Summer meme, from Sisyphus

1. What is your favorite part of summer?

Travel! Woo hoo!

2. What's your favorite quintessentially summer food? Least favorite?

Peaches! Or better yet, blue crabs with lots of Old Bay.

Least favorite: Probably potato salad, which strikes me as a waste of perfectly good potatoes. (Unless it is the German kind with vinegar and no mayo, which is fine.)

3. Best beverage to beat the summer heat:

Sam Adams Noble Pils.

4. Least favorite/most annoying thing related to summer?

Centipedes and millipedes. Ugh.

5. Pick one: the lake /the beach. Why?

The beach! Because dude, WAVES. And that salty, seaweedy ocean smell.

6. Most amusing summer vacation trip you've ever taken?

I don't know if I can think of too many amusing trips I've taken, so I will tell you about the time I went to Bosnia, because I'm fairly sure this one is at least interesting. I was sitting in a restaurant in Croatia, and I thought "hey, you can totally take a bus to Bosnia from here," so I did. I went to Mostar when they were rebuilding the bridge, and fortunately I ment a nice woman at the bus station who spoke English and rented out rooms for 10 Euros, so I spent the evening sitting on her patio eating cherries with her family and frustrating her three-year-old son, who couldn't understand why I couldn't read to him in Bosnian. Then I went to Sarajevo, where they had an actual youth hostel, and one of my roommates was a Canadian guy who wanted to look for this park where they had pickup soccer games (which I think continued all through the war). Which we eventually found, so I cheered while he played soccer with the locals. Soccer is, pretty much, the universal language.

7. Most ridiculous/cringe-inducing/blush-provoking summer outfit you have seen? (Bonus points if you yourself were wearing it!)

Not a clue. I'm lucky if I notice my own clothes; anyone else's are a lost cause.

8. Your absolute dream summer afternoon would be:

Exploring a new city, preferably somewhere with twisty medieval streets and lots of wine and olives and sun. (Which I will totally be doing this July! Woo hoo again!)

Influential Writers Meme

Tagged for this by Undine. If you want to be tagged, consider yourself tagged, as I'm not sure I actually know twenty-five people who haven't done it already.

I have adopted Horace's idea of dividing the list into stages of life, and Undine's caveat that not all of these are current favorites. I'm not, for example, totally sure what was up with the Antonia White obsession, but an obsession it definitely was.

Preschool:

1) A. A. Milne

Elementary / intermediate school:

2) Elizabeth Janet Grey
3) Gordon Korman
4) Shakespeare (this particular Unholy Obsession started early)

High school:

5) Douglas Adams
6) Joseph Heller
7) Bob Dylan ("writers" includes writers of other things than books, yes?)
8) Walt Kelly
9) Federico García Lorca
10) Stephen Jay Gould

College:

11) T. H. White
12) Ludovico Ariosto
13) Emily Dickinson
14) Charlotte Brontë
15) Emily Brontë
16) Anne Brontë
17) John Webster
18) Antonia White
19) Sir Thomas Malory

Grad school, and after

20) Dorothy L. Sayers (whom I encountered for the first time in high school, but didn't really get until grad school)
21) W. B. Yeats (again, didn't really get him until grad school)
22) J. K. Rowling
23) Thomas Heywood
24) Wilfred Owen
25) Guy Gavriel Kay

Hmm, this appears to be a somewhat eclectic list. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Long-ass book meme, from Heu Mihi

... because I clearly can't do any actual work during office hours.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

I'll be using a lower-case x for partial reads, because I can't resist splitting hairs.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein - 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 (I think I have read the vast majority of it at some point or other.)
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 – x (barring Timon of Athens and Henry VIII, which I really should get to one of these days)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks * (Picked this up at the thrift store, really should get to it)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot – X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’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 - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Man, I'm not doing well on the Russian novels.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - x (I've read two, I think; TLTWaTW was required reading in elementary school, and I'm pretty sure I read one of the others in college, when I went through a phase of really trying to like C.S. Lewis. It didn't work very well.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X+
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X+ (In fact, I think this may be the first "chapter book" that I ever read)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - X
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 - X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I've never even heard of this.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
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 * (Another thrift-store pickup I've been meaning to get to)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X
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 (Got maybe 5/6ths of the way through, wrote a paper on it anyhow while pounding vodka screwdrivers and watching Pulp Fiction, got an A-. Sometimes I'm not sure I deserve my college degree.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - x (No, I didn't read all of it, and yes, I somehow faked my way through an exam on it in grad school. Hmm. Maybe I don't deserve my master's degree either.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - X
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - X
80 Possession - AS Byatt X
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Curiously, I'm only familiar with this one because the LibraryThing Unsuggester lists it as among the top five books that you will not like if you really, really like the Orlando Furioso. I have not tried the experiment, but I think this is probably true.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
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 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

seven quite random facts about me

A meme that Dance tagged me for. If you want to be tagged, too, consider yourself tagged. (At this point, I think everyone has probably done it.)

1) I really, really wanted to be Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall when I was nine or ten. I'm not sure how I ended up in a sedentary profession without great apes. Nowadays I just go to the zoo a lot, although I do want to go to Africa and see some mountain gorillas in the wild someday, assuming there are still mountain gorillas left in the wild by the time I can afford it, which may, sadly, not turn out to be the case.

2) My brother has the same birthday as Harry Potter (month, day, and year) and Juliet Capulet (month and day). I find both of these facts far more interesting than he does.

3) I would much rather travel alone than with somebody else, because (among other things), if you take the wrong bus when you're alone you can sit back and enjoy the ride, rather than worrying about spoiling somebody else's day by getting them lost.

4) The oldest of my second cousins on my father's side (of the same generation as me, none of this "removed" business) was born in the 1940s. The (probable) youngest will be born in 2008.

5) The closest I ever came to the corporate world was a one-semester stint as business manager of our student-run coffeehouse when I was a sophomore in college. Both I and the coffeehouse survived, but I consider this something of a miracle, and have not been tempted to repeat the experiment.

6) I find many of the villains in Renaissance drama oddly sexy. Richard III, Edmund, Bosola, Angelo. Yow.

7) When I was a kid, my father traveled a lot on business, and he was something of a dabbler in languages -- the sort of person who would check out a bunch of teach-yourself-Hebrew tapes at the first hint that he might be going to Israel, and so on. I have inherited this tendency, but I usually end up trying to learn the language after I've visited the place, which doesn't work as well.