BBC Meme

Oh memes. I usually ignore them, but this one was too fun (got a link to it via Facebook). It's a booklist, ostensibly from the BBC, though I have my doubts.

"The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '- ' to the ones you HATE.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

I'm also going to put an * by the ones I plan to read.

Then tag however many people you want and read their responses:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x +
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, not all of them) x +
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x +
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x +
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x +
34 Emma - Jane Austen x +
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x +
36 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x +
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x +
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 x
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 x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
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 x
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 x
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 x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Beloved - Toni Morrison
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x +

Total read: 49


OK. This list looks rather uneven to me. What is The Five People You Meet in Heaven doing next to Sherlock Holmes? I'm getting flashbacks to the Humanities curriculum, which seemed to think five female authors sufficient for a two-year study of literature and history. Anyway. I do have a quite a few classics to read still!

New Year, New Pictures

Ah, the first post of 2009! How very exciting. I have great hopes for 2009 to be a most excellent year.

I've been keeping busy during the holidays with trips hither and yon and much time spent knitting. There are many new photos up on Flickr from Brussels, Brugge, Amsterdam, Villers Abbey, and the continuous production of knitted items.

The new semester will start in a few days and then I'll back in the swing of things. I do plan on taking more pictures of Tours, though, as I've not posted many pictures of the city itself (besides the Loire, of course). The Cathedral is absolutely lovely, so perhaps I will do a little photoshoot around there.

In other news, I've become enthralled by GoodReads. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it's a book website that allows you to list books that you have read, hope to read, or are currently reading. It's a bit shameful to see just how many books I have in the works right now, but also extremely handy since I am always reading about new books to try. It's a convenient place to keep the future books list, and it's fun to see what other people are currently reading.

Riddle 30: What a Conundrum

Constellations are a fascinating idea: take five or so stars, imagine some lines, and then announce that you've discovered the shape of a dipper or a bear in the sky. Sometimes the conclusions are rather unlikely, but charming once you can make them out.

That's how I feel about the Old English riddles in the Exeter Book. They are lovely, of course (if you like Old English), but the solutions sometimes seem a bit of a stretch. The descriptions can be hazy at best, with no clear answer.

When I took a linguistics course and we did a far too short segment on the history of English, we had the option to recite Old English or translate a riddle. I took as my object Riddle 30, translated it very literally, and then smoothed it out for a clearer modern English version.

Here's the kicker. I have no idea what the solution to this riddle is. Once upon a time, I looked up a scholarly opinion, disagreed with it, and promptly forget the official answer. So, I am starting the first ever contest on Marvelous Things. Whoever provides the most amusing and what I deem the most fitting answer to the Riddle will win a fantastic (yet to be determined) prize. Please don't be lame and try to Google the correct answer; be creative and come up with something. I promise it will be well worth your while. The contest will run for one week.

Please note that the formatting on the riddles below is rather odd; the underscoring between each half of the line is to prevent Blogger from absorbing the space between the characters. The autoformatting eats the caesura (the break in the middle) so the underscoring acts as a buffer. Normally, these riddles would have about a tab's worth of space between the two halves.

First of all, the original riddle in Old English, verse Indeterminate Saxon:

Ic eom legbysig, ___ lace mid winde,
bewunden mid wuldre, ___ wedre gesomnad,
fus forðweges, ___ fyre gebysgad,
bearu blowende, ___ byrnende gled.

Ful oft mec gesiþas ___ sendað æfter hondum,
þæt mec weras ond wif ___ wlonce cyssað.
þonne ic mec onhæbbe, ___ ond hi onhnigaþ to me
monige mid miltse, ___ þær ic monnum sceal
ycan upcyme ___ eadignesse.

My translation:

I am beset by flames, ___ sacrifice among wind
wrapped with glory, ___ storm-assembled
eager for departure, ___ fire-troubled
grove-blooming, ___ burning ember.

Very often companions ___ send me after hand
that myself, husband, ___ and splendid wife kiss
then I exalt myself ___ and she bends down to me.
Many with mercy, ___ there I for mankind must
increase up-springing ___ of blessedness.


Mesdames et messieurs, I await your responses.

ETA: I've published a new post about Old English and this Riddle which includes my first, literal translation.

Harry Potter Lives On Forever

NB: This post is dedicated to my younger siblings, who share in my joy for this series. I love you both!

It's not hard to figure out via context clues and my obsessive ramblings, that I adore the Harry Potter books. Not everyone understand this, which I can appreciate. Still, there are many that shared my sadness when the series concluded a little over a year ago.

So, when J.K. Rowling announced the publication of a new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard (which figured prominently in the last book of the series), I was among those rejoicing. But wait! I'm abroad! How will I ever find this lovely text in this strange and foreign land?

Fear not! A few weeks ago I read in the promotional newsletter for my favourite bookstore, La Boîte à Livres (the box of boxes) that I could expect to see Les Contes de Beedle le Barde very soon! Therefore, I went and obtained my very own copy today. I haven't started reading it yet -- I am going to try to really stretch it out.

Here is the lovely cover:



I adore the design and layout -- old-school is the way to go. J.K. Rowling did the illustrations inside as well, but I am not photographing those because everyone should go find a copy in a local bookstore to enjoy the surprise.

Of course, I am very excited about eventually getting the English version too and comparing the two editions. In reading the original series in French, I pick up on slight translational liberties.