First blog post of the year

So I've been a little behind on updating things around here.

This year I had only one New Year's resolution: to pass my Adult Bronze moves in the field test before September 1, when several elements on the test will change.

We began to focus primarily on the moves test in my lessons last June, and I decided not to skate in three competitions last fall because I finally started making progress on the moves and I didn't want to start working on my program again and lose the gains I'd just made. I decided to compete in Wyandotte in January, as I usually do, and we found out that they'd be having a test session in conjunction with the competition. It made sense for me to test then, even though my coach couldn't go, as I'd be there anyway and there would be other adults testing at the same time.

I'm pleased to report that I skated well during the test and I passed! My crossovers felt good, and I did some of the best left back outside edges I've ever done on the back crossover to back held edge pattern. (Part of that was because I didn't have to worry about running into anyone during the test.) One of the judges said I looked relaxed, which surprised me, as I didn't feel relaxed.

I did, however, feel quite relaxed during the competition later in the day. The warmup felt like any other practice, and I had fun skating my program. I'd been spending so much practice time on preparing for my test that I'd only run the program with music three times since I competed it last March, so I knew it'd be a little rough, but it wasn't terrible. We're working on getting some of the transitions to be smoother before sectionals on March 13.

In other news, I've finished two books on my Fill-in-the-Gaps list (Treasure Island and Wide Sargasso Sea), and I read a total of 25 books last year. I'm ahead so far this year, as I've finished three already. Knitting is going well -- I finished a cowl and several dishcloths, and I'm working on a baby blanket for our impending nephew. We celebrated the seventh anniversary of Lucy's adoption day last week. (I told her the story of how she was adopted and there was catnip for everyone.)

And now I'm caught up.

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

For an English major, I've always felt that I'm not particularly well read. When I got 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I checked off the ones I'd read, and I scored a miserable 29. (I've since read 5 or 6 more.)

I was pleased to find a new challenge over at Editorial Ass. Moonrat, inspired by her friend Andromeda Romano-Lax, made a list of 100 books she wants to read to fill in some of the gaps in her coverage of "classics and great contemporary fiction." The time limit is five years, and they both gave themselves "25% accident forgiveness," which means that if they finish 75% of the titles on the list, they'll consider themselves to have completed the challenge.

I'll start today with my own list, so I aim to finish by April 2, 2014. This leaves time for me to read plenty of other interesting books along with these. When I made my list, I started with the lists from the first and second editions of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and a list from the Guardian of 999 notable books of some sort (I forgot to save the title of the list!). At least 97 of the 100 books on my list come from there. In addition, I limited myself to only one book per author. Here's my list.

1. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe


2. Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


3. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende


4. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis


5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou


6. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov


7. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen


8. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury


9. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë


10. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov


11. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan


12. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess


13. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs


14. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs


15. Possession – A.S. Byatt


16. The Stranger – Albert Camus


17. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote


18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll


19. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra


20. The Awakening – Kate Chopin


21. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad


22. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper


23. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane


24. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe


25. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick


26. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens


27. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)


28. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky


29. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


30. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas


31. Silas Marner – George Eliot


32. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis


33. The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison


34. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner


35. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald


36. Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman


37. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden


38. Lord of the Flies – William Golding


39. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett


40. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy


41. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller


42. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway


43. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo


44. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley


45. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James


46. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce


47. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis


48. Kim – Rudyard Kipling


49. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos


50. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence


51. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard


52. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis


53. The Call of the Wild - Jack London


54. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez


55. Life of Pi - Yann Martel


56. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham


57. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers


58. Atonement – Ian McEwan


59. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville


60. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell


61. Beloved – Toni Morrison


62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov


63. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell


64. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak


65. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath


66. The Godfather – Mario Puzo


67. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque


68. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys


69. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth


70. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie


71. Contact – Carl Sagan


72. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


73. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger


74. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink


75. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott


76. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair


77. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn


78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein


79. East of Eden - John Steinbeck


80. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne


81. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson


82. Dracula – Bram Stoker


83. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe


84. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift


85. The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington


86. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray


87. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson


88. Walden – Henry David Thoreau


89. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien


90. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy


91. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain


92. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne


93. Candide – Voltaire


94. The Color Purple – Alice Walker


95. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace


96. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace


97. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells


98. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde


99. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe


100. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

In the interest of full disclosure, I've read about half of Dracula and maybe 60 pages of The Hobbit, and I may have read part of A Sentimental Journey in college, but I don't remember much, if anything, about it. I'm starting this evening with Wide Sargasso Sea.

