All the books!

Here we go - a slightly happier blog post :)

I'm not exactly sure where this list of books came from, but judging from the title, it had something to do with the BBC. Apparently, statistically speaking, on average a person will have only read six of these books. A few years ago, I set myself the rather enjoyable challenge of finishing half of them before my 25th birthday (which is still 18 months away). Of late, my efforts have been stalled slightly, by a combination of a ridiculously busy few weeks and a rather large book that has taken me a while to get through. However, I took a sick day today (a little bit unwarranted, but I really needed the day off) and managed to catch up on a bit of reading. So after my school reports are done, I think it might be time for another trip to the local library.

If anyone reading this loves books as much as I do, I'd really appreciate your feedback as to which eight of the 58 books I haven't read I should make it a priority to read before I'm officially a quarter of a century old. (Speaking of readers - shout out to the Russians! According to blog statistics, the country with the second highest number of page views of this blog is Russia. Go figure...)

BBC reading list

[x] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[x] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x] 6 The Bible - God (the whole thing)
[ ] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[x] 9 The Northern Lights- Philip Pullman
[x] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

8/10

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
[x] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[x] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[x] 14 Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[x] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[ ] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

14/20

[x] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[ ] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[x] 23 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
[x] 24 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[ ] 25 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[ ] 26 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 27 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[x] 28 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
[ ] 29 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 30 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

19/30

[x] 31 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain

[ ] 32 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 33 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 34 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
[x] 35 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[x] 36 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 37 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[x] 38 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
[x] 39 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[ ] 40 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

25/40

[ ] 41 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 42 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[x] 43 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x] 44 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 45 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[x] 46 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 47 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[x] 48 Atonement - Ian McEwan
[x] 49 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 50 Dune - Frank Herbert

31/50

[ ] 51 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[ ] 52 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 53 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 54 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 55 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[ ] 56 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[x] 57 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[ ] 58 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 59 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 60 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

32/60

[ ] 61 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[x] 62 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 63 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 64 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 65 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 66 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 67 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[x] 68 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
[x] 69 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[ ] 70 Dracula - Bram Stoker

35/70

[x] 71 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 72 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[ ] 73 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 74 The Inferno - Dante
[ ] 75 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 76 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 77 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 78 Possession - AS Byatt
[x] 79 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 80 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

37/80

[ ] 81 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 82 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 83 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 84 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[x] 85 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
[ ] 86 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[ ] 87 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[x] 88 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
[ ] 89 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 90 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

40/90

[ ] 91 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[ ] 92 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 93 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[x] 94 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 95 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 96 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[x] 97 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[ ] 98 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[ ] 99 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

[ ] 100 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

total 42

So Many Possibilities

I'm just feeling a bit confused at the moment. There are so many directions my life could take, and none of them stand out as 'the right one'. But first, some context.

I was dragged into my current job, kicking and screaming (metaphorically, of course). I had a few ideals of my dream first real job, and this one was the exact opposite. I wanted to stay in the city where I was living at the time, I wanted to teach classroom music at a high school. I ended up getting posted in another town 5 hours away, far too close to my parents, teaching at a primary school and singing teaching at a high school. The funny thing was, I loved it, and I still do. Except for the fact I'm meant to be writing the students' reports at the moment, I usually can't believe I get paid to have so much fun! However, I'm still doing a hodge-podge of different positions (3 jobs at 4 schools to be precise), none of which are permanent, and they don't add up to a full-time workload (although, that's probably a positive. I love my 3 day weekends!)

A few weeks ago, I was talking to the teacher in charge of music at one of the schools where I work. Let's call her Miranda music teacher. Miranda has been a fantastic, albeit unofficial mentor since I started working. She's planning to retire at the end of next year, and was talking to me about the possibility of me taking over her position. That would be a full time role in the same town where I'm living now. However, that means I couldn't keep going with the singing and percussion teaching that I'm doing now, which I love doing. The instrumental teaching is only 2 1/2 days per week at the moment, but I inherited two very small programmes, which have been growing since I've been here, so it could increase to three or four days a week over the next few years very easily. I also work one day a week at a primary school that really needs a full time music specialist (that they claim the budget won't cover!) In a lot of ways, although I find primary classroom work more stressful, I see it as being more important than the instrumental work. So arguing my way into a full-time position at that school is another possibility. I've also been head-hunted by both the Christian schools in town, who heard on the grapevine that there was an underemployed music teacher living in their midst. Overall, the biggest consideration is how long I want to stay in town, and why I'm deciding to stay.

