Today is the day

Well, today is the day. I am meeting Emily to pick up the Harry Potter books. Em recorded her thoughts before starting The Hobbit, so I thought I would do the same.

The main reason I have avoided the whole Harry Potter thing, is because I almost always avoid anything that gets shoved down your throat by mass marketing schemes and makes people stand in line for hours or even days. I immediately get turned off by it. When you can't buy a bag of chips or a Slurpee without a picture of whatever is the new hot thing on it, it pisses me off. I know my money is adding to the profits of something I don't really care about. When I can't watch the news without 2 or 3 segments about whatever the new hot things is, it really, really pisses me off. I'm not amused or interested when they have a news reporter interviewing people who've been in line for 3 days for the opening of Ikea, or to buy an Iphone. When I know everything about this new hot thing, because I've been forced to listen in on endless conversations at work, or the grocery store....well I think you get the idea.

Classic example: American Idol. I don't think words can explain how much I truly, truly hate that show with every fibre of my being. I know I am in the minority here, but that is just fine with me. I won't go on about it, that would be a blog all it's own.

Some of you might be thinking I'm being a bit hypocritical here. And you're right. There are some things that come out that I do really like, and get a bit excited about. For instance, a new Spiderman, X Men or LOTR movie gets me pretty excited. I wouldn't stand in line for hours to see one, I usually wait for most of the hype to go down, and go when the theatres aren't so crowded. I don't need to be the first one to see it. There are a couple of exceptions. I have stood in line overnight for a couple of concerts, but I think that is different. You only get that one chance to see it, it's not something I could see anytime over a couple of months. And one time my friend, Annalyn, won tickets to a pre-screening of X Men III, I went with her. So I did get to see that movie a couple of days before anyone else, that was kind of cool.

Another smaller reason I avoided Harry Potter. Is because I try to avoid things that come in a series. I am the type that forces myself to finish out something, even if I don't care for it. Like I've never walked out or turned off a movie I don't like. I make myself watch the whole thing no matter how dreadful it is. So something that comes in a series, like Harry Potter, I just try to avoid altogether, because I don't want to get trapped into something. I avoid those TV shows too. The ones you can't just watch occasionally, but have to watch every single episode or you can't follow it. One exception, Lost. I do like Lost, but didn't start watching it until the first 2 seasons were already out on DVD. And I only started watching it because a couple we are friends with started watching it and highly recommended it. We tend to have the same taste in movies, books and TV, so I started watching it, and I love it. Thank you Andy and Brenna. I know some of the other shows are good, like 24 looks like it is probably a really good show. But I think it's now in it's 20th season, and there is just no way I'm going to start from the beginning.

So there it is. It's really not because Harry Potter is about wizards and things. Well, it kind of is, but that is only like 20% of the reason. And yes, I am aware there are wizards in LOTR. But kids going to a wizard school, just seems kind of dumb to me. If those books came out when I was like 12, I'm sure I would have really, really liked them. But I was in my 30's when they started coming out, I'm a different person now. Harry Potter just seemed to go on forever. It seemed like every couple of months another book was coming out and it just drove me crazy. I had to share a cubicle at work with women knitting Harry Potter scarves for them and their kids to wear to the release of the newest book or movie. That stuff drives me insane! I think 7 books in a series is a bit much. 4 should be the limit.

I promise Em, I will read it with an open mind, and try not to roll my eyes too much while I'm reading.

Would someone please just kill me now?

So, my sister Emily, sent me a challenge on her blog. If I read the Harry Potter books, she will read the Lord of the Rings books. If you would like to read her challenge, and the comments that ensued, you should visit her blog http://www.emily-lifeinaglasshouse.blogspot.com/. She titled it "The Gauntlet". The comments get pretty silly, and oh, so nerdy.

She and I have teased each other over the years. She is a Harry Potter fan, and I really want nothing to do with it. I am a Lord of the Rings fan (cause they rock!), and she wants nothing to do with that. I watched the first Harry Potter movie on HBO quite a few years back and thought it was really quite lame. I read the LOTR books for the first time in 7th grade, and have read them 3 or 4 times since. I am the only one in my family, besides my brother Dave, who likes the books, or the movies! In fact, a movie rating thing went around myspace a couple of months ago and everyone in my family did it. They all rated The Return of the King with like 1 star, but they all rated Pretty Woman with like 5 stars! So they like fairy tales about whores, but a fairy tale about a magic ring? No way! I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around that one.

She also put the challenge out there to anyone who hasn't read one of the series, or either of them, to pick one and join a team. My Harry Potter team is called The Harry Pot Pot's and her LOTR team is The Fro Baggs. So, if anyone wants to join my team, please do. I could use all the support I could get. I thought I could just breeze through life without knowing anything about Harry Potter. But, if she is willing to read the LOTR books, then I have to read the Harry Potter ones. No matter how much I don't want to, I have to. And I found out there are 7 of them? Are you kidding me? I thought there were 3 or 4. What have I gotten myself into?

How many have you read?

I borrowed this list from my sister Emily's blog. This is a list of 100 books that the National Endowment for the Arts put together. According to them the average American has read just 6 out of the 100. That is very sad indeed. If you are one of those that have read fewer than 6 of these books, then I suggest you pick some titles and get reading! I have read 59 of them, if anyone wants recommendations, just ask! If I were to put together my own list of books I think people should read, it would be a little different than the one below. There would be no Harry Potter (but hey, at least those books got people reading!), and there would be a few Kurt Vonnegut books on it. I probably will put together my own list of 20 or so books at a later time. I have highlighted in orange the books from the list that I have 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 Faulks
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 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
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 Flaubert
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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
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

I didn't count The Bible because I've only read parts of it. I am only counting books I've read from cover to cover.

Say hello to my little blog..............

Yep, I'm gonna do it. I'm starting a blog. Some of you are probably thinking "What??? But you don't have any kids! What could you possibly write about?" Well, my animals for one, and then there's my husband, Cam. And we do stuff, and I think things. Actually one of the main reasons for doing it is because I don't keep any kind of journal or diary or anything like that. And I am terrible at remembering dates of when things happened. (Note to self--Cam and I got married October 16, 2004) See! Now I can always use this as a reference if I forget.

So, stay tuned (or don't). I'm going to get some pictures and other stuff on it soon. Not tonight, it's a work night and I still have to make dinner and bottle some salsa and plum sauce Cam and I made last night.

By the way. The URL I chose is Vote Rydman. It's a joke Cam and I have, it just looks kind of weird all run together. You Simpsons fans should know what we are referring to "Vote Quimby!" And if you don't get the name of my blog, I suggest you go rent Scarface right now.