Monday, January 4, 2010

Tackling the classics

Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits
This year I've made a couple of New Years resolutions. One of them is to read more of the classics. The book Beowulf on the Beach by Jack Murnighan looks at the 50 greatest hits of classic literature. For each of the books discussed the book has a kind of cheat sheet with these topics: The Buzz, What People Don't Know(but should), Best Line, What's sexy, Quirky Fact and What to Skip.
The book starts with The Iliad by Homer. So tomorrow I am off to the library to check this one out. I only plan on reading one classic a month. I am a fan of fluff novels and need time for those. So please leave you comment below and let me know which of the classics listed you think I should read.
In case you were wondering the other classic books discussed are as follows.
  1. The Odyssey
  2. The Old Testament
  3. The New Testament
  4. The Aenid
  5. Metamorphoses
  6. Beowulf
  7. Inferno
  8. Paradiso
  9. The Decameron
  10. The Canterbury Tales
  11. The Faerie Queene
  12. Hamlet
  13. King Lear
  14. Macbeth
  15. Don Quixote
  16. Paradise Lost
  17. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
  18. Pride and Prejudice
  19. Faust 1 +2
  20. Eugene Onegin
  21. Pere Goriot
  22. Jane Eyre
  23. Wuthering Heights
  24. Moby Dick
  25. Bleak House
  26. Great Expectations
  27. Madame Bovary
  28. Crime and Punishment
  29. The Brothers Karamazov
  30. War and Peace
  31. Anna Karenina
  32. Middlemarch
  33. The Wings of the Dove
  34. Remembrance of Things Past
  35. Ulysses
  36. The Magic Mountain
  37. The Trail
  38. To the Lighthouse
  39. The Sound and the Fury
  40. A Farewell to Arms
  41. Tropic of Cancer
  42. Native Son
  43. The Man Without Qualities
  44. Lolita
  45. Giovannis Room
  46. One Hundred years of Solitude
  47. Gravity's Rainbow
  48. Blood Meridian
  49. Beloved

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Photo a day


This year one of my many resolutions is to take a photo a day. I tried this last year, but my DSLR mysteriously broke, in February, and I got off track. I am using the Becky Higgins Project Life. If her digital version had been available I probably would have purchased it instead. The regular paper kit arrived today and it really is great. The graphic design is snappy and the project layout is handy. If you are interested you can purchase the kit on Becky Higgins' website. The photo above is an example of work from Beck Higgins website, not mine.