So I found this meme on the internet (I know, that NEVER HAPPENS) but I thought it was very interesting. It purported to be a list of books that the BBC only expects you to have read six of or something like that. The tumblelog I got it from had the wrong list, though, and I don’t know where the number six came from, because it’s not on the BBC’s version. The meme tells you to x those you’ve read, + the ones you LOVE, and * the ones you want to read. This is way too complicated for me. But here you go: the BBC top 100 books. Because British people are the best judge of fine literature. (The italicized grey ones are ones I haven’t read.)

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac (I am currently reading this book.)
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

I have two questions for the general public —

a) do you not agree that six is way too few, and that most people have probably read way more than six?

and

b) how the FUCK does Bridget Jones’ Diary rank that high? Above “Ulysses”? Really?

It’s the beginning of spring semester, although I always feel a little weird referring to it as “spring semester” when it is still so very obviously winter. This semester I get to ditch nasty physics classes for some nicer ones, and although I am taking on a bit more difficult semester (18, maybe 19 credits) I think it will be more fun by virtue of the classes themselves.

Over the break, I had a very short-lived Tumblr account, before a friend introduced me to soup.io. Mine, under augustine, has become where I’m filtering most of the stuff I look at on the internets, mostly design-, illustration- or architecture-related. The nicest thing about soup.io is that it includes built-in automatic feeds for most common and some less common Web applications (last.fm, vimeo, youtube, del.icio.us, vi.sualize.us, and flickr are the ones that I find the most useful.) Its interface is lovely, and it’s easy enough to post things directly to your soup. It’s nice to have everything I find in one place, with a search box for easy finding.

I also did a wordle for this blog. The dominant themes aren’t all that surprising.

I plan on writing a little more this semester, partly because I will be writing things like response papers for art history anyway and I thought perhaps I could subject the internet to my thoughts on the history of film as art, as punishment for all its sins and wrongdoings. In the meantime, I’ll be posting things to my soup.

Taking a quick break from finishing my last (!) exam paper to post something exciting. A photo of mine was posted on Deleted Images today, check it out.



My brother Paul. Or rather, my brother’s nose and lip, and a bit of his bright green plaid shirt. Also found on Flickr.