The Meme in Which I Prove I am A Big Giant Nerd!

I was tagged for this Meme, which fits my Literature Major self oh so well.
Here's the deal: books in bold type I've read, books in italics I'm planning to read.
And, since commenting / discussing books is my favorite pass time there are many comments. Well, not too many, I self edited.

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 i HATED this book with every fiber of my 11 year old being.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy this one flat out sucked.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – half bolded, I’ve read many, but not all...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier I LOVE this book and the movie.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger –
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - an all time favorite
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy –
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – this is my husband’s favorite book, so I’ve promised him I’ll read it at some point.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck –I have a strong dislike for this novel.
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 – my favorite Austin novel.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this on the list separately from #33? Anyway, it’s the only one I read)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini – I’ve heard only good things about this book; it’s on my to read list.
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden – Another favorite
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – Angels and Demons was MUCH better.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 – the overly aggressive marketing campaign bugs me too much to read this.
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen – my least favorite of Austin’s works.
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 – I bought and read this in San Francisco Intl Airport, during a marathon flight delay three years ago.
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac – seriously anti-climatic
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding – another let down
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 – on my literary to do list.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray – brilliant book, simply brilliant
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker – this book started me off an Alice Walker binge in 1995, where I read everything Walker ever wrote.
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro – stunning book.
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom – I read this the night before my brother’s wedding. I started it about 10pm and was finished by 4am; be warned it’s a weeper.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – I was forced to read this for a class in college. I hated it.
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

Let them eat cake....

One year ago tonight, at 9 pm, my new husband and I cut our wedding cake.

It was coconut pound cake filled with chocolate mousse and looked like it came from outer space.

The cake was made to match the Futurama cake topper I had created. The whole shebang was a surprise for my Alpha Buck.

AB was previously quite upset, thinking we'd have a boring cake of ivory butter cream icing with pink hydrangeas between the layers. If I live to be 110 years old, I will never forget the look of joy on his face when he saw his cake.

I have set some goals - long and short term.
I am setting them forth here, to enable me to blog on them, track them and be held accountable for them.

I have 6 weeks before a milestone birthday. I intend to arrive at that birthday in the best shape of my life.

In the short term, I intend to set my nose back to the proverbial grindstone and turn in a weekly report at 100% compliance this week. In short, no cheats, no nibbles, no divergence from plan. This means getting in all the meals, workouts and water. At the present, I'm a bit behind on water and workouts, but I have a plan to pull bang on with the goal.

I originally intended this blog to be a chronicle of my recomp (per my trainer you never say diet) and I have noted it is such a struggle with feelings that I am even unable to blog about such matters. I will endeavor to unburden myself of the self hatred the dwells in my soul and shed this damnable fluff once and for all.