Glad Games for the 21st Century

This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long, long, time. Neil Patrick Harris is definitely the bomb.

And d’oh, now that I read the attached pages, I realize it is a Joss Whedon production, which explains it’s awesomeness pretty well.  I was just thinking it reminded me a lot of the Buffy musical episode.  

It’s only streaming through July 20, so check it NOW!

A challenge passed along by my friend Alex, based on ’The Big Read’, from the NEA, designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They came up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you’ve read.

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 (70% of the plays, only a few of the poems)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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 - CS Lewis
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
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 (a good many of them)
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

So, at 59 (not including those series I haven’t read completely) I guess I’m above average, like all the children in Lake Wobegon.  And, yeah, I managed to get through eons of education without reading Moby Dick or Ulysses–don’t tell!  And don’t tell the Admiral I still haven’t opened The Wasp Factory, after buying it a year ago.
It’s sort of a bizarre list, no?  A weird combo of classic children’s lit, stuff that’s been on high school and college reading lists for eons, and a random selection of 1990s bestsellers.  Also, why do they list The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe separately?   And counting the collected works of Shakespeare as one seems a bit unfair–reading 20 or 30 huge-ass plays still doesn’t count as much as reading some wimpy little bestseller? 
And, um, yeah, I’m really competitive about my nerdishness.
ADDENDUM: In checking back at the NEA Big Read site, I don’t find any mention of the above list, and tracking back from Alex’s link doesn’t help.  So I actually have no idea where that list originates.  These are the books listed as being part of the NEA’s current Big Read program–I’ve actually read a much bigger percentage of these:

Bless Me, Ultima
Fahrenheit 451
My Ántonia
The Great Gatsby
A Lesson Before Dying
The Maltese Falcon
A Farewell to Arms
Their Eyes Were Watching God
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Call of the Wild
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Shawl
The Grapes of Wrath
The Joy Luck Club
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Age of Innocence

where we just spent a week, and only hours after my husband and son left the area. 

Tragedy in Flagstaff

Hmm…not sure if I should feel cursed, or blessed that we’ve so far escaped any direct effects from these disasters.