Land of Odd

1119

maddieonthings:

Well dang! That pretty girl named Maddie is up for preorder over on Amazon

Another kid book finished: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

Take-away: “If you stay on this rez,” Mr P said, “they’re going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. We’re all going to kill you. You can’t fight us forever.”

2nd take-away via Vince Lombardi: “The quality of a man’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.”

Great “narrator” drawings throughout the novel.

Books I’ve Read - I’ve decided to read some kid books for a change. Just finished: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Take away: “I laid down on his old bed, and I looked through the window at this tree that was probably a lot shorter when my dad looked at it. And I could feel what he felt on the night when he realized that if he didn’t leave, it would never be his life. It would be theirs.”

Pretty quick read. Good flow.

Just Finished - Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim

Finally finished it!! It was a complete slog… mostly due to the slang… which of course there was a glossary for (I discovered at the end of the book when I finished reading it).

Take-away: “Lord, I’m not asking you to bless my pimping. I ain’t that stupid. Lord, I know you ain’t black. Surely you know, if you’re up there, what it’s like to be black down here. These white folks are doing all the fine living and sucking up all the gravy. I gotta have some of that living and some of that gravy.”

Book Finished (quick read): The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont

Take Away: Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

Funny that the Mitt Romney prep school stuff came into the news cycle while I was reading this…

Book Finished: The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

Take Away: “A simpler answer - that Edgar perceived himself as an island of underrated promise in a sea of undeserving incompetence - would sound iffy in the open air”.

And: “Majority status is no people’s right… It is an accident, a lucky advantage. Like any advantage you want to hold on to it. But it is typical reasoning of privileged people to assume that just because you have something, ipso facto you deserve it. In truth, this ‘defense of borders’ is naked defense of self-interest - not justice”.

And finally (just for fun): “Edgar gathered the train and swirled out of the bedroom with a little transvestite flounce; assured that you could get away with anything so long as you did it with conviction”.

Recently finished reading: Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Take away: “We have determined that the message of change and redemption can only come from within humanity itself. We have chosen to make contact with certain gifted humans. We have identified a number of individuals whose mental vibrations are at a higher pitch than those of the majority of your race. This makes them more suitable for use as communication channels. You are one such individual.”

I am NOT one of those individuals and found the time-shifting really confusing. Were people able to exist in two different times subsequently? Or does meth cure autism?

Finished Reading: The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

Another quick read - probably not the best to read at bedtime (drowzy), because I don’t read as deeply then.

Take-away: If your child is making imaginary worlds out of pieces of trash, you might need more help than faith.

Finished Reading: Tough Sh*t by Kevin Smith

Quick read - autobiography of select portions of his life relating to film (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Cop Out, Red State) and his life.

Take-away: the fact that you’re on planet earth is a miracle (the sperm with your dna won the race and hit the egg) and so anything else is gravy - make the most of it.

Just finished: Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Well-written, light read. Fiction.

dyingofcute:

My number is 40

100 Books

Have you read more than 6 of these books?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger*@
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell@
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald*@
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams@
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 - A.A. Milne *@
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *@
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown@
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*
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 Inferno - Dante*
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 - E.B. 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

COPY AND PASTE. STAR the ones you have read.
PLEASE JOIN IN .

I have 53 (I used the “@” to mark)… of those I didn’t mark I’ve tried and given up or won’t read because they don’t appeal to me, so I’ll never get the full 100.

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