Another Book List for Shits and Giggles

A friend sent me a link to NPR'S "Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books" and I wanted to see how many I've already read. (And remind myself of books to which I still need to get.) There are quite a number that I want to read or already have in my "To Read" stack (which takes up a couple of bookshelves in my apartment, sadly).
(color guide: read, own, want to read)

1. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
5. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
6. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells
7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
9. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg
10. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

11. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
12. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
13. The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
14. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
17. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
18. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
19. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
20. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
21. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
22. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
23. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith
24. The World According to Garp, by John Irving
25. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
26. The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy
27. Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
28. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
29. The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler
30. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
31. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
32. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
33. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
34. Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
35. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
36. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier
37. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
38. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
39. The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough
40. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

41. Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
42. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
43. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
44. Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
45. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
46. Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes
47. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
48. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins
49. I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb
50. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
51. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
52. The Stand, by Stephen King
53. She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb
54. Dune, by Frank Herbert
55. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Barrows
56. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
57. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
58. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
59. The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
60. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
61. Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
62. Jaws, by Peter Benchley
63. Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner
64. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
65. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
66. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
67. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
68. Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
69. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
70. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
71. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
72. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
73. Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns
74. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
74. Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe [tie]
76. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
77. Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon
78. The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher
79. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
80. Eye of the Needle, by Ken Follett
81. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
81. The Pilot's Wife, by Anita Shreve [tie]
83. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
84. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
85. The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
86. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
87. One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich
88. Shogun, by James Clavell
89. Dracula, by Bram Stoker
90. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
91. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow
92. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
93. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
94. Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris
95. Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume
96. The Shining, by Stephen King
97. How Stella Got Her Groove Back, by Terry McMillan
98. Lamb, by Christopher Moore
99. Sick Puppy, by Carl Hiaasen
100. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Women in the Spotlight: Sarah Palin

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly says, "There are certain shades of limelight that will wreck a girl's complection." That's the spotlight I choose to shine on Sarah Palin this week. For centuries, women have fought for equal rights, both here in the U.S. and around the world. Sarah Palin is setting us back by a decade or two at least. Women already have to campaign harder to work their way up the political ladder and having someone as inept and blatantly idiotic as she is in the center arena does not make it any easier. A friend linked me to Vanity Fair's article "Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version" and it underscores just how unqualified this woman was for Vice President (or any other political position in my personal opinion). The saddest thing, though, is that she probably worked really hard on that speech and was proud of it. At least that was the attitude I encountered working at my first job proofreading content for apartment newsletters. I learned that many people in our country are so poorly educated in English that they don't even know how bad their writing is. And they got extremely agitated when I fixed the blatant grammatical errors (like subject and verb not matching in number) and say, "I worked on that for hours. How could you rewrite it?" And I wanted to tell them all, "I'm sorry, but you really shouldn't have." Meanwhile pondering how much worse the original version could have possibly been? (And immediately deciding that I'd rather not know.)
Now, this is all just speculation. I don't know how much time Palin spent on this speech or how she felt about it. Or even if it was her who wrote it (though VF made it sound like it). Regardless, she should be embarrassed for having given it, because it's one of the most poorly written (and factually inaccurate--she thought President Lincoln's cabinet was responsible for the purchase of Alaska. Isn't that the kind of thing a state governor ought to know?) things I've read since getting laid off from the newsletter company. My cousin wrote better than that in 5th grade. Sadly, most of her listeners probably saw no more wrong with it than she did. Which ought to serve as an indictment (or, preferably, a wake-up call) to us on the state of public education. Instead that's the first thing governments cut when budget crises strike (just look at California right now if you don't believe me).
Kudos goes to VF highlighting the spectacular-ness of editors. So many newspapers and magazines seem to be dispensing with these positions as they send things online. It's reassuring to know that someone is upholding the integrity of the written word in the media.

Women in the Spotlight: Amelia Earhart

While I was in SF, I saw Public Enemies and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, both were good movies, but that's beside the point. They ran a preview before both movies that made me particularly excited: Amelia. At long last, someone is making a movie about Amelia Earhart. Growing up, she was one of the women I studied in school and read about. I was obsessed with knowing about her life. And I couldn't understand how nobody could know what had happened to her. I felt a special affinity for her in part because she was from Kansas (the state where I grew up), Atchison to be exact.
Amelia Earhart was the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean as well as setting many other records and establishing an association for female pilots before she disappeared over the Pacific ocean while attempting to circumnavigate the world in 1937. This is a movie I will definitely be going to see. And I'm almost glad they waited so long to finally make a movie about her, because I think Hilary Swank is the perfect actress to portray her.

Free At Last!

Saturday marked the end of my time working in shoe hell. Whoo! A day earlier than I had expected. It's one of the few jobs I've quit in my life. The only one since college. And no matter how much I dreaded working there, quitting was hard. Or maybe awkward is a better word for it. I'd originally said (in my interview) that I planned to stay even if I got a full-time job. And it wasn't meant to be a lie, if I'd gotten any of the jobs I was interviewing for last spring, I would have had to just to make ends meet and pay back my parents. Plus, I worked with nice, cool people. But as my mom reminded me there are plenty of people out there who need that job more than me now. Besides, I was planning on giving notice anyway so that I could go on vacation and move. Now I get to take my vacation without having to stress about coming back and boxing all my stuff up afterwards. It's a good feeling. Which is something I haven't felt in quite awhile. And hopefully, this means the end of my nightmares about shoes.

Apparently, My Friend Is God (or, biblical history repeats itself)

My friend and I were discussing (some might say arguing) the other day about links she threatened to send me. It all goes back a few years ago when she sent me a link to some comics and said, "By the way, don't read the first one on that page. It is the most disturbing thing I've ever read." Well, of course, I immediately wanted to know what would could possibly be that bad. So I read it. And, quite predictably, I responded with, "GAH!!!! How could you possibly send me that?!?!?" To which my friend said, "I told you not to read that." Which, I was forced to concede, was true.
Anyways, so when my friend says the other day that she found another link in the same forum that that link had come from, I automatically responded with "NO! Don't EVEN send me anything like that again." And she tried to convince me that a) it wasn't anything that bad and b) it was my fault for looking at it the first time. So I brought up the story of Eve from Genesis to explain why it was HER fault because she told me not to read it, so of course I had to read it. I was all like, see, you are like the serpent tempting me with this apple that I'm not supposed to eat by telling me all the reasons I shouldn't. And she pointed out that actually God was the one who told Eve she shouldn't eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Which of course lead to her conclusion: "I'm like f***ing God in that story." (A dangerous concept all on it's own and the whole reason that I had to write this post. Because I had to use that as a title.) And I am unable to resist my curiousity. But I learned my lesson. If my friend says something is disturbing, I now trust her on it. Never again will I question what could possibly be that bad. So history may repeat itself, but hopefully we learn something at least from our own.