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I found this on Twitter. David Archuleta is adorable!

Inspired from a post on Alice’s blog, I am trying to find out whether I am well-read in the literary world’s so-called classics.

Bold the books you have read.
Emphasize ones you want to read.
and Strike Through those you have no interest in reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible [I've read this partly only]
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 – William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. 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 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 – C.S. Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
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 – L.M. Montgomery [I think I read the abridged version]
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 Misérables – Victor Hugo

21/100. Wow, is that awful or what? I don’t even know most of these books, but some titles look promising enough.

(The Top 100 you can’t live without was taken from the The Guardian.)

…but I really, really, really love this song.

I first heard this song on a Barney DVD which I watched a long, long time ago, when I was still a kid. And while I was musing on a forming story in my head, I suddenly remembered  this song, and I couldn’t get it out. I love it. So simple and so sweet. I wish I were a kid.

As someone who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend [and even if I did, I don't have the means to do so], I really really like free things. I use open source scripts online, I download free games and music and such. So when I found out about LibriVox, my interest was piqued. Free audiobooks?

I’m an avid bookworm. I don’t think that audiobooks can ever replace books for me. Still, I like reading and changing voices to fit different personalities and such, so I decided to try it out.

LibriVox, for the record, is a website that offers free audios of books in the public domain [translation: books written before 1923]. I know, it sounds boring, but really it’s not! A lot of classics were written at that time, like Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, and The Divine Comedy. And some quite unknown books are interesting, too, like All About Coffee [since I'm a caffeine addict].

My recordings sound crappy in comparison with the others’, since my parents don’t want me to buy a USB microphone, so I have to make do with a low-quality MP4 player to record my voice. I’m currently doing one whole book by myself [hurrah!!!] and I’m still in the first chapter, haha! It’s so exciting! I think everyone who’s willing to volunteer should join.

I was betting on Adam Lambert winning American Idol Season 8, but Kris Allen took the crown from David Cook. Sigh. That sucks big time.

Green Day just released their eighth studio album a few days ago – be sure to pick it up! I’ll surely get my copy when they release the album here. I’m so excited, really. I’ve heard the first single “Know Your Enemy” on the website [check out the videos section] – very cutesy type of tune. “Viva La Gloria!” is also a song to love. 21st Century Breakdown sounds like American Idiot, only more pumped. And guess what? They’re on the cover of Rolling Stone this month! Awesome!

Lots of political overtones. But very very interesting. Check it out.

————— Forwarded message —————
From: jan camina
Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:05 PM
Subject: No More Newly Imported Books in the Philippines; the Reason Why
To:

Grr! This news makes my blood boil! Picked this up on a blog and I’m spreading the news to help stop this outrage.
In the last few months, the importation of books into the Philippines has virtually stopped. (To those of you who frequent bookstores, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.) The reason why is explained in this article by Robin Hemley, a University of Iowa creative writing professor currently on a fellowship in the Philippines.

If you have no time to read the article, the essence is that because the Bureau of Customs has decided to impose duties on the importation of books into the Philippines.This, despite the 1950 Florence Agreement on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials (which you can see here), which the Philippines ratified in 1979. The preamble of the agreement states: “Considering that the free exchange of ideas and knowledge and, in general, the widest possible dissemination of the diverse forms of self-expression used by civilizations are vitally important both for intellectual progress and international understanding, and consequently for the maintenance of world peace…”, an indisputable proposition.
here’s an excerpt from Robin Hemley’s article (i shortened it a bit. better if you can read the whole thing.) -

…Over coffee one afternoon, a book-industry professional (whom I can’t identify) told me that for the past two months virtually no imported books had entered the country, in part because of the success of one book, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. The book, an international best seller, had apparently attracted the attention of customs officials. When an examiner named Rene Agulan opened a shipment of books, he demanded that duty be paid on it.

The importer of Twilight made a mistake and paid the duty requested. A mistake because such duty flies in the face of the Florence Agreement, a U.N. treaty that was signed by the Philippines in 1952, guaranteeing the free flow of “educational, scientific, and cultural materials” between countries and declaring that imported books should be duty-free. Mr. Agulan told the importer that because the books were not educational (i.e., textbooks) they were subject to duty. Perhaps they aren’t educational, I might have argued, but aren’t they “cultural”?

