I can make this work biweekly

A few weeks ago, Dave the preacher at my church, gave a series of lessons on our Decade of Destiny and asked everyone to write a 2yr, 5yr and 10yr plan for their lives. Nathan and I came up with one, but I decided to add some other goals to my list that I felt might better me as an individual and give some balance to my school dominated life. The number one goal is to read 20 non-school related books.

A few months ago, a list of books was generating around Facebook. It claimed that out of the 100 books on the list most people have only read 6 of them. It claimed to be a list created by the BBC, but upon further investigation, this does not seem to be the case. Either way, I decided to take a look at the list and see which books  I’ve read. Turns out, I’ve read only about a quarter of them. I have read other books by the many of the authors on the list but not those on the list.  Tackling the list over the next 5 years seems to be a great way to improve my intellect without reading MORE psychology journal articles.

So here is the list. I’ve crossed out the ones I’ve read.

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 Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

 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 - A.A. 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 Inferno - Dante

 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 Mitchell

 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 - E.B. White

 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

 89 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

Attempt to Blog #2

I attempted to blog last year when planning my wedding but I was so busy with everything going on that I failed at keeping it going. I'm a little hesitant to attempt again but I have a new motive to blog.

Why I am reattempting to blog:
My Advisor gave me a book called "How to write a lot". It essentially says writing only becomes easier with practice. As I am suppose to write a lot and often for school,  a blog is a great way to practice when I don't have anything to write for my thesis. It's what I like to call "productive procrastination." I'm getting my creative juices flowing even if it's not on task for school.

I've renamed the blog "The nonexistent life of a graduate student" because I'm not really suppose to have a life outside of school. I'm suppose to eat, breath and sleep school work or at least that's what graduate students are made to think. However, my attention span and interests do not allow for that. I'm being a rebel by trying to be balanced and this is where I will keep track of my activities as long as I remember to do so.