Book List

Here's how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

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 Canterbury Tales - Geoffery Chaucer
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
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

Sweet, books are awesome!

Dreamboat

"Hey dreamboat, your barnacle is here!"

Ha ha, sometimes reading old Ensign articles pays off! Just kidding, it always pays off, but this is probably the best thing I've heard all year! Someday, some guy is going to say this to me, and I will just have to marry him right there!

Back to school....

Yes, it's that time of year again when I bust out my Adam Sandler voice! We actually started class two weeks ago, and it's been kinda funny for people to ask me if I'm excited to start class, and I get to reply that we already started. Yeah, those bums over in the law school start tomorrow, so who knows what they've been getting up to these past two weeks! Just kidding, I love my lawyer buddies.

So Sophomore year as a dental student is looking pretty promising thus far. We spend every afternoon, if not more, hanging out in our awesome lab. We are currently in fixed prosthodontics (crowns and bridges), complete dentures, and operative (cavity preps). It is so much fun because after they lecture us for an hour or so, we get to spend the next three hours free in the lab cutting up teeth! Serious, it's like a big fat art class. Not really, because dentists deal in millimeters, and fractions of millimeters, so it's extremely precise with a lot of attention to detail. Still, I'm absolutely loving it! I'm like a big science/art/teeth geek these days. We have already done a couple of crown preps and cavity preps on extracted teeth, and I've got to say that I'm actually starting to feel a bit like a real dentist!

So our labs are balanced out by a whole crap-load of lecture time. We are in pathology, microbiology, growth and development, pulp biology, and periodontics on top of all our lab time. It's a little crazy. However, we have some pretty entertaining professors, especially in our micro class. Thanks to one of them, I will never look at yogurt the same again. Also, we did manage to learn all about cricket from one of the professors who is from Tazmania (Australia). I got to say, there are gross little 'gee whiz' facts I pick up from that class.

Well anyways, that is my brief little update. Unfortunately, it's getting late, and 6 am comes much sooner than you would think!

Just for fun

Okay guys, unfortunately I left my camera cord in Omaha, so I will not be uploading any pictures of me.  Oh well.  You'll just have to wait for that later!

So I got done with finals, and left that afternoon to fly out to Utah.  It was exciting to see the fam, but I got to say, packing and preparing to leave your home unoccupied for about a month is stressful.  I think that my future trips to Utah will either be shorter, or more well planned.  Ha ha.  So um how exactly do you pay utilities from two states away?  Anyways...

Well Harry Potter came out like the week after I got to Utah, so I made Blake and Lindsay go to it with me.  I was, however, disappointed that I didn't create some kind of Harry Potter costume because they actually tried to have a costume contest at the theater - and no one was even dressed up!  A bunch of non-fanatical Potter fans.  Lame.  I was disappointed in myself, but in my defense, none of the stores sell anything Harry Potter anymore.

I gotta say, I loved the movie.  They did an excellent job.  However, I am biased, because I think the Half Blood Prince was my favorite of the books.  I even managed to re-read the entire book before seeing the movie.  It was awesome.  I gotta say, I miss the days of buying Harry Potter books at midnight, then attempting to read the entire thing that night!  

Well let's see, I'm pretty much bored here in Cedar.  We did go to Disneyland, which was a BLAST!!  However, that place is always too busy when we go.  Someday I'm going to go on a random Tuesday in like March when everybody is in school or working.  Sweet.  Also, we went to the beach, but apparently there was some big storm in Tahiti (maybe?) that was creating huge swells at Newport beach.  This meant that we weren't allowed to go out very deep at the beach, and the lifeguards actually yelled at me a couple of times.  It made me pretty grumpy, because honestly I didn't think I was out that deep.  Besides, I get to the beach like 1 time a year, and it was ruined.  Lame.  Oh well, I still loved it!

Lazy river

Okay, so I have lots of other pictures, but I choose to start with these because they are the most recent, and they are my favorites!  Ha ha.

This weekend was pretty crazy.  Needless to say, I got almost no studying done.  Luckily, this week has been pretty laid-back with the 4th of July coming up.  Yay for national holidays!  Friday I went to a bachelorette party for a girl in my class, and it ended up being great because I got to know a bunch of the other girls.  Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures, and I will have to wait until one of the other girls either posts theirs, or I beg them off someone!  I won't say much, but I will mention that there were penis-shaped straws involved!  Ha ha.  

The next morning I woke up to my friend inviting me to meet at the institute, and to bring a swim suit.  Intrigued, I met up at the institute, and we proceeded to drive out into the middle of Nebraska.  On the drive we were surrounded by quaint little towns, and rows and rows of cornfields.  I felt like I was in an M. Knight Shamylan movie, and I kept waiting for the aliens, or creepy plant infections to attack us!  However, we arrived at our destination safely, and I discovered that the plan for the day was to float down the Platt river on tubes!

Okay, so before our adventure began, we discovered these wind boats!  How cool is that?  I felt like we were in the bayou, or something.  If you have ever seen The Rescuers, that is exactly what these reminded me of.  I kept looking for Evinrude, but all I found were mosquitos!

Oh yes, this is David showing off his back-country hillbilly skills.  Ha ha, just kidding.  However, I thought this picture was hilarious!

This is Rae, my new friend from the ward!  Too bad she is only in Omaha for the summer...