No matter. With this one success under their belt, customs curtailed all air shipments of books entering the country. Weeks went by as booksellers tried to get their books out of storage and started intense negotiations with various government officials.
What doubly frustrated booksellers and importers was that the explanations they received from various officials made no sense. It was clear that, for whatever reason—perhaps the 30-billion-peso ($625 million) shortfall in projected customs revenue—customs would go through the motions of having a reasonable argument while in fact having none at all.
Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales explained the government’s position to a group of frustrated booksellers and importers in an Orwellian PowerPoint presentation, at which she reinterpreted the Florence Agreement as well as Philippine law RA 8047, providing for “the tax and duty-free importation of books or raw materials to be used in book publishing.” For lack of a comma after the word “books,” the undersecretary argued that only books “used in book publishing” (her underlining) were tax-exempt.
“What kind of book is that?” one publisher asked me afterward. “A book used in book publishing.” And she laughed ruefully.
I thought about it. Maybe I should start writing a few. Harry the Cultural and Educational Potter and His Fondness for Baskerville Type.
Likewise, with the Florence Agreement, she argued that only educational books could be considered protected by the U.N. treaty. Customs would henceforth be the arbiter of what was and wasn’t educational.
“For 50 years, everyone has misinterpreted the treaty and now you alone have interpreted it correctly?” she was asked.
“Yes,” she told the stunned booksellers.

Throughout February and March, bookstores seemed on the verge of getting their books released—all their documents were in order, but the rules kept changing. Now they were told that all books would be taxed: 1 percent for educational books and 5 percent for noneducational books. A nightmare scenario for the distributors; they imagined each shipment being held for months as an examiner sorted through the books. Obviously, most would simply pay the higher tax to avoid the hassle.
Distributors told me they weren’t “capitulating” but merely paying under protest. After all, customs was violating an international treaty that had been abided by for over 50 years. Meanwhile, booksellers had to pay enormous storage fees. Those couldn’t be waived, they were told, because the storage facilities were privately owned (by customs officials, a bookstore owner suggested ruefully). One bookstore had to pay $4,000 on a $10,000 shipment.
The day after the first shipment of books was released, an internal memo circulated in customs congratulating themselves for finally levying a duty on books, though no mention was made of their pride in breaking an international treaty…
Please forward this or disseminate this in any way you can. In the name of reading.

I’ve delved into the dirty business of running a fansite a couple of years ago. It was hard and quite thankless, but I loved it. Now I’m running this Adam Lambert fansite [yeah, the guy from American Idol], and it’s quite weird. When I first launched it, a lot of people came. But suddenly the hits started dropping. I’m not sure why – maybe it’s because of the layout? What do you guys think?

Visit it at http://adamlambert.atbhost.net.

I’ve been watching movies again lately, which is good news. Sadly, though, Robert Downey, Jr.’s “The Soloist” isn’t showing yet here. I’ll have to wait and hope.

Meanwhile, a lot of my friends are squealing about Zac Efron’s “17 Again”, but as far as reliable sources say, it’s a crap movie with a recycled plot. My sister wants us to watch it with her, though, since it’s “ZAC EFRON!!!!”. Sigh.

I’ve updated the movies page.

There are a couple of trailer spoofs on YouTube. My favourite is “The Shining”. Classic.

Hahaha! Funny!

“Scary Mary” – a Mary Poppins horror remake. Which is epic fail, really.

There’s also this “Happy Days” [a '50s sitcom, I believe] remake into a horror film with a happy background song. Textflu from Ain’t It Cool gave me the link after I talked about the “Shining” trailer. It was funny, but others may find the supposed deaths gruesome. Oh well.

Wow. First things first, I got addicted to two shows: American Idol and Gossip Girl.

American Idol addiction is not surprising. Last year, I got hooked as well, because of Michael Johns. When he was eliminated however, I stopped watching the show completely.

This year I’m rooting for Adam and Anoop. Actually, it was Scott, but he got booted out in the Top 8 just like Michael Johns.

The Gossip Girl addiction is weird, though. I mean, almost everyone in our school likes it, since our school is basically Upper West End or whatever that hellhole is called. Bitches bitching each other, gossip spreading, even anonymous bloggers that backstab random people. Wow, I know. I just kind of got hooked to Ed Westwick, because he looks exactly like a boy I admired and then hated. Even if I still hate the boy Westwick looks like, I have to admit he’s interesting and so is Ed. I’m watching the first episode, and if I like it then I’ll continue until Season 2.

How about you guys? Any new addictions?

I have been quite taken with theatre again ever since my mom told me to start looking for summer classes to quiet her guilt. Haha! Not really. Before summer started, I asked her to enroll me in a ballroom dancing class, but she didn’t like the idea of a) having to spend again during the summer, and b) me ballroom dancing with old geezers. So I just told her I’d save up the next school year, and then pay for my own summer classes. She agreed.

Now we tried looking for language classes [she wanted me to take French; I wanted German], but only Japanese classes turned up. And personally, I thought they were really expensive, but I don’t know how much language classes are supposed to cost. So language classes are out as well.

I had subscribed to the mailing list of a very popular and really old theatre group here, and – surprise, surprise! – they were having summer classes! I was absolutely thrilled. I have been dying to return to theatre since my seventh grade. But when I told my mom about it, she didn’t like the idea since the venue was too far from our house and from her workplace. So theatre is also out.

The next idea my mom had yesternight was music lessons. But that would cost even more than theatre, or ballroom dancing, or language classes, since I’d have to buy a new instrument for me to be able to practice consistently. Oh goodness. Any ideas for summer classes?