stuff

Got this off Squirt's blog. It's Time's 100 Greatest Novels. There are plenty of such lists around, and there's always some fault with each of them. Everyone's got their own list of 100 greatest novels. So I'm going through the list just to see if I've read some of the novels that some people call the 'greatest'.

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved - Toni Morrison (have the book, haven't read it)
The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (have the book, haven't read it)
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
A Death in the Family - James Agee
The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance - James Dickey
Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
Falconer - John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (yes, I've actually read this book.)
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (only an abridged version)
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (picked it up, never finished it)
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (on my list of books to read)
Light in August - William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (the whole series too)
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving - Henry Green
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Money - Martin Amis
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Native Son - Richard Wright
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 - George Orwell
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Possession - A.S. Byatt (maybe the book will be better than the movie)
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise - Don DeLillo (on my personal reading list)
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (bought the book, haven't read it)

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In other news, my car got a flat tyre yesterday. The short story is that it's now changed FOC.

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Some appliance in my house short circuited the entire flat. And my grandmother waited 2 hours in the dark, and would have just spent the rest of the night like that if I hadn't come home and decided that something should be done.

Bunch of pictures

Took a few pictures over the last few weeks, but just didn't feel like updating. So here goes:

Celebrated my Baobei's birthday a few weeks ago. Went to Settler's Cafe at Katong, then headed to Hong Kong Cafe? I think that's the name, to have dinner/supper. My lovely girls waited with me for my bus before crossing the road to head home.


Picture 306: My Darling being coy.



Picture 307: Baobei being cute.



Picture 308: Me and the birthday girl.


Went for the Fireworks Festival on Friday. Parked at Esplanade. Omg, please don't park at Esplande unless you got lots of cash to spare, like those rich people who can spend a few hundred on drama productions. It's $4 an hour. I didn't get a lot of nice pictures, but I got a nice video. Too bad there's a tree right smack across my line of vision. Bo bian. Only got there around 8plus.


Picture 309: Fireworks...



Picture 310: Fireworks...



Picture 311: And more fireworks.


And finally, the pictures that some of you have been waiting for...


Picture 312: My new car. It's not second-hand.



Picture 313: I put two stuffed toys on each side. I used to get stuffed toys for my birthday, and I never knew what to do with them. So the other day, I threw them all into the washing machine, and then threw them into my car. The rabbit is from Jaime-san, the giraffe from someone I don't talk to anymore. On the other side are two bears, one Tatty Bear from Stas, and the blue one is the Science fac bear. Yes larh, I bought it larh. Support support ma.



Picture 314: Side view of my car. Btw, it's a Hyundai Getz 1.1M. 

Btw, before you start saying, "Wah!! So rich ah! Buy car ah! Father-mother sponsership, right?" Let me tell you that although my mother encouraged me to get a car (because the journey to and from school is quite far), I am paying for the car myself. Petrol, road tax, season parking, cashcard top-ups, insurance, the whole works, I'm paying for it. And before you say, "Wah, earning so much ah!" Let me tell you that I'm not using the car for leisure. After paying for all of the above, where got money to go chiong?! Also, only one person actually intuitively got the intention of the car. I am quite surprised actually, that someone could actually understand the rationale of the car.