Tuesday also blah

I woke up feeling even worse today. Did NOT want to come in to work. Thing is, lots of work to be done today, so I dragged myself in.

Managed to get the important work out of the way, but I think I'll leave early and work from home the rest of the afternoon. I'm knackered!

Last night, I picked up my copy of Cursed Child again, but had to reread it from the start, as I'd lost track of what was going on. It's an easy enough read, but it's a bit odd reading a script; I'd much rather have watched it on stage. What threw me off as well was that there aren't classic stage directions in it; when I read a script, I expect stage directions! There was also a fair bit of interpretations of actions. I don't quite know how to explain it without actually quoting it (and therefore potentially spoilering. Then again, it's been three and a half months...I guess spoilering it is fine?), but it just felt like an amateurish script. It was very reminiscent of the works that my classmates and I did for our literature and drama projects back in school.

That said, I did love the story, and I really do have to watch it on stage some time! The London production's pretty much fully booked well into next year, so I'll just have to wait and see.

So yes, I kept up my end of the pact...Nekowife hasn't finished it yet - she's only got about 10 hours to go before the deadline is up!

~~~

I'm halfway through the second season of Gilmore Girls. I think I have 117 episodes to go. Each episode is approximately 40 minutes long. So that would be about 4680 minutes worth, which is 78 hours. Which is 3.25 days.

See kids? Maths is useful; stay in school.

Yeah, I'm not going to finish watching all of them before the revival episodes are released. But believe you me, I'm going to make a valiant effort! I'll keep you updated on my progress.

In the meantime, I might have to succumb to my humanness and actually get some sleep during the week.



~~

I just realised that I don't actually have a tag for Harry Potter. I shall rectify that immediately.

Cursed Pact

Unbelievably, I've had my copy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for ages now. I'd actually started reading it, but for some reason, I just could not get into it. Perhaps if I saw it on stage?

The stage performance in London is fully booked well into next year, in case anyone's wondering.

Anyway. Nekowife hasn't finished reading it either, so we pretty much made a pact that we'd both finish reading it by the middle of the month.

Which leaves me a week to finish it. It really shouldn't be a problem. I enjoy reading, and I'm a quick reader.

Thing is, I've just been so not into reading lately. I'm in the middle of several books, and I have tons just lying around waiting to be read.

The only downside to not having a commute any more is that I don't have my commute-read now. It really was the best time to catch up on my reading.

I guess this means that I just have to go on a beach holiday soon - the last beach weekend I went on, I pretty much read a novel a day.

It's such a shame too. I love this universe, and I've missed it so very much. I think it's just getting used to the post-HP series? After all, I was one of the subscribers to EWE aka "Epilogue? What Epilogue?" Now give me a Marauders-era story any day. Pre-series stories are my weakness.

Which reminds me. Fantastic Beasts opens next week! I wonder who I should go with...hell, I'll just go alone. Judging from the trailer, Eddie Redmayne looks like he makes a good Newt Scamander.
I'm looking forward to that!


But first...I really gotta get round to reading that cursed screenplay.

I recently reshelved and catalogued my books (decided to use LibraryThing), and my current book count is 471, with new additions over the past month not catalogued yet. So current book count is about 500 now? Sadly, several of my books have gone missing over the years (this is why I need a proper catalogue and lending system!), so now I'm trying to rebuild my library.

So...time to revisit that list, eh? Of course, I've read far more than what's listed!
---

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has read only 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those that you've read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


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 (this one is STILL sitting on my shelf)
6 The Bible (Does it count if I've read parts of it, during Sunday mass?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I'm midway through this. It's tough reading on an e-reader though...need to get this in paperback.)
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 (I just cannot finish this one! One day, I shall)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I have this on my shelf too! And I've read several of his works, just not all of 'em.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
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 (I'd like to say I want to read it but just...no. I'm not that intellectual, thanks.)
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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I'm pretty sure I read this one when I was a kid, but I'm not counting this in, for I barely remember it!)
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 ( I feel obliged to read this; I might have my geek card revoked if I don't)
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 (he's the best of writers, he's the worst of writers...)
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 (see #27)
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 (Also midway through this one.)
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 (to read or not to read, that is the question...)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I've seen the musical on the London stage...does that count? No? Oh well)

Reading List

I was listing out some books that I intend to read this year, when I remembered that I once did a "100 books meme" on LJ. I looked it up, and decided to c/p it over.

---

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has read only 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those that you've read.
2.) Italicize those you intend to read.
3.) Underline the books you LOVE.


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 (this one is STILL sitting on my shelf)
6 The Bible (Does it count if I've read parts of it, during Sunday mass?)
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 (I just cannot finish this one! One day, I shall)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I have this on my shelf too! And I've read several of his works, just not all of 'em.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
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 (I'd like to say I want to read it but just...no. I'm not that intellectual, thanks.)
