An Ode To Existence

summer reading list

i'm stealing this from reb like 3 minutes (according to her) after she posted it because i compulsively check her xanga like every 5 minutes, even at 7:30 in the morning (that may be slightyly hyperbolic, but i emphasize the word slightly. and now it's almost 9:30, which tells you how long i spent making my little comments). i am weird. i have come to terms with this, and apparently she finds it cute & endearing, so i don't see any problem here. anyway, here's a list of 50 classics; bold the ones you've read, italicize those you want to read, underline the ones you've read part of. this is by no means a 'top 50 classics' list (at least i hope not), just sampling of those that apparently qualify. and i don't even know who made it up, but that doesn't really matter. be honest!

Beowulf (i was supposed to read this for military history junior year....you know it's a great class when you can get a b+ while doing about 10% of the "required" reading)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart (colonial africa with prof. ewald...she was definitely an odd bird, but who am i to talk? she was always really nice to me)
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (this one sounds really familiar, but for the sake of journalistic integrity (hah!) i'm going to say i haven't....yet)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (ladies, tell me if this is really worth my while)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (input here too)
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (if for no other reason that because it's a classic)
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (i don't think there are words for how much i hated this book and the b.s. symbolism that ms. mays definitely pulled out of her rear. boo on conrad!)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans (cooper is all about detailed description. once you get past the first 50 pages that describe the forest & its various shrubbery, it moves along nicely. movie is definitely in my top 10)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (i picked this up once when i was a kid cuz i knew it was supposed to be about hell and i thought that would be interesting. old english and prose don't appeal to your average 10 year old, so it goes without saying i didn't make it past the first page)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (ap spanish, this is like old english, but in spanish. in other words, impossible to understand without footnoted translations to modern spanish....someday i will finish it, and when i do, i will officially consider myself an accomplished spanish speaker/reader)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (i had this deal with my mom in jr. high where i would read a classic for every two modern fiction pieces i read. this was on my list, but somehow i got out of it. this also explains why i was a bit of a social outcast in jr. high)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (i just bought the idiot a couple weeks ago, but dostoyevsky is a must read)
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers (i hear this one is fast paced as well, sounds good to me)
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (that just sounds cool)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays (one of the great american writers)
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying (very weird book....something was definitely up with faulkner, and not in a cool way)
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby (another one of those 'symbolic' pieces that i didn't really catch all the symbolism from, i should read it again now that my grade doesn't depend on it)
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies (i read this on my own in jr. high....no wonder people thought i was weird)
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter (yawn)
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (i'm a fan of american lit from the first half of the 20th century)
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (i liked the old man and the sea, and hemingway is another author from my favorite time period)
Homer - The Iliad (this is the history nerd in me, no one will ever care if i do or don't read it, but it's like the pinnacle of ancient greek literature)
Homer - The Odyssey (see above)
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (i like les miserables the musical, and i like victor hugo, even if he was french)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God (another one that sounds really familiar, but i can't offer any substantive memories to justify why)
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (i also like conspiracy theory lit such as 1984, the handmaid's tale and farenheit 451)
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis (reb really liked it, have to say it sounds interesting)
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (good book, and i liked the 50's version of the movie)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild (read white fang as well)
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude (i am living in south america, i should hit up a few of their more famous authors)
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible (along with death of a salesman in 11th grade)
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (in my time frame and conspiracy theories abound, where is 1984?)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (been on my list ever since i saw conspiracy theory)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (the title alone is enough to make me at least try)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone (another one of those must reads for the satisfy the history geek inside)
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex (and again....)
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (sad, like the pearl)
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island (has this been made into a disney movie? if so, i'm sure i've seen it)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin (the little woman who started a war, according to lincoln)
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (definitely saw the cartoon movie a million times)
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden (believe it or not, i bought this at a bookstore in b.a. just a few weeks ago. it maybe be next on my list)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Harrison Bergeron (i need to read slaughterhouse five first)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

there are way more italics than bolds up there....i feel woefully unread, but there's only one way to fix that. feel free to recommend good books (classics, modern fiction, whatever), i want to start compiling a list so that i will actually make some headway into this. off the top of my head i'd like to read kavalier & clay, the da vinci code, and perhaps the last temptation of Christ (i know it will be sketch and unbiblical, but i'm curious as to what the author wrote). let the list making begin!

