someone’s blog a few months ago (months!)). The list is pretty random, and since I’ve read and own most of them, I’ve included some notes and links to reviews where appropriate. Meme ad libbing! Doesn’t that just fly in the face of all the meme rules? I’m such a blog rebel.

How it works: bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, and underline the ones on your book shelf.

• The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (review)
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (read this as a teenager, didn’t get the hype; read it again in my 20s and fell in love)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (also first read as a teenager, one of my all-time favourites)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (you already know how I feel about this one; review)
• His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (I’ve pulled out this series every year during the winter break, swearing that I will read them all; not sure why it hasn’t happened yet but I do look upon these three books longingly every time I walk by my bookshelves. One of these days I’ll have some time to read these indulgently, all in one go, cover to cover.)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel (review)
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien (yes, it’s on the shelves, it belongs to the mister. I have no desire to read it, although I feel like I probably should.)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (review)
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• 1984 – George Orwell
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
• One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
• Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (hated it!)
• The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
• The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (review)
• Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
• Angels and Demons – Dan Brown (also one of the mister’s)
• Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
• The Secret History – Donna Tartt (why do I feel like I should know this book?)
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (you’ve heard the story on this one too)
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
• Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides (review)
• Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
• The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
• Atonement – Ian McEwan (review)
• The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• Dune – Frank Herbert (one of the mister’s favourites. He’s tried to force it upon me many times, I’ve managed to resist).

I started this meme ages ago and had it saved in draft (someone tagged me; it was so long ago that I can’t remember who it was!), and since I’m on the hunt for blog fodder these days, to-day turned out to be the perfect day to finish it!

One book that changed your life?
Crime and Punishment. Not sure what it says about me but I wrote three papers about Raskolnikov when I was an undergrad. For three different classes (2 Literature, 1 Philosophy). I was (and still am) fascinated by him and Crime and Punishment continues to be one of my favourite books of all time.

One book you have read more than once?
I read Wuthering Heights so many times as a teenager that I remember my dad saying, around the fifth reading, “don’t you think it’s time to read something else?”

One book you would want on a desert island?
Well, Crime and Punishment, of course. And the 12-volume edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. I’m not kidding about that last one.

One book that made you laugh?
Most recently, Elsewhere (the book about a 15-year old who died and narrates her afterlife). There are many things about Elsewhere (where you go in the afterlife) that make it similar to Earth, but one of the differences is that animals and humans can communicate on Elsewhere (apparently they should be able to communicate on Earth as well, but sadly, no one is teaching “canine” in schools yet). The conversations between Liz and the dogs in her care made me laugh out loud.

One book that made you cry?
Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger. So fabulously imaginative and magical, I didn’t want it to end. I loved it so much, in fact, that I’m a bit troubled by this.

One book you wish had never been written?
A tie: Tuesdays with Morrie and The Bridges of Madison County.

One book you are currently reading?
Specials, Scott Westerfeld. It’s the last of a brilliant YA trilogy.

One book you have been meaning to read?
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve borrowed this book from the library and returned it without cracking the spine.

Now tag five people:
Oh, you know I don’t meme-tag! If you’d like to play along (all three of you who haven’t done this meme yet), consider yourself tagged. And leave a comment to let us know!

So, anyway, things have been quiet. Easter weekend was a lovely treat, we drove out to the mister’s brother’s new farm in Napanee, Ontario (new on account of their recent move to said farm, not because the farm itself is new; the farm is, in fact, a couple hundred years old!), where we did a lot of visiting, eating, and laughing. I took a ton of pictures too, but left my camera at my parent’s house (where there was more good visiting, eating, and laughing on Sunday), so Flickr is going to have to wait a few days.

I’m reading Jane Austen: A Life at the moment. I first read Austen as a teenager and disliked her novels intently, so much so, in fact, that I inscribed that Thoreau quote (the title of this post) on the title page of my copy of Pride and Prejudice. I’m not sure how I managed to escape her novels through two English degrees, but I did, and I was always somewhat regretful for it because I felt that my youthful condemnation might have been a bit harsh and that I ought to give her a second chance. I’m only a few pages into the Shields biography, but I have a feeling that by the time I reach the last page, I will be ready and eager to embark upon that long overdue second chance.