Meme, pilfered from Meg

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. Here's how I shape up against them.

The books I've read are in bold, the ones I started but couldn't/didn’t finish are in italics, what I couldn’t stand has a strike through, those I've read more than once have an asterisk*, and those underlined are on my To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary I watched the movie, though.
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre ...I watched this movie, too.
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and PeaceVanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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* (LOVE LOVE LOVE)
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
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
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
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud
Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (thanks, Lisa!)
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
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

Lesson: Nothing, really, except that I clearly have more books to read.

If You Forget Me

Just because I like it, here is a lovely poem by Pablo Neruda.

---

If you forget me
I want you to know one thing
You know how this is

If I look at the crystal moon
At the red branch of the slow autumn at my window
If I touch near the fire the impalpable ash
Or the wrinkled body of the log
Everything carries me to you
As if everything that exists - aromas, light, metals
Were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me

Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you, little by little

If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember....
That on that day, at that hour
I shall lift my arms, and my roots will set off to seek another land

But... If each day, each hour
You feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness
If each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me
Ahh my love, ahh my own
In me all that fire is repeated
In me nothing is extinguished or forgotten
My love feeds on your love, beloved
And as long as you live it will be in your arms
Without leaving mine

Stolen from Lisa, who stole it from Paul.

If your life was a movie, what would be the soundtrack?
Instructions:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend your cool... & a lot of the songs fit with
the setting"


Opening Credits:
Quequ'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni.

(I like it!)

Waking Up:
Freylekhs (Joy) from Songs of My People, Simon Wynberg

(This is a very perky song. It's an appropriate waking song, I think.)

First Day At School:
Amor Verdado, Afro Cuban All-stars

Falling In Love:
Dudu, Tarkan

(hahaha. I do love this song, and it kind of makes me want to fall in love, but I think it's about him being sad that he's not loved back, yes?)

Fight Song:
New York Gotan, Gotan Project

Breaking Up:
I'm No Angel, Dido

Prom:
Route 101, from the Definitive Hits, Herp Albert

(Sounds about right, yeah.)

Life:
Carmen Suite -- Aragonaise, LA Guitar Quartet

(This is one of my favorite songs ever. I would be happy to have it be my life soundtrack, so long as I end up better than Carmen did.)

Mental Breakdown:
You Know I'm No Good, Amy Winehouse

Driving:
It Had Better Be Tonight, Lena Horne

Flashback:
When You Called My Name, The Newsboys

(This works. I like it.)

Getting back together:
Besame Mucho, the tango version by Mantovani

Wedding:
Complainte de la Butte, Rufus Wainwright from the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack

Birth of Child:
Nekreh El Keld, Souad Massi

Final Battle:
Somewhere, Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story (Sung by Tony as he's dying. Sad. Maybe better for after the battle?)

Death Scene:
My Baby Needs a Shepherd, Emmylou Harris

Funeral:
No Jive, De-Phazz (Hotel Costes, Vol 1.)

End Credits:
Sadani Khalas, Amr Diab

Very appropriate end credits song.

Something for a Friday

5 Things I Am Afraid Of:

• Getting stuck in an elevator
• Scuba diving
• Death in my immediate family
• Public speaking and performing
• Causing a toilet to overflow somewhere that is not my home

5 Fears I Have Conquered:

• Cutting all my hair off
• Touching my eyeball/putting in contact lenses
• Getting a brazilian wax
• Quitting my stable job in order to pursue something that may or may not work out
• Traveling alone

5 Things I Am Good At:

• Sensing the moment at which the conversation turns from "playful!" to "...awkward" and thinking up something to say to change the mood
• Cooking with what I have in my fridge at any given moment
• Walking in heels
• Vocabulary words
• Packing

5 Things I Am Bad At:

• Remembering to mail my rent check so it arrives on the 1st instead of leaving my mailbox on the 1st
• Estimating distance and the time it will take to travel said distance
• Getting up on time
• Not getting distracted by shiny objects
• Studying if I know there's not going to be a test

5 Things I Want To Get Better At:

• Keeping my closet organized
• Getting enough sleep
• Dancing in nightclubs
• Giving other people the benefit of the doubt
• Returning phone calls

5 Things I Will Never Be Able To Do and Therefore Covet The Ability To Do Said Things In Others:

• Be the life of the party
• The splits
• Act
• Speak English with a convincing foreign accent
• Stay friends after breaking up

5 Things I Wouldn't Give Up, Not For Anything:

• Good rhythm
• Willingness to taste any food put in front of me
• My fantastic and inspiring friends
• A good relationship with my parents
• My faith

5 Things I Would Be Lying If I Told You I Wouldn't Sell My Soul To Possess:

• A six-pack
• A lucrative career as a photojournalist
• An old house with a veranda
• Thicker skin (in the metaphorical sense)
• A clear complexion