Books

Yeah, I know this has been circulating since the Internet was invented, but I still like doing these things sometimes:

Please copy and paste your bolded books read, italicized books not completed, and then sum up with a head count, so to speak. What does the list say about your reading habits?

Who's first?

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

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
6 The Bible
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 - read some, but not others...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (apparently the creators of this list didn't realize this is part of the aforementioned Chronicles of Narnia?)
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
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 Albomac
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 Miserables - Victor Hugo - OK, it was the abridged version, but I didn't realize that when I got it.

So that totals 35, I think. Yikes. I gots to get reading. Luckily, I am at a library as I type this, so I might be able to find a few of these fellas.

Single Servings: The misadventures of an almost domestically competent single woman

All the single ladies! Yes I know, there are only two of you left in the tri-state area, but, this blog's for you. I'm calling it “Single Servings,” and it's intended to document the attempts of a single woman with just enough domestic knowledge to be dangerous in the kitchen. I tried an experiment recently, and it involved food. Even though I rarely get home from work before 11 p.m., it typically takes me an hour or three to wind down before I can fall asleep. I even more rarely feel like doing housework, though I do, for whatever reason, always have the urge to vacuum...but I tell myself this would be un-neighborly. One particular night, I had the munchies, and I just happened to have a bag of chips – but I was fresh out of Mom's homemade salsa. Not wanting to go to the store, I took a self-guided tour through what my mother once described as Mother Hubbard's cupboards, and wondered what I could throw together for chip dip. If there's one thing I have in abundance, it's cream of mushroom soup. I don't know why, but if the world were to run out tomorrow, well, just give me a call. I think I used to have a favorite recipe that used it and I was perpetually running out, so I got in the habit of buying a can every time it was on sale. I've since forgotten that recipe, and cooking for one is downright obnoxious, so I do not tend to have a well-stocked kitchen. But old habits die hard, and the cream of mushroom soup crop is doing well. I also grabbed a can of refried beans, and a few other odds and ends, thinking, “I wonder what this would do.” I've always been intrigued by weird food combinations – fries and vanilla ice cream, corn dogs and ranch, pickles deep fried in batter – so this seemed like an opportunity. While the flavor wasn't bad, it was too heavy for chip dip. I also should probably add that during my “let's keep the mushroom soup companies in business” phase, I would sometimes buy different variations, basically because I get bored with repetition. That's fine and dandy, except when you accidentally grab a can of mushroom soup with roasted garlic when the situation would be much more suited to plain, old mushroom soup. Really, it should be called "scent of roasted garlic with a mushroom garnish" for as strong as it smelled. I learned something about myself: I apparently do not like overwhelming garlic smell. It ruined the chances of it working as chip dip, but, really, isn't self discovery what it's all about? Despite being underwhelmed with my invention, throwing out that much “food” would have given me nightmares full of reprimands from starving children in third-world countries, so, I had to come up with an alternative. I thought, maybe use it with some kind of meat? I'm not that imaginative, so I found some pork chops, thought, “Yeah, OK, that works,” and went with that. I bought a couple pork chops, and smothered one in the experimental goop in a baking pan. As a contingency plan, I smothered the other one in barbecue sauce, because you can't really screw that up. The result? Delicious. Pork chops dry out pretty easily if you don't use some sort of sauce or marinade, and the creaminess of the mushroom soup worked perfectly to keep the meat tender. The little hint of refried beans and tomato added flavor to what can sometimes be a bland cut, and you don't have to spend 20 minutes measuring out 18 different spices just to get some flavor into it. The whole process gave me renewed respect for people who create recipes, because it's way more involved than you'd think, even for something as basic as this. I didn't have a book to tell me how long to cook the food/at what temperature, so I called my Holly Homemaker oldest sister and we think tank-ed our way to a logical solution. And, best of all, the recipe makes almost the perfect amount of sauce for two pork chops. For a single person like myself, handling two chops is much more manageable than something like a rump roast or even a package of bacon. I paired them with a can of green beans, and had what passes for a pretty balanced meal in my world. I actually got two meals out of it. So, basically, I'm ruling this experiment as a success. If I keep experimenting, I might find a home for all the rest of these mushroom soup cans. Ingredients: 2 pork chops 1 8 oz. can of refried beans 1 8 oz. can of cream of mushroom soup Either 1 can of tomatoes or 1 large fresh tomato Directions: Open the cans. Mix together the beans, cream of mushroom soup. Chop up the tomato(s) and add to the mixture. Put the pork chops into a small baking pan, and cover with the sauce. Cover with aluminum foil, and bake at 325 for 45 minutes.* Makes 2 servings. *If you don't own a meat thermometer, use a knife and a fork to cut into the pork chop. If it's still pink, put it back in the oven. If it's white, it's ready to eat. (This would be why they call pork "the other white meat.")