Book meme

In case you guys were wondering, this meme comes from the top 106 books that were tagged as owned-but-unread on LibraryThing.

The variation I found elsewhere when tracking down this meme said: bold what you have read, italicize your “did not finish” reads, strikethrough the ones you hated, and put asterisks next to those you read more than once. However, I will put an asterisk by the ones I currently actually own, have owned in the past, or are otherwise floating around the house but haven’t even started.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude – This one is particularly shameful because I got all the way to about 30 pages from the end, plus it was an amazing book. I still want to finish it.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad – At least, I think I finished it.
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
* American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
* Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons – Dan Brown sucks for characters & dialog, so even with the interesting plot, I couldn’t bear it. The aforementioned problems bordered on embarrassing. No, they were actually embarrassing. Note: my opinions are completely subjective, of course, and does not reflect a poor opinion of anyone who did like the book whatsoever.
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park – But I can’t remember what happened.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
* The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
* The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
* A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics – The overwhelming popularity of this book kind of angered me because it appeared to me that just because he made a lot of interesting points/connections and challenged some preexisting notions, the entire work was received as being unimpeachably well-researched. It was, at times, a piece of crap, IMO. Again, no reflection on those who loved it. I’d still recommend it, but with reservations and with a request to challenge the assumptions presented in the book itself, as the author challenges preexisting notions.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Peak cuteness?

I wonder when you cross over from being so close to someone that you can riff on inside jokes and finish each other’s sentences and it’s so awesome and fun and goofy that it makes you giggle all the time, to becoming utterly bored and annoyed by the sameness and lack of mystery of it all.

Seppo and I are still in the “omg, why are you so awesome and funny all the time” phase, and we are nearing 10 years together. I don’t say this to make anyone jealous. I know a lot of relationships over the history of the human populations must have been great for periods, but many fall apart at some point.

How do we, as a modern, proactive couple, keep ourselves from reaching that critical cliff where the familiar goes from comforting to confining? What steps must we take and what interactions must we be aware of so that we never hit that? How we we continually work to make sure our relationship is getting better and better with time?

Advice? Insight? Cynical jokes? 😀