Book meme

Meme from Steph.

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the website, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (I'll bracket them because Blogger doesn't do underlines.)
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

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 -- started it
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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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
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
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 -- partway through right now
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 - A. S. 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 - 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

My score: 23/100

The problem with Twitter

The problem with Twitter is that I don't have anything to blog about anymore because I Twitter it all.

We have just moved to a new building at work. My space is less than half the size of my previous space. I barely have room to turn my chair around. I was extremely happy with my previous space, which I occupied for more than five years. Our new building is very nice, and it is in a convenient location.

This weekend we went to the Barnes and Noble in Noblesville for the Harry Potter release party. The trivia questions were fun. I finished the book on Sunday afternoon; I hadn't finished rereading Book 6 by the time we got Book 7. I liked the book. I won't say any more than that so I don't spoil anything for people who aren't finished yet.

As of yesterday, I've read more books so far this year than I did in all of last year.

I will finally get to skate on Wednesday after more than five weeks off the ice. I haven't been off the ice for this long since I hurt my back in 2002. Getting back on the ice then was difficult because I was so afraid I'd hurt myself again, but I don't think I'll have that kind of trouble now.

2006 Year in Books

I read only 23 books in 2006. That's more than I read in 2005, but not as many as I wanted to read. Here's the rundown:



I read this for book club, and it was just okay.



We got an advance reader's copy of this at work, and I was excited to see a book about a kid with two moms. I ended up disliking some of the characters, though, which frustrated me.



Prep got mixed reviews, and I agree with those who felt the main character, Lee, didn't change or grow very much. I mostly enjoyed the book despite Lee's flaws, though.



Another book club selection. I enjoyed this book. I felt for Grady even though his predicament was all his own doing.



I forget the answer to the title question, but I found this book entertaining. It wasn't just another boring health book.



I read a different edition of this book. The cover has Encyclopedia Brown pictured wrong! Doesn't he have reddish-brown hair? It certainly isn't that dark. I had a bunch of Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid, and I found this one at a garage sale. When I was at my dad's last weekend, I found my old copies, so more Encyclopedia Brown may be on my reading list for 2007. He's still a good detective.



Steph picked this book up at a book sale; I read it one day when we were sitting around her house. It was a fun way to spend a couple hours on a lazy Saturday afternoon.



I bought this book for my not-exactly-a-niece Raven, who's 14, and I felt I should take a look to see what it was like. It's a good thing I did, because after I gave it to her, she called me to ask what some of the British words meant.



Yet another book club book. I thought it could have ended sooner. It was interesting to read a classic science fiction novel.



I like memoir-type books in which people talk about their daily lives. Karol Griffin has a very different life from mine. I enjoyed learning about the world of a tattoo artist.



I loved these essays, especially one in which the author and a friend made a contraption to remove stray plastic bags from trees.



One of my favorite books from sophomore English. We read The Great Gatsby for book club, and I enjoyed it almost as much nineteen (!) years later. I loved it for its social commentary.



I picked Amalee up at the library because I was interested to see what kind of book Dar Williams would write. I like her music.



Steph bought Geography Club because it is about a gay kid in high school. I wasn't out in high school, so it's interesting to read about kids who are.



I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I read this book. I got it at the library sale for Michelle because we used to watch General Hospital.



Another book club selection. It was a fun read; I borrowed his earlier book Jennifer Government from my mom, and maybe I'll get to it this year.



Jim Henson rocks.



I liked the premise, but I couldn't relate to the author very well.



I wasn't young enough, fabulous enough, or broke enough for this book. I already knew most of the stuff she covered -- I think I need a different Suze Orman book.



This book was a little unsettling. Freyer had friends over to tag items they thought were representative of his life, and he sold them on eBay. I liked the stories behind the items and the description of his process, but I was sad that he sold many of his photos and other items that were really meaningful to him.



This book didn't work for me. The dialogue wasn't realistic and the story seemed a little forced.



Adding to my collection of skating books...



Definitely one of my favorite books of the year. I loved reading about the author's relationship with the encyclopedia and with knowledge in general.

I hope to read a little more in 2007. I've already started two books, and Steph and I are reading a story each night from a book of 365 bedtime stories. This year I also need to buy fewer books and clear out a few more of the books I don't want to keep.