symphonic melodies: mazzy star - into dust
brain eats: 'the science of knowing & the art of living' in can man live without God by ravi zacharias

my calling in life

i took one of those little online quizzes and it told me that i'm a grammar god my mission in life should be to preserve the english language. sadly, the image won't post, so i'll refrain from placing the annoying box with the little red x here so you can all wonder what the picture looks like. it reminds me of monty python, and very well may be from the movie. if you're desperate to see the image, or want to test your skills, go here. the bastardization one is pretty funny.

i could swear i woke up in the middle of night (really, sometime after i went to sleep this morning) inspired to write something, but now i can't remember what it is, or if it was really even that good. blast my short term memory!

symphonic melodies: erykah badu - other side of the game
brain eats: 'the madman arrives' in can man live without God by ravi zacharias

osmosis of cool

my girlfriend dines on pasta and wine in swanky park avenue penthouses with the progeny of movie stars and their significant others. it follows then, that i am way cool by association, no? not that it gets any better than dating reb, but chillin with robin williams' son? the only way i could measure up to that would be running into one of diego maradona's illegitimate love children while i'm down here (there's got to be at least a few out there).

so i've been wanting to write something of at least minimal significance for the last few weeks, but i'm drawing big, fat blanks. unless you consider my kung fu dream an example of creative writing genius, i've been relatively uninspired lately. nothing has stirred me up into the frenzied passion that allows words to pour out of me with the fiery mellifluence that people seem to enjoy reading. my usual muse tends to be the news/current events, but it's been the same crap retread over and over for the past month. i'm tired of just reading about the statistics of dead american soldiers since we finally decided to kick saddam's ass. write about some of the good things like this that i know are happening over there (yes, i know people who are in iraq at this very moment) instead of trying to make it look like the entire country is on the brink of an uprise (which is nowhere near the truth). i'm not stupid, and it's more than a little annoying that the media outlets assume i am and continue to spoon feed me their not so subtle anti-war propaganda through the news that they decide to release. stop being so [expletive] sensationalist!!!! oh, how things would change if i were to become a media mogul. there, i had a mini-rant. that wasn't so hard.

switching gears...reb & i celebrated our 1 year anniversary last monday (woot!) and i'm still riding a high of sorts, which is fine by me. i suppose i could write something about that, but i dont think i'm quite ready to unleash the full weight of my cornish ways for all the world to see just yet. as long as she knows what she means to me (which at times is a dicey proposition, considering my jekyll & hide ability to express what i'm actually thinking/feeling), the rest is just butter for y'all. perhaps someday...

other than that, it's just been the day to day working on campus, meeting with students, and learning something new about argentine culture every day. today we were going to have an asado (that's argentine for "eat lots of cow") but all the stores were closed, placing the task of buying cow on the far side of impossible. why? because today is "el dia de los trabajadores" (worker's day) which they use as an excuse to have yet another holiday. i'm not against this in principle, on the contrary, i'm all for holidays and the like. but on a saturday? are you kidding me? doesn't that defeat the purpose? i know a raw deal when i see one, and this definitely qualifies. so instead we just ordered a bunch of pizza, played cards, and generally acted a fool with some of the students. this is my job. i get paid to hang out, be a friend, share the most important thing in my life (that would be my relationship with Christ) with people, and i get to travel on top of everything. try not to destroy anything valuable as you fly into a jealous rage. it's not the computer's fault ;)

three hours ago i left the girls' place, ostensibly to go to bed. obviously, i'm not one of those people who zeroes in on a goal and doesn't stop until it's done. to say that i'm easily distracted would be one an understatement of grand proportions. that's not to say that i'm a disorganized flake; far from that. i'm just too tired to explain it right now, so ask me later if you're really that curious about how it all works. see? sleep is distracting me from finishing that thought. you've just witnessed the process in action. that, or i'm delusional at the moment. either way, i need to get some rem and non-rem sleep or i might die, according to kat. m'outtie 5k.

symphonic melodies: santa esmerelda - don't let me be misunderstood
brain eats: worldwide challenge - a publication of campus crusade for christ international