A Reflection on Friendship

Friends are such an important part of life.  I think a lot of hardships would be almost impossible to get through without the help of a good friend.  It doesn't matter where you are or when the last time you saw that person was.  A true friend is always there.  While watching Lord of the Rings recently, it struck me how Gandalf and Aragorn were really true friends.  In the story, I always think of Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin, and Legolas and Gimli.  But, really,  the books allude to how Gandalf and Aragorn have worked together for many dangerous missions.  Aragorn expressed concern for Gandalf during a discussion on whether they should go through the mines of Moria or not.  At another point, Tolkien implies that Gandalf encouraged Aragorn to return to Gondor and claim his right as king.  Both voice their trust in each other on several occasions.  And that's what friendship is all about, isn't it?  They were frequently separated for long periods of time, but they trust each other implicitly.  I think this is an aspect of friendship that isn't thought of today.  Shouldn't we work towards helping our friends rather than looking at what they can do for us?

Reasons Why I Like School (Because I Really Need to Be Reminded Right Now...)

1. I enjoy learning; I really do.  Reading a book for a class is fun to me because it means that we're going to take it apart and discuss it.  The problem lies when I don't get anything out of the discussion as a result of a variety of reasons.
2. I like being with a group of people who also want to learn.  When you actually have a good group (like I have with my Early American Literature class at the moment), I feel useful and we actually get something done.  In the end, I think we all come out of it understanding the topic more thoroughly.
3. The professor has a certain amount of expertise in the subject you're learning.  As a result, being in a class taught by that person means that you get to hear an expert talk about their field of study.  The issues only begin when that person cannot effectively communicate that expertise in an understandable manner, which is disappointing because, and I said in #1, I enjoy learning.
4. I've had the opportunity to meet a variety of different people from all different backgrounds.  When we all come together to work in a group, that means everyone has something to contribute, even if it's simply a different perspective on the assignment.
5. I have some awesome people to call friends.  Between the groups that are or were in my classes--such as my Art Ed peeps--or the people who live in my building or from Getaway Weekend, I have some fun people to talk to and hang out with outside of class.
6. I have fun stuff to do outside of class.  No more hanging around at home for me.  If I tried, somebody would probably drag me out to do something fun.

Unfortunately, I must cut this short as I need to finish some things for the aforementioned Early American Literature class.   Don't stay up too late tonight, peeps.  There's places to go and people to see tomorrow.

Books, books, books...

So, I was reading my friend Krysti's blog (krystiatcollege.blogspot.com) and she posted this list of books that, according to the BBC, most people have only read six of the one hundred books on this list.  I'm putting the books I've read in red. I'll put the ones that I started but didn't finish in blue and the ones that I want to read in green.

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 Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

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

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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 - AA 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

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 Flaube

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB 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

So...that's 20 books that I've read, 8 that I've started but never finished for whatever reason, and 8 books that I want to read.  I think I need to get cracking... I really need to find a public library in this area... the reading selection at the school library stinks... it's all reference. I think we may be making a city excursion over the weekend, so we'll see how my reading goes from there.  At the moment, I'm working through The Hobbit again.  I've been wanting to re-read all of Tolkien's books... at least Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  I would like to read the Histories of Middle-Earth, too, if I ever have time.  Yay reading!