100 Books to Read.

According to the BBC, the average person has only read 6 of these 100 must-read books. I've bolded the ones I've read, and italicized the ones that I've partially read or never finished.

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

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

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 Carol

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 Mitchel

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 The 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

So, that makes it a total of 26 books read, and 9 partially read. Not too bad, eh? One of my goals in life is to  have read all the books on this list. I'm basically about 1/4 through it, so hopefully within a few years I'll have finished it!

Oh, by the way, I passed my 100th post without realizing it. Haha, no point in celebrating now. Celebrations will come for 200th then!

How many of the books have you read?

I really want a ukelele.

Last night I had a dream that (young, hot) John Lennon was my boyfriend. It was bizarre. John's not even my favorite Beatle. George is. And then, at the end of my dream, John died and I was devastated. It was weird experiencing this deep grief for some guy that I apparently loved in my dream. These kinds of dreams have been happening a lot lately. I keep falling in love with famous people in my dreams, but it's never fulfilling. They either die or I wake up before something good happens. I wonder what it means. It's almost like a constant reminder that I'm forever alone! :D

Guys, I'm so scared. I'm scared that I won't make any friends in college next year. I've had the same group of friends for 3 years. Any new friends I've made are because all of us are in the same classes. I don't know how to make friends outside of that anymore. I don't know how to make small talk, which is apparently an essential part of forming new friendships.

I lost a lot of friends I had at my church last winter because I was in a rut. I expected they would understand and be waiting for me when I returned to normal in the spring because that's what true friends do (which I thought they were). They didn't. Their lives went on. They grew closer and left me behind. I gave up on those church friends, and gave up on having friends at that place at all anymore. Losing friends you were previously close with has an enormous impact on you, though. Every time you go back and see them, it terrorizes you. You go home feeling worse than ever.
I just want to leave, forget they ever existed, and never see them again.

On top of that, my group of friends that I love dearly is going through a rough time. We've all been more tense and irritable, and not a day goes by in school that at least one mini-argument doesn't occur within the group. One day it's me and one friend. Another day it's another friend and her closest friend. It's scaring me, because we've never had such conflict. We're all so stressed though with all this overwhelming schoolwork, and maybe even tired of seeing each other all the time. Seeing each other every single day for the majority of the past 3 years gets annoying.

I'm hoping things will get better, but it all comes back to my fear of next year. My childhood and younger teen years, I suffered from two parasitic friendships that changed me. I lost any other friends I'd had for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. Up until sophomore year, I'd never had a great group of friends. Now, with everything that's happening and college looming in the near future, I'm wondering if I'll ever find the true friends everyone claims to have, or if I'm just destined to end up alone. But being alone is my greatest fear. You have no idea how much it terrifies me.

I'm starting to think there's something wrong with me. I either choose friends that take advantage of me, or I'm not good enough for them because they drop me entirely. I don't know why.

Don't mind me. I'm off to listen to Paul McCartney's new album...well, just because.

I'm also watching the Grammy's. Foster the People was amazing. As were the Beach Boys. And Macca. Oh  they made my night.

This band. Ugh. I've dreamt about them too.

Taylor Swift's performance sucks. Hey Taylor, I'ma let you finish but Paul McCartney had one of the best Grammy performances of ALL TIME. :D

I was so tempted...

Out of sheer boredom and for the noble pursuit of procrastination, I decided to look up how much a domain name costs. I'm not planning on getting my own domain name and not interested in taking out the ".blogspot" part of my domain name; I was just curious. I had expected the choice of .com, .org, maybe .net. I got this:

.xxx! .XXX! I'd heard they finally made it an actual TLD (what does that even stand for?) specifically for those kinds of sites, but to have that as an option?! I'll shamefully admit, I considered it for one second, just for the hilarity. Could you imagine the wonderful irony? 

As if I had $80 to spare...

Laugh all you want at my immaturity. We all have a bit of a 15 year old boy in us. Well, maybe not.

Your eyes of judgement. I CAN FEEL THEM.

:)

Hi. It's Wednesday.

Coldplay has a new video! It's called "Charlie Brown," which makes me very excited because that's my current favorite of 'Mylo Xyloto'. Here it is:

I'm so satisfied with the video. It's exactly how I pictured it.

