Caitlin's Library Meme Thingy

K, I stole this from Caitlin, who stole it from somebody else.

bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated* = you’ve read more than once
blue text = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – no, but I want to, does that count?
2. Anna Karenina – good, but AK is really wishy washy, and I often found myself wanting to shake her and say " make a freakin decision!"
3. Crime and Punishment –
4. Catch-22 –
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights –
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: A Novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick - I couldn't make it all the way through the first time, but the second time I did and really enjoyed it.
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14.The Odyssey -um, I'm pretty sure I've read this because of english and Latin classes..
15. Pride and Prejudice - * many, many rereads
16. Jane Eyre - *
17. A Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveller’s Wife
23. The Iliad - ditto from The Odyssey
24. Emma -*
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. *Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods –
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius –
31. Atlas Shrugged –
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver- never heard of this one?
36. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales - I've definately read bits and pieces, so I'm counting it
38. The Historian
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum - never heard of this one either...
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula -* must be read at 3 in the morning, with the lights out for the full effect
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King - great book!
51. The Grapes of Wrath – loved it
52. The Poisonwood Bible –
53. 1984 - doesn't everyone read this in high school?
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
L57. Sense and Sensibility - *
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park –
60. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels - I didn't hate the book, but by the end I did hate Gulliver...
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury - it's hard work to read, but I really appreciated it after we'd talked about it in class and I actually understood what was going on
72. Angela’s Ashes
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present Day
75. Neverwhere
L76. A Confederacy of Dunces
77. A Short History of Nearly Everything - ah, the token science book. Haven't read this one, but I've read many other science books, do those count?
78. Dubliners
79. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
80. Beloved
81. Slaughterhouse-Five
82. The Scarlet Letter –* great book. Avoid the Demi Moore movie, as it completely effs up the ending
L83. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
84. The Mists of Avalon
85. Oryx and Crake : A Novel
86. Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
87. Cloud Atlas –
88. The Confusion
89. Lolita
90. Persuasion
91. Northanger Abbey
92. The Catcher in the Rye - I didn't hate it, but I was the only one in my class who didn't love Holden and identify with him. I don't think I'd experienced enough teen angst yet. Maybe one day I'll reread it and like it.
93. On the Road - oossibly the only book I've started and not bothered to finish. Too hippie for me. Maybe one day I'll give it another shot.
94. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
95. Freakonomics
96. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
97. The Aeneid - again, ditto from The Odyssey and Iliad. I'm pretty sure I read all of them and translated bits and pieces in Latin, but they all kinda blend together...
98. Watership Down
99. Gravity’s Rainbow - hmm..another one I've never heard of..
100. The Hobbit
101. In Cold Blood
102. White Teeth
103. Treasure Island
104. David Copperfield -long, but I loved it! The drunk scene is amazing, and everyone should read it
105. The Three Musketeers

So...I've read 34 of the 105 books on the list. And most of the ones I've read are "classics" since I'm much better about reading those than I am about reading the latest craze books.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

I have now finished all of my obligations as a student and TA at URI, and have only to finish my actual thesis and defense. And then I can finally leave, and be done with school FOREVER. Wow, I'm almost afraid to type those words out, surely I'm somehow jinxing myself.....

It's almost over, and I can't tell you how happy and, well, satisfying that is. I think grad school is like organic chemistry. Difficult as hell, and you have to work your ass off to get through it, and then you have a bond with other people who have gone through that same experience, a bond other people just don't understand, because they haven't gone through the same suffering and unbelieveable stress.

Sorry, this is supposed to be a happy post. Deadlines are coming up. I need to turn in my defendable copy next Fri, May 23, and then I defend on June 13. Whew. So....soon. It's hard to believe how quickly the last couple of weeks have gone by. Probably because I've already written my thesis. Once you do that, everything seems so much easier.

I talked to my brother Mike yesterday, and he and Kodi might come up to RI to visit me before I leave. I'm trying to convince them to come the weekend that I defend, since I'll already be celebrating and refusing to do any work. Hopefully, since its a whole month away, he can plan on coming, or at least keep it in mind. Hard to tell with his crazy work schedule. Hmm..what other fun stuff is on the horizon? Oh, we had grad prom this weekend, sorry, the graduate student associaton final bash. It was lots of fun getting to hang out with everybody all dressed up, and getting a nice dinner for $5. There are pics on facebook if anybody's interested. Oh, and I've applied for some more jobs, all temporary, since they require a minimum of qualifications. I don't really expect to get any of them though. The job outlook is looking pretty bleak. Truth be told, I'm not too worried about that though. I'm smart, I know I'll get something eventually, and I kinda want to go home for a couple of months, get a job at a temp agency, and just enjoy life for a couple of months. Not too long, mind you, but just a short break from school and life before I plunge back into the real world with a new job in a new location.

A Little More Order, A Little Less Chaos

So after months of not knowing what the hell I'm doing with my life after grad school, I finally have some tentative plans.

First off, I have my thesis defense date set, which is exciting and terrifying and good because I've learned that when I don't have deadlines I get really lazy and procrastinate way too much. So, my defense date is set for June 13th, and yes, it's Friday the 13th. Screw it, pretty much everything I've done for the past 3 years has failed, I may as well embrace my bad luck. That means I need to get a defendable copy into the grad school by May 23, which seems far away, but I know it will sneak up on me much sooner than I want it to. I'm working on my second thesis draft now, and hope to email it to Brad by Saturday at the latest. So, May and June will pretty much consist of me working on my thesis and defense, and possibly applying for more jobs. I also have a wedding to go to June 20-21 in Mobile, so that'll be fun, another unofficial college reunion.

July will pretty much be me running around visiting people. My family usually meets up in Cooperstown around July 4th, so I'll be driving over there after I finish my last thesis revisions and officially turn in my thesis to the grad school. So I'll probably be there about a week. I mean, I haven't seen any of the fam since Christmas, and I'm hoping to meet Mike's new girlfriend, you know, the girl he met and then moved to New York for 3 months later. Clearly this girl is something special. Then mid-July I need to have all my crap out of my apartment. So somewhere around July 10th-ish I will be embarking on my solo road trip from Rhode Island to Alabama. I'm still hoping to crash with family and friends on the way down so I don't have to pay for hotel rooms, we'll see if that actually works out. And then I'm hoping to visit Mags and Spencer in Milwaukee towards the end of July. I can't believe I haven't seen either one of them since their wedding a year and a half ago. Crazy.

I also need to visit Whitney in Florida, but I'm not sure when to squeeze that in...August? Somewhere in there I need to get a job, because life's expensive right now, and I think I get my last paycheck tomorrow, then I'm just living off my savings for the next two months. And then with all my traveling.....apparently my plan is to blow the rest of my savings while I'm unemployed, which is a terrible plan. Still, it will be good to see everybody. With my crappy New Years Eve, non-birthday, dead cell phone, dead car, dead laptop screen, tax screwups and thesis problems, I've got to say, so far I'm not impressed with 2008. It's pretty much been crappy and stressful for the most part, although there were many fun social occasions that helped balance out those bad days. Still, I'm hoping the second half of 2008 goes better. With finishing grad school and visiting college friends it has to be better. Now my life can actually move forward, and that's gotta be a positive thing.