22 December 2007

The 100 most influential books by women - and how many Ive read

Which is not too many, maybe I will take some up in 2008..

1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife

37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

47. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved

51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune's Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession

59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women's Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater


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20 August 2007

Harry Potter marathon

Starting at 4:00 PM on saturday , in flight from Boston to Baltimore , from Baltimore to Charlotte.. continued through dinner and till 1 am in the morning..
Start back on page 512 at 9 AM sunday.....skip breakfast .....and at 11:34 AM we have a winner , who crossed the 'HP and Deathly Hallows ' in record 10.5 hours !!! 3 cheeers !!!!
 
As for my thoughts on it... its a paceful story, but seemed a bit juvenile to me... but ofcourse as every other reader of the HP series I 'had' to read it.. so there...
 
 
 

17 July 2007

Toto and Alfredo !!

what a delightful relationship...in a delightful movie.. 'Cinema Paradiso' - saw it over the weekend and just looooved it...particularly the young Toto.. brings a smile to my face even now :-) .. A Classic !!
 

13 July 2007

Interesting fact of the day

Saffron comes from the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus. Each purple flower has three threadlike orangish-red stigmas, which form part of the plant’s reproductive apparatus. When these are removed by hand and then dried, they become saffron. The stigmas are very, very small, and it takes several hundred to make up a gram of saffron. Depending on their size, it can take as many as 200,000 flowers to make a pound of saffron. Only about 30 tons are produced per year worldwide.

24 June 2007

After dark


"But why should you be interested in me?"
"Good question. i can't explain it myself right this second. But maybe--just maybe--if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai' soundtrack music will start playing in the back-ground, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I'm interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us."


--Haruki Murakami

22 June 2007

Why !!!

Why do White Shirts attract disaster ???
For no reason at all , I splashed coffee on my white shirt.........urrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh

20 June 2007

Excited about

this one..http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419887/ .. I loved the book..hope the movie lives up to it..
Speaking of which http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/ is one movie which has gone beyond the book...seriously !
Also enjoyed http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976026/ recently..

13 June 2007

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe

has won the Man Booker International Prize in honour of his literary career.
His first work, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a classic of world literature and has been translated into 40 languages.(which I read recently)
Achebe, was once described by Nelson Mandela as "the writer in whose presence prison walls fell down,"
 
OTHER SHORTLISTED AUTHORS FOR THE AWARD :
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Michael Tournier
Peter Carey
Carlos Fuentes
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Doris Lessing
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Don DeLillo

Who wouldve thunk

that orange + coffee aka Iced Orange Mocha would be such a delightful combination !
Come to think of it..Ive always loved orange...next step Orange Icecream !!

09 June 2007

Being Right

There is no more destructive force in human affairs -- not greed, not hatred -- than the desire to have been right. Non-attachment to possessions is trivial when compared with non-attachment to opinions.
- Mark Kleiman

08 June 2007

The Sopranos

is coming to an end this Sunday, and as much as it pains me to admit it , I will surely miss it.
I started watching it on my hubby's insistence as he is big mob-story-lover, but slowly and surely I got sucked in..
and now here I am scouring the net for all the Sopranos obituaries , savoring each last tidbit of the Soprano diet..
Salut !

Einstein on Freedom of Will

I do not believe in freedom of will. Schopenhauer's words, “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills,” have accompanied me throughout my life and console me in my dealings with others, even those which are truly painful to me. This recognition of the lack of freedom of will helps me avoid taking myself and my fellow men—both as actors and as individuals casting judgment—too seriously, just as it protects me from losing a sense of humor.

Albert Einstein

07 June 2007

Half a yellow sun

wins the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction , a well deserved award for a well written book .
Congratulations to Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  who says "I suppose I was born with the story-telling gene." ..
Wish that could be found in me ..

06 June 2007

Added to reading request pile

  • East of Eden
  • The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer winning)
- John Steinbeck , One of the best American writers of 20th century
Winner of Nobel Prize of Literature in 1962
 

Literary Quote of the day

"Lord,how the day passes ! Its like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do "
                                        - John Steinbeck (American Novelist)

Beauty and the Beast in Epcot , Orlando..