This is a group photo - obviously.  That is me, David, Chris, Rae, Bernadette, and I don't remember the little girl's name.  Poor David is surrounded by girls.  Ha ha.  I don't know if he was upset, or just plain overwhelmed.  It is hard to tell from his face.

So the river trip was fun, but the Platt river is really wide, really shallow, and really slow.  We did find some slightly faster stretches, which was exciting, but for the most part it was just a very relaxing way to spend the day!  Too bad I came home with a super awesome sunburn on my back and shoulders!

I finished up the day with some extremely delicious Chinese fare contributed by the village green dental association.  I even made some tasty fried rice!  After that was Transformers on the IMAX screen.  It's good to be in Omaha!

The time has come...

Hey guys!

Okay, I haven't posted on this blog in forever, so the time has come.  Plus, so much has happened in the last month.  Woah.  I don't even know what to tell you about.

Major thing - I moved to Omaha, Nebraska about three weeks ago.  Crazy, huh?  Well me and my dad loaded up everything I own and drove a moving truck cross country.  We started at 7 am, and made it into Omaha by about 10:00 pm on Friday.  That's a solid 15 hours on the road.  Yeah, we didn't stop much.  For those of you who don't know, the drive is over 900 miles, so we felt like we had made pretty good time!  So my dad was kind enough to drive me out, but he had to make it back to Cedar, so he actually flew out Saturday afternoon.  To make things every so slightly more interesting, I couldn't move into my new place until the next Tuesday, meaning that I got to camp out at a hotel for about three days.  It was nice because I got to totally relax since surviving the massive attack of finals, but it was also extremely boring.  Bleh.  I was glad to finally be able to move into my new place!

I would like to send special thanks to the awesome dental students, and some random guy driving by, that stopped to help me move into my place!  I spent most of that first day unpacking and putting together furniture.  I single-handedly built a table, four chairs, a queen-sized bed frame, a desk, and a bunch of bookshelves.  It was an adventure!  So I live in a one-bedroom townhouse which consists of a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, and unfinished basement.  I have turned it into a pretty sweet little place, and I took a couple of pictures just for you!

This is my kitchen.  This is a confusing picture, just because there is a giant mirror taking up the entire wall, which makes my kitchen look twice as big!  Seriously though, this kitchen is bigger than the one I used to share with Amanda, Mary-Ann, and Catherine!  Yep, this is also the table where I currently do all my studying.  Awesome!

This is me.  Yay.  Well, acutally this is me in my unfinished basement, complete with washer and dryer.  (Wow, I need to tell that story!)  Any ideas on what I should do with the basement?

Still in the basement!  I have set up a little study cave, and in an attempt to make it more appealing, have decorated the walls with beach-related posters.  Okay, these are actually pictures from old calenders that I have been collecting for years.

Finally, this is my living room.  That is not all of it, and these aren't the best pictures.  Oh well.  I am finally able to put my giant surfer poster in the front room!  I was recently told that I am obsessed with blue... you can't tell from this picture, but I do indeed have lots of blue decorating my place.

Well the last thing I'm going to put up for tonight is to let everyone know that I now have a room-mate named Michelle.  She is staying in my basement for now, just because she didn't really have a place to stay for the summer.  The situation is that she was in med school last year, but got sick a missed several weeks of her gross anatomy lab.  She is here for the summer retaking gross anatomy at Creighton.  Anyways, I just felt like I needed to help her out, especially since I have plenty of extra space, and I actually have a spare bed.  I don't know how permanent she is, because there were other girls in the ward offering to let her stay with them, and it's a little bit of a service project, because I'm currently not really charging her rent.  Any ideas on how I could ask her on this?

Well there is a lot else to tell, but I'm bored, and I don't have any more pictures to post.  So maybe next time!

Finals Week!!

Oh man, finals week is so freakin' awesome!  I was just thinking about past adventures involving this most wonderful of weeks, and I thought I would shout out to them.

I believe it was 2006-ish, back when I lived with Amanda, Catherine, and Maryann.  We were all having a study party in the living room, and Catherine was eating some weird Chinese noodles.  Well they had these funky swirly noodles that she didn't like, so instead she made a creation with them.  Thus was the creation of "Mr. Happy!"  Ha ha.  Catherine and I thought it was so flippin funny!  This was likely because of our sleep-deprived, over-studied brains.  Maryann, however, did not find it funny, and I believe there was a comment made about sticking Mr. Happy on Catherine's butt.  Woah, man, that is what happens when too many people study for too long!

Another fun one - we will all remember the day that Catherine forgot about her O-chem final until the night before, then stayed up all night long cramming.  Also, she ate some weird feta cheese, and took an unintentional 3-hour nap on the love sac.

My favorite was probably the year when I spent all day studying for a genetics final, and we went to Ho Ho's chinese to celebrate when I got done.  Subsequently I felt sick (probably from the super-high-quality food from Ho Ho's), so I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the first season of Desperate Housewives.  I got all kinds of addicted, and Amanda and I kept watching all night until we suddenly realized it was starting to get light outside.  Yeah, that's probably the closest I've ever been to an all-nighter!  Ha ha.  Good thing we had 1-o-clock church, not nine.

Okay, there are plenty more, but I'm afraid I need to return to this year's finals adventures!  Good luck all you poor souls studying for finals right now!