Thanksgiving break

..always too short :( Currently packing to go back to Duke for the (most excruciating) last 3 weeks of the semester. But the last few days have been a much needed break spent mostly lounging around at home eating lots of wonderful home cooking. Black Friday shopping was pretty relaxed this year…with less actual walking and more online drooling. My wishful holiday/birthday wishlist (unfortunately out of my poor college student price range) is as follows:

burberry quilted jacket

tory burch reva flats

Canon s95

live in the now: BBC Book List →

Procrastination. (and it seems I have much reading to catch up on)

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: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

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 

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 Berniere

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 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

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 – 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

elections →

If there is a lesson in all this for both parties, perhaps it’s that merely piling up votes on Election Day doesn’t confer on you a mandate for any ambitious agenda — unless you have presented the voters with the difficult choices you intend to make. For Republicans, this argues against overinterpreting the meaning of Tuesday’s gains. For Mr. Obama, it probably means that the campaign for the next agenda begins right now.

“She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about the chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

Mrs Dalloway