It always takes me a while to settle into a new town, but I'm starting to feel like I've made it here. I've found a great church, made a lot of close friends, and have found things to do in the evenings besides watching TV. And now that I've moved out of home (again), even living in the same town as my parents is a positive thing about being here. There are still a lot of things that I miss about my old city, but each time I go back for a visit, I find that I've drifted out of the loop a little bit further. Essentially there are two tangible things keeping me here. When I think about it, both of them are pretty stupid things to base major life decisions upon.

The first is my students. As an instrumental teacher, I teach the same kids over long periods of time, rather than getting new ones each year or semester. Part of me wants to see my first crop of year 8s through to year 12, and see what my choir is like when it's full of kids I've been teaching for five years instead of one.

The other is Garry. Yes, as in Garry the guy-I-kinda-like. We get along really well. He's a fun person to hang around with. I feel I can just be myself with him, and conversation just flows. However, he's never given me any indication that he wants to be anything more than friends. And I'm being the good little Christian woman who kissed dating goodbye and is just waiting for him to pursue me. (Actully, I never kissed dating goodbye, dating has never really said 'howdy'.) See how ridiculous it is, for me to base decisions upon a relationship that maybe potentially could possibly happen in the distant future!

So what do I do? Do I hang around here in one or more of any number of jobs, loving life but somewhat stagnating? Or do I venture forth in search of new horizons? Do I passively wait for Garry to figure out where things stand between us, or do I declare undying love for him, secure in the knowledge that if everything goes horribly wrong, the UK worker's visa application doesn't take too long :P

Sorry about the long-winded whinge, anonymous internet traffic, and thankyou for listening. I'll try to make sure the next post is significantly sunnier.

Boys can be silly

I have to justify this statement by citing some conversations that I have been a part of over the last week. For the purposes of keeping all things anonymous, let's refer to these particular members of the male persuasion as Barry from bible study, Freddie the friend-of-a-friend, and Garry the guy-I-kinda-like.

(In the context of a discussion on polygamy)
Barry: "I can't even find one wife, where am I going to get two?"
Fisher: "You're sitting at a table with company that includes three gorgeous, age-appropriate, Christian girls, none of whom, to my knowledge, you have ever asked out, and you say that you can't find a wife?" (This was in my head.)

Freddie: "Hey, I haven't seen you for ages. Do you want to catch up for coffee sometime?"
Fisher: Totally unsolicited freak-out and stretching of the truth in order to avoid said coffee and catch-up at all costs.

Garry: "..." (except for a facebook like)
Fisher: "You're the most amazing man I've ever met and our babies will be smart AND beautiful!" (Again, this was in my head.)

Okay, so perhaps judging from these conversations all laid out, I might be the silly one. It's just so much more satisfying to blame everyone else for my problems. I'm not particularly proud of any of the responses I made (even though they were mostly in my head).

On a previous occasion, I have gotten quite angry at a friend who wanted to play the simple game with the complicated name: 'Let's-take-all-the-single-people-over-the-age-of-sixteen-at-church-and-decide-who-would-make-cute-couples'. Church, although a good place to meet potential life partners who share values, interests and faith, is not a match-making agency, and shouldn't be treated as such. Church should be a place where everyone is accepted, even if they've reached the ripe old age of twenty-three without settling down with a spouse and children. It irks me when it is assumed that two single people around the same age and attending the same church must be right for each other (which is exactly what I did the other evening). So sorry, Barry, for trying to set you up and not simply accepting you as you are.

I spent a fair bit of time with Freddie over the weekend. We saw each other at a mutual friend's wedding, and he spent the whole night being very friendly - coming over to my table to chat several times and asking me to dance. We did spend a fair bit of time on the D-floor, which involved plenty of twirling and a close waltz grip. (Had I known, I would have worn a skirt with a bit of a flare, rather than my fairly basic shift dress.)He spent the whole night, unlike Stephen Sondheim's musical theatre heros, being both charming and sincere. The signals I was getting were on the border of friendship and flirtation. And so I did what I usually do when faced with an uncertain, possibly romantic, situation - I panicked. I spent ages the next day composing a reply text that contained no out-and-out lies, but neglected to mention the fact that I could have seen him, but chose not to -  mainly out of fear. After the last time I was in a similar situation, I promised that I wouldn't let my fear of relationships hold me back from having adventures. So much for promises made to myself....

And Garry...I think two out of three justifications aren't bad. He can remain a silly boy!