I signed up for Goodreads.com today - a cool site that lets you keep track of and rate books you’ve read with some social networking thrown in for good measure. Here’s my user profile: http://www.goodreads.com/profile/AnaisAmy

Coincidentally, I saw a book meme online just now, so I thought I’d blog both things. Here’s what you’re supposed to do with the list below:

1 - Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2 - Italicize those you intend to read.
3 - Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn’t like.
4 - Post this list on your own blog

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 - Not sure if I’m read everything, but I’ve read most of his works.
15) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
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
31) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I actually borrowed this from the library and had a hard time getting into it, but I’ll try again.
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 - AA 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - I didn’t hate the writing, but the subject matter was just too depressing.
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 - EB 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
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Damn, that’s a lot of books I haven’t read; I need to get busy with some of these classics. Which one should I start with first?

I saw mention of Wordle on some blogs, and thought it was mostly lame at first. Then I put in the URL of my blog and really liked the image that it created. So I hereby declare Wordle cool.

Check out my Wordle:

I was so saddened to wake up to the news of George Carlin’s death this morning. He was a true comedic genius and will be greatly missed by those both in and out of the industry. I’m also bummed that the only time we saw him perform in person, he really sucked. It was so bad that we walked out, even. I was hoping he would redeem himself for us at another show, but I guess that won’t be happening. I’ll have to satisfy myself with old shows now.

Although he was enlightened in ways a lot of people aren’t, I think George was a tortured soul while he walked this earth. I hope he’s resting in peace now. And I hope Jesus brought him some pork chops.

I’ve long had a dream to live on a farm, totally old-school style the way my great grandmother lived her entire life. The circumstances of my life have prevented that, but today I took the first step towards my dream. It’s a tiny step, sure, but it’s more than what I’ve done in the past.

This might not look like much, but that right there is our humble beginnings of a garden. Planted are two beefsteak tomato plants, two red bell pepper plants, and a big container of cucumber plants. Let’s hope I don’t kill them all. Next year I want to start earlier and plant a whole bunch more stuff. Ideally, I’d like to have potatoes, yams, red & green bell peppers, hot peppers of some sort, cucumbers, carrots, and corn at the very least next season. But, let’s just see how this season goes first.

I also signed up to participate in the One Local Summer challenge which began this week. I didn’t have a full meal that consisted of all local food, unfortunately. I hope to do that as the summer goes on. Funds are tight, though, so it will just depend on how much local chicken/turkey costs. I need to do some more research. The start of this challenge came up on me faster than expected. Summer isn’t for another few weeks, after all. :-)

In my dream world, I’d have chickens and all sorts of foods from the garden that I cultivate and can, thereby keeping our kitchen stocked with extremely local food. The idea of knowing exactly what is in the majority of my food, where it all comes from, and the cost savings alone are enough to make me salivate without even beginning to take into account how delicious all of it would be. Maybe some day.

Here’s to a fruitful harvest!

Yesterday I attended a friend’s babies’ (triplets!) dedication ceremony at her church where the service and sermon afterwards really knocked me off my feet. When I first walked into the church, there was fairly loud, rockin’ music playing, lots of people hustling around and being extremely friendly - recognizing me as a newcomer right away - and just a general sense of happiness and light through out the place. Expecting a traditional, more staid-like church atmosphere hadn’t prepared me for this experience. I was pleasantly surprised. Not that there’s anything wrong with the more traditional church approach; I’m a fan of that style, too, but this really awakened my senses and whetted my appetite for more.

As I walked into the nave, the music grew louder and a full band on stage greeted me with sounds of contemporary Christian music. I loved seeing 2 guitar players, a bassist, a keyboardist, a drummer, and 4 singers up there really getting into their stuff. I couldn’t help smiling as I found my way to a seat among the dancing and swaying parishioners as I looked for my friend and her babies. The dedication ceremony itself was relatively brief, but very precious. How could it not be with three smiling babies facing the congregation? At the end, a soloist sang, “Yes, Jesus loves me” in the sweetest voice ever. Loved it.

But the thing I loved the most was the message the pastor preached to us that day. He started out with a mention of all the veterans who have served us and we applauded them all. This led into two very moving stories of servicemen in the past. One was an 18 year old in either World War 2 or Vietnam (I forget the specifics) who picked up a live grenade the enemy had just tossed into their camp and tucked it into his stomach so that he would die instead of his four buddies serving next to him. The other story was similar but more recent. An equally young man was driving a tanker when a grenade landed on it. He could have jumped out and the tank with the four soldiers inside would have exploded. Instead, he chose to take the grenade to his mid-section - killing himself, but saving the others.

As the pastor told these stories, I wondered if I would have made the same choice those two men did. I honestly don’t know that I would. Maybe it’s different in war time and you’re right there in the moment. Maybe I would in those circumstances. I hope my character is stronger than I think it is, anyway.

The pastor then went on to tie the message of the sacrifice the men and women who have served and lost their lives for our country to the small, every day sacrifices we can make in our relationships. He joked that most people would take a grenade to the stomach, but not give up doing their favorite activity for their loved ones. That got a laugh, but it really hit a nerve. He asked how much do we truly sacrifice our wants and needs in a loving, filled with humility way - in order to deepen and strengthen our relationships. I know I have a lot of work to do in that regard. So much work. The promise of self-sacrifice is deeply rewarding relationships beyond imagination, though, and I want that.

Of course, he ended the sermon with the parallel of the sacrifice Christ made for us - and I just loved how he tied it all together. It was a great way to start my day and a great reminder of the sacrifices the men and women of our great United States of America have made for our country. I’m grateful for every one of them and will take time today to reflect on those who have lost their lives so that we may live a better one.