I've been missing a lot of school this year. Call it "senioritis" or whatever, but I think it's out of boredom (not to mention tiredness). I've become so unbelievably bored with everyday school life. It's the same routine every day. I can't possibly stress how boring it is. Every morning I wake up exhausted, go to school and sit in the same classes, take minimal notes, attempt to distract myself by googling random things, and still end up bored and exhausted.

I see no purpose in going to school. My learning these days is minimal. I can go through the entire day and not learn a single thing, mostly because I'm just too lazy to pay attention. I don't see anything we're taught as helpful, because I never end up reviewing the notes I take. I take some notes to pass the time. They don't help me. They're too broad for the very specific tests we're given. Knowing that hydrochloric acid is a strong acid and sodium hydroxide is a strong base is not going to help me on my Acids and Bases test. Only rereading the 30 page textbook chapter is going to help me.

Everything we're learning this year is so thoroughly uninteresting. It all bores me to death. The only class I find moderately intriguing is English, but the books are all kind of lame. I'm not one to label books "lame," but there really can't be anything worse than Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.

You see, all of the classes I'm in are preparing for a college-level exam at the end of the year. I don't have a reason to care anymore. I got into college. If I keep my grades up to a decent level (and they are), I shouldn't get any admission reconsideration. What's the point then? Last year, I had something to prove. I had to prove to myself, to my peers, and to colleges that I could do well, and I did. I have a deep-set fear of personal mediocrity, and I overcame that in terms of academics.

(I hope you don't think I'm arrogant based on the above paragraph. I'm really not. For the longest time, I really believed I was just a stupid girl that got decent grades because she worked hard. I don't have any achievements to shove into people's faces or any extremely honorable accomplishments. I just recognize the fact that I worked hard. Does that make sense?)

I'm just into things now that are ultimately more satisfying than classes that really don't mean anything other than potential college credit. I put aside my interests for several years so that I could do well in school. That's grown old. I'm tired of being stressed. I want to finally reserve some time for myself and things that I enjoy.

Which is why I did no homework today, despite the fact that I have several projects I could (and should be) working on.

The logical side of my brain finds it essential to suggest that you ignore all of the above paragraphs in favor of a much shorter explanation for my lack of academic motivation and poor attendance record: I'm lazy.

My love for Pixar.

Pixar is the love of my life. It is the joy of the radiant sun that shines in the morning. It is the melodic laughter of a child. It is the combination of everything that is beautiful and adorable.

(Okay, creepy introduction paragraph over. I really seem to have a fondness for anaphora. Maybe because my name's in the term.)

I have an inexplicable, almost bizarre, love for Pixar. I've seen all of the major films and most of the shorts. I watch them consistently. I quote them at random. I annoy my friends about them.

For some reason, some people consider Pixar to be almost exclusively for children. I can't understand why. I grew up with Pixar and as they continue to release brilliant films, I don't find myself outgrowing them at all. They still make me as happy as I was when I watched them as a kid. Whereas my perspective has changed on some of the Disney films (I adore Peter Pan, but the constant references to killing in it is crazy!), my perspective on Pixar films hasn't. On the contrary, the things I discover in Pixar as a teenager make me love it even more than when I was a child. Some of the quotes I didn't recognize or understand as a child are my favorites now.

Finding Nemo: (conversation between two sharks when Marlin and Dory arrive)
Chum: Humans-think they own everything.
Anchor: Probably American.

Both of those quotes I wouldn't imagine understanding as a child, but I love them now. What hasn't changed, though, is how happy they make me. With Pixar films, when you watch the films, you get into their world and you become friends with the characters. They leave you happy and enchanted, thinking "well hey, life's not so bad. Actually, it's pretty fantastic!"

Finding Nemo is my favorite, closely followed by Ratatouille. Personal story time: when I was in 5th grade, my mom came down with a life-threatening chronic illness. It was a scary time, but I would watch Finding Nemo on my bed multiple times per week. It always made me feel better, no matter how bad things were going. Watching that movie and "Beyond the Sea" playing in the credits at the end, to me, solved everything. If Nemo and Marlin could overcome so many terrible things, why couldn't I? So yeah, there's a little sweet story for you.

The Pixar shorts are also adorable. They're like condensed versions of Pixar films, but are just as likeable. The fact that Pixar can tell as great of a story in 5 minutes as they can in 2 hours is true skill. Here's my favorite:

Moral of the story: Pixar is amazing. It works for all ages. It has great stories for little kids, and it has an added layer of depth and beauty for adults. It's perfect.