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 - 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 ( I feel obliged to read this; I might have my geek card revoked if I don't)
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 (he's the best of writers, he's the worst of writers...)
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 (to read or not to read, that is the question...)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


---


How is it I didn't have a tag for books and reading? No matter, this has been rectified.

The Introvert Who Reads

I recently read a couple articles that seemed as though they were written about me. They resonated so strongly with me, and I feel the need to share.

A Girl You Should Date
Some excerpts:
"You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow."

"Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book."

"She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are."



10 Myths About Introverts
This one made me so relieved to know that I'm definitely not the only one who feels this way. Many a time, I force myself to put on my extrovert mask, and I go out and have a brilliant time, partying away. More often than not, these events make me feel drained and depressed. Reading this article helped me realise why I get agitated after a while in a club, or why I breathe a little easier if I have my earphones in while negotiating crowds.

The Girl Who Reads

You Should Date an Illiterate Girl


The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied.

Girl reading by Charles Edward Perugini

Bibliophilism

From yesterday's post about hot guys reading books, I now bring you another site that gives me multiple geekgasms:

Bookshelf Porn.

Porn for book lovers. A photoblog collection of all the best bookshelf photos for people who *heart* bookshelves.


Once again...I'll be in my bunk. Probably with a book.

Remember, remember...

...the 5th of November. That's today. I don't know why that rhyme gets stuck in my head. I know next to nothing about Guy Fawkes, the gunpowder plot or Bonfire Night. Although I've read enough Enid Blyton books to just know about burning the guy on the bonfire.

Anyway. Still in Taiwan! Today was pretty eventful, I thought. Slept in...oh, glorious glorious sleeping in, how I have missed thee! It's not a proper holiday unless you get to sleep in, really. Anyway, after I woke up, for some reason I had a hankering for some bacon and eggs. So Neko brought me to NY Bagels for brunch. Well, it was rather later than brunch, to be honest. But yeah.

I consumed an orange, two pancakes, two pieces of lovely lovely bacon, two eggs overeasy, potatoes, a blueberry bagel with cream cheese, and a coffee.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I managed to get up and walk after that.

Dropped by a bookstore afterwards, because really. I might be out of my homeland, but you can't keep the books away from me! Actually, Neko just wanted to have a look at a guidebook, to get an idea of where we could go, and to see if there's anything that caught my interest. After a while, I saw the English book section, and I picked up one that looked rather interesting, and got quite a few pages in, before Neko came back to pick me up.

Note to self: for further reference, since you didn't get that book, and it was rather interesting, it was A Soft Place to Land, by Susan Rebecca White. Get it. Seemed like a good read.

After that, we stopped by at hers, where we freshened up (and by 'we', I mean 'me', and by 'freshened up', I mean I redid my make up while Neko looked up driving directions).

So yeah, we had a lovely drive around the mountains, where Neko got temporarily lost, and I got to see quite a great view of Taipei. We ended up at the Tsuan-Tang Hot Springs, for my first hot spring experience. I decided to go with the private one though; I didn't really want to see a bunch of naked arses around me, nor did I feel overly inclined to expose my bare butt.

Anyhoo. I quite liked it! It was so relaxing...definitely glad I crossed that off my list, and will do it again if and when I come to Taiwan again. I'm not sure my skin is any better though. I'm still as gorgeous (and modest) as ever.

After that, we did another must-do - we stopped by the Shilin Night Market. I still wasn't hungry by this point (see: huge brunch consumed), so we decided to walk around a bit first. I did of course have a bubble tea first. Suuure, I can get that back home, but still! Can't come to Taiwan and NOT have a bubble tea, right?

Didn't buy anything. Strangely enough, I haven't really been bitten by the shopping bug while I've been here.
I did eat an oyster omelette...without the oyster, strangely enough. Yes, another thing I can get back home, but Neko got it for me, and it was quite the noms! Together with that, Neko got us another dish that I'd learnt about back home from some travel cooking show. Mum asked me about it, I asked Neko about it, and turns out that Neko quite likes it.

So I had my first taste of deep fried stinky tofu. I...did not like it. I could barely swallow the first bite. As much as I'd wanted to like it, I just...couldn't. But hey, at least I say I've had it!

Last thing I ate was guava and strawberries. The loveliest, juiciest, sweetest strawberries ever. Again, noms!

Pretty knackered after that, plus it started raining, so we made our way home. By home, I mean Neko's, of course.

So now we're here, both blogging, and drinking rum and cokes, planning to snuggle up and watch Chuck.


And so ends Day 5.

iCaved

I'm now the proud owner of an iPhone 3GS. White, 32gb.

It's so purty! Got it delivered today. So yet another reason today was a lovely day. For starters, I got to stay in today, and had time to myself. Watched a couple movies on HBO, one of which was the film adaptation of the book I'd just read - The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. The book, of course, was more detailed and explored the characters a little more, but as film adaptations go, this one was quite decent!

Other things that made me happy today include, but are not limited to:
- Calis, as always
- frozen yoghurt
- listening to Drake Bell music
- cheesecake

Hmm. What was that other movie I watched today?
I don't remember now.

In the meantime, I gotta go to bed.

Oh, and I had a dream that had VK the Bastard Ex in it. It was strange - he was dressed in a suit, and his hair was greying. He actually looked rather good, in a distinguished way.
But I was still avoiding him out of fear. I think that's very telling. But then I was at a beach, and the water was calm. I dream of water a lot, and the water is always a reflection of my emotional state. So yes. Peaceful, calm, relaxed and beautiful. :)


Edited to add:
I remember now. It was Ten Items or Less. And made the grammarian in me go "It should be FEWER."