Walked Over

A cutesy, rather rotound tiger for your Chinese New Year application. 11 more years and maybe I’ll have done a full set!

(am not responsible for epilepsy resulting from viewing the image above)

I’m not American, but since I’ve never done one of these memes before…

The rules:

• Bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
• Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.

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 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
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 Meany – 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 (started but couldn’t get into it)
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
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
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

Who the hell “finishes” reading the Bible?

I think I need to read more. Recently, what with Reddit and Google Reader, I haven’t touched a book that wasn’t work-related. It’s somewhat embarrassing that I haven’t read some of the ones above but seen the movie–such as Pride and Prejudice and any of the Potters’. It’s also a little embarrassing that I’ve read some of them without watching the movie–such as Bridget Jone’s Diary and Little Women.

I need to macho up my reading list. Why have I read Anne of Green Gables but not War and Peace???

More maddening is the fact that I read so much literary criticism online that I know OF all the books listed above, even if I haven’t read them. All plot-spoiled, sadly.

Just beautiful.

Watched Fundamentally Happy yesterday with F. It was a good play for its budget, raising some issues that I thought were interesting (it’s about paedophilia, selective memory, religous duty) and stepsiding religous complications that might have crippled it.

Here’s a YouTube clip of a past season’s run, somewhat different from the version I caught (gee, you can find everything on YouTube).

As we sat down, F raised a point that I hadn’t noticed- the number of people in the theatre. All in all, there were only about 100(+- 20). F asked how it was possible thay could have made money, considering that a ticket only cost S$30 and with the play running for only two nights.

Doing the math, we figured (well, I figured, because numbers interest me) they could probably rake in something like S$6K in revenue at best, and what with site rentals it probably couldn’t turn much of a profit, much less feed the actors.

And this got me guilty, because I had used my expired student pass to purchase a ticket for myself at a concession rate (F is still a student, so no guilt for him). Evil Alex, who had shortchanged the hardworking artists of a whole S$12 for an hour’s worth of good and thought-provoking entertainment!

So I resolve to pay full admission should I ever go for a play again! Never again shall my hands be sullied by the blood of starving artists!

Seriously, though, I know they get governmental subsidies. But hey, you wouldn’t stinge on charity just because you knew kidney-problem patients got medical subsidies, would you?

My claim to cinematic expertise comes from the one Film module I did back in university, but I do watch quite a lot of movies, which I believe counts for at least something.

And I’m pretty sure I can recognize a French film when I see one (even without the benefit of the large noses).

The question I’d like to ask is – do French films use scripts? And if they do, who writes them? How? My idea of a French screenplay looks something like this (translated, for the benefit of my non-French readership):

And it’s not that all French films are like that, but the vast majority of them tend to be, even the supposed-comedies. And it’s not that I don’t like French film – in fact I adore them when I’m in the right mood, but sometimes you just want to have a bit of a laugh and see something on screen without having to feel painfully conscious of Film Art and having to remember everything you learnt about mise en scene.

I have the sneaking suspicion that French scriptwriters are all trained in design rather than literature. Either that or French literary narrative differs very much from English, with Jane Austen plots set to Dickens prose. Will let you guys know once I can read anything in French.

At the moment I’m struggling to get past Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (Les Adventures des Orphelins Baudelaire in French), which is sadly not very French at all. Nor easy.