Separated at birth?

We were watching a video of local MLA Tim McMillan speaking in the Saskatchewan Legislature about the heroism of a local fire department. It was a nice speech and after it was over all I could say was: "Is it just me or does he look like Snake from Degrassi?"

You be the judge:

Stefan "Snake" Brogren and Tim McMillan

MADLibrarian

The Official Start of Summer

Although the Summer Solstice won't be for another month and we live with the risk of frost, this weekend was the official start of the summer season here on the Prairies-- also known as the May Long Weekend (really it's Victoria Day but very few call it that).

It was a nice weekend. I didn't get as much yardwork done as I would have liked-- none actually although I did change the oil in my lawnmower and replaced a leaky water tap on the front of my house.

I also made a torte (happy news for all my relatives coming to Dad's birthday party in July) and took my parents out for ice cream for their anniversary which isn't until next week but they will be in Portland with my sister.

Instead of yardwork I read a few books. In preparation for an author visit in June I read I am Hutterite by Mary-Ann Kirkby. Wow. I learned a lot about life on a Hutterite colony. I can't wait to talk to Mary-Ann about her childhood. I was looking forward to seeing her at the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw and now she's coming to my library!

I also read this year's Lloydminster Reads selection What I'm trying to say is goodbye by Lois Simmie. Lois will be in town in August as part of Arts Without Borders which is the cultural component of the Saskatchewan Summer Games. It's a pretty cool book with Alcoholics Anonymous, a philandering MLA, a slightly vengeful poltergeist, religious cultists and others. Funny, sad, serious. Another author I'm looking forward to meeting.

MADLibrarian

Reading the unread

Thanks to Marlyn Roberts for mentioning this meme on her blog Stuff and Nonsense. LibraryThing is one of my favourite time sinks.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (too long, too boring)
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (but I have no desire to see the movie)
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire (and a lot of his other stuff as well)
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert (I tried-- got through the first page only)
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (it isn't divided into chapters!!!)
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale a better distopian novel)
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli* (Political science and political philosophy class)
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson ( think I remember reading this a long time ago during my RLS phase)
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
103.Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

A lot of these books I read when I took 18^th century novels and 19^th century novels at university (and no I was not an English major-- I have a history degree!)

MADLibrarian