Eggs, beans & crumpets!!!

Why don't I throw my hat in the ring too

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:00:04 -0700

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 – Phillip 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 (The advantages of having a mom who studies literature)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
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 (haven't read the whole thing yet)
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
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
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
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 St. 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

Not quite sure how this list originated, but I did better than I thought

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Love those last.fm visualizations

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:04:35 -0700

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

QotD: My First Car

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:45:58 -0700

What was your first car?

An old 1985 (?) Honda Accord that I bought from a departing grad student (I was a second year grad student at Syracuse at the time). Paid $1500 for it and double of that to fix it during it's lifetime. So much for that

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

A couple of links

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:45:10 -0700

There are things to be proud of and things that make you feel giddy. Here are a couple of links that fall into those categories.

One of the features of my grandfathers house in Delhi where I spend a few years as a kid (well on the floor above) and a year when I was in college is a stainless steel olympic torch. Recently, the Delhi edition of the Indian Express talked to my dad about simpler times and you'll find out how the torch ended up there

Simpler Times

On a more recent and personal note, one of the people, someone I call the original alpha geek is Jon Udell. A couple of weeks ago, he interviewed me for his podcast, which went live today.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

A couple of musical links

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:39:48 -0700

Muxtape - How is this thing legal? I have no idea but it's kinda cool. Here's mine

Another is hypemachine. Haven't really tried it, but it seems to do a great job of tracking music blogs, etc. Let's see if it works for my tastes and interests.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Weekly Charts - March 30, 2008

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:58:54 -0700

Here's the latest. Haven't had the scrobbler on too much what with travel n all

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

This is great

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:52:58 -0700

All the desis on here will love this

http://www.badmash.tv/dishoom/

All you Americans ... you should watch this too. For context ... read this first

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Weekly Charts - March 16, 2008

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:01:45 -0700

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

An interesting book

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:42:46 -0700

The Indian crowd here might appreciate this more, but here's a book I would love to read. I have always had a fascination for stories from Indian and Greek mythology, and this one, about an heirless king who drinks a potion for his wife and ends you pregnant himself, sounds much too tempting.

The Pregnant King

Devdutt Pattanaik

Jai Arjun Singh had a great review on his blog, but it seems to have disappeared. Luckily I have it in Google Reader. Here's a section from the review

There’s some healthy irreverence on view: when a messenger arrives with the momentous news that the war is over, no one in the kingdom is particularly interested, being more concerned about internal matters. When the hero Arjuna makes what amounts to a guest appearance and is asked about a story Bhishma narrated to the Pandavas before he died, his reply is a curt, “I’m sorry but I remember no such story. He said so many things” – a neat dismissal of the ponderous Shanti Parva, Bhishma’s long deathbed discourse about a king’s duties.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to read it soon

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Weekly Music Chart - March 9, 2008

nobody@vox.com(mndoci) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:51:52 -0700

Keep reminding myself to post my weekly music charts and forgetting. Ah well. Here you go

And here are my all time top albums (as per last.fm listening)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend