The Immediate Book Meme

DarwinCatholic's got a book meme. That means I'm playing. With the caveat that I'm always reading too many books simultaneously.

Here we go!

There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.


1. What book are you reading now?

Rabble in Arms by Kenneth Roberts

2. What book did you just finish?

The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, wonderfully narrated by Derek Jacobi

3. What do you plan to read next?

Whatever my Book Bingo pulls up. It's the joy and terror of complete randomness.

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

Art: A New History by Paul Johnson

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

6. What is your current reading trend?

Big, huge books.

It began when Scott Danielson said, "Hey, let's talk about The Lord of the Rings" on our podcast. It continued when I picked up Rabble In Arms. And then I was given the audiobook of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, narrated by Simon Prebble (who I just can't say no to, that guy is an amazing reader) ... and which I began a few days ago. And have I mentioned that Paul Johnson's art book has a gazillion pages (and not nearly as many pictures as you'd think for an art book).

10 Books That Have Stayed With You Meme

This began on Facebook, but I know of no reason why we shouldn't bring it into the blogging world which is where all the really good booktalk happens. (Ok, Goodreads excepted, but that is where I have made many good book talkin' pals.)

I knew this would come my way as soon as I saw Jeff Miller did it. Turns out Will Duquette laid it on me. Turns out the first two books on his list are the first I thought of also. Here goes ...

Rules: list 10 books that have stayed with you. Don't take more than a few minutes; don't think too hard. They don't have to be great works, just the ones that have touched you. Here's mine, in no particular order :

1. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
3. The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold
4. Death Comes as the End - Agatha Christie
5. The Franchise Affair - Josephine Tey
6. Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
7. Only You Can Save Mankind - Terry Pratchett
8. While We Still Live - Helen MacInnes
9. The Hiding Place - Corrie Ten Boom
10. One Door Away From Heaven - Dean Koontz

I'm supposed to tag 10 people and I did tag a few on Facebook, but I'm just going to leave it up to whoever wants to join in, whether blogging, on Facebook, or just in the comments box here.

Fifteen Vocalists in Fifteen Minutes

From a Facebook thing I got tagged with, but I'm sharing it here also. I found it interesting to see what vocalists swam to the surface of my mind when I was just staring at the sky and thinking about music.

The rules:  Don't take too long to think about it.  Fifteen vocalists that will always stick with you.  List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.  And in no particular order.  Tag fifteen friends.

1. Ella Fitzgerald
2. Annette Hanshaw
3. Billie Holliday
4. Louis Armstrong
5. Paul McCartney
6. John Lennon
7. Dean Martin
8. Frank Sinatra
9. Bob Dylan (and not in a good way ...)
10. Steve Goodman
11. John Prine (also, not really in a good way, though I find him more tolerable than Dylan)
12. Bonnie Raitt
13. John Hiatt
14. Tom Petty
15. Mark Knopfler

Fifteen Novels in Fifteen Minutes

I was tagged for this on Facebook (which I actually remembered to visit today), but it is too good to just leave there. Influenced is harder than "liked" ... but here we go ...

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List, in no particular order) fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. Rumer Godden
2. Agatha Christie (nonfiction)
3. Harriett Beecher Stowe
4. Robert Alter (his OT translations)
   
5. Flannery O'Conner (The Habit of Being)
6. Dean Koontz
7. CS Lewis
8. Shirley Jackson
9. Samuel Shellabarger
10. Fulton Sheen
11. Francis Fernandez (author of the In Conversation with God series)
    
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. Robert R. Chase
14. Charlotte Bronte
15. M.F.K. Fisher

You're supposed to tag fifteen people but I decline that part. Not that I wouldn't like to see what Jeff Miller, Stephen Riddle, Will Duquette, and Maureen (Aliens in this World) would pick. I'm just sayin' ...

Have You Read This? Well, HAVE YOU?

From Theocoid ...  here we go.

P.S. About half of these are NOT really classics but just popular modern books. Give me a list of 100 that have already stood the test of time and I'll be much more interested. Mitch Albom? Really?

UPDATE: Melanie Bettanelli commented on the Facebook version of this that she had actually seen it loosely linked originally with a list from the Guardian when she did a vain attempt to track it back to the BBC. Either way, it is still rather a fun list to look at.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here...

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, underline the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

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 (but I"m working on it)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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 - A.A. 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 (This is NOT a classic and is mean spirited enough to make it never become one in my book ... stick to his history-ish books, not the travel guides)

75 Ulysses - James Joyce         

76 The Inferno - Dante

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 - E.B. 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 - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

UPDATE
Dr. Boli (from whom I am honored to have received a comment) shows us a different way.

The fundamental flaw of the list is that there seems to be no way to construe the word "classic" so that it includes Dan Brown. However, we may find another use for the list. Copy it again, and this time bold all the titles that nothing short of a substantial payment, cash on the barrel, would ever induce you to read. Give reasons.

Dog Days of Summer Meme

Ironic Catholic tagged me with this which calls for me to name my five favorite devotions ... hmmm, devotions, let me think. I am not sure if these are all what one would call "devotions" but they are some of my favorite things.

My five favorite devotions:

• The Sacred Heart of Jesus novena
  
• Adoration (or just sitting in front of the tabernacle)
  
• My Guardian Angel
  
• Praying for the souls in Purgatory
  
• The Holy Spirit prayer (Come Holy Spirit ...)
  

And I tag:

• The Paragraph Farmer
• The Curt Jester
• Will Duquette
• Deacon Greg
• Ambrose-a-rama
  

ABCs of Me

Tagged by Kelly on Facebook. But answering here in Blogger. Because that's just the kinda gal I am. "S" is for stubborn.

A - Attitude: Optimistic

B - Born in: Aurora, IL

C - Cat's name: no cat now but we have had in the past Puff, Truffles, and Calico

D - Dog's name: Pepper

E - Excited by: Tom (!)

F - Field: advertising

G - Grateful for: my faith

H - Hates: Negative Nellies!

I - Into: books, movies ... basically stories ... and talking about stories!

J - Job title: co-owner

K - Kinfolk: Davises, Austins

L - Loves: my family, my many hobbies, my (yes, you know where I'm goin' with this, right?) faith.

M - Music: bluegrass, blues, rock, classic country

N - Nickname: Julie (nickname for my nickname ... Jules)

O - Outstanding achievements: a happy life and marriage (hey, that's hard work, folks)

P - Pastimes: blogging, podcasting, knitting, cooking, movies ... and lots and lots of talking about all of them!

Q - Quirks: LOVE using our office paper shredder.

R - Relaxes by: reading, knitting, watching TV

S - State of residence: Texas

T - Telephone type: ??? I have no clue

U - Usual breakfast: last night's leftovers

V - Vices: woah, that's for the confessional! Though I do admit to a lot of procrastination when working on podcasting.

W - Wearing: tank top, jacket, slacks, flats

X - X-ray you last had: teeth

Y - Yummy dish you make: Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Malted Chocolate Frosting

Z - Zoo favorite: hippos

Rockin' Girl Bloggers

Much thanks to Catholic Colbert for bestowing this award on Happy Catholic!

Now I must figure how to narrow all those rockin' girl bloggers I know down to five. Sheez! These ladies all can be counted on to be entertaining, thoughtful or informative ... and sometimes all three simultaneously which is no small feat.

1. The Wine Dark Sea


2. Aliens in This World


3. The Summa Mamas


4. The Anchoress


5. Et Tu?