Sometimes, a girl just needs new shoes

[coffeesnob318]

Had to take Rachael (my car) shopping for new tires today. The back two were sadly out of shape. Thought we'd make it until the end of the month, but no.

I went out to the car this morning and found a flat tire. Great. At least she had the decency to wait until I got home last night to go flat. So I changed clothes (because if there's dirt, it will find me), got all the necessities out of the trunk, and proceeded to change the tire. I did everything right - loosened the lug nuts before jacking it up, got it up, tried to continue taking off the lug nuts and nothing. Wouldn't budge. Stood on the damn thing, and it still wouldn't budge. Then this random angel named Roger walked by and offered to "do it for me." While I snickered like a five-year-old, he changed the tire. I only felt slightly less girly when I had to tell him that he was trying to put the donut on backwards. Yep. Definitely time to hit the weight machines at the gym.

So Rachael got new shoes and all is well.

I leave you with "Look how little I, the one with the master's degree, have actually read," stolen from wingsonwind
College Board's 101 Greatest Works of Literature
bold those you have read, underline those you want to read (actually, consider all the ones not bolded underlined, because I'll probably eventually read all of them).


Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage *blech*
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan an Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - George Bergeron
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Comments

[sevinish.livejournal.com]

I really don't like Shakespeare...I'm usually like "huh?" But besides the Shakespeare and Oedipus Rex...I haven't read *any* of those books...when I know I should have. Thank you Coffee! Your list has now become my goal! :D

[coffeesnob.livejournal.com]

The ones I liked the most were Crime and Punishment, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, A Doll's House, and Animal Farm, if you'd like my two cents on where to start. ;)

[sevinish.livejournal.com]

ok! thanks :)

[karyn5101969.livejournal.com]

I've read 20 of those selected works. But then I took English Literature in Grade 12, and was considering majoring in English in College, so I did all the Lit courses the first time I went back in the late 80's. Plus I've read a ton of other English authors not on the list that would've made the British "must read" list. Canadians follow a mostly British curriculum, with some Canadiam authors added in. It's why I absolutley despise Margaret Atwood. That woman can get me wishing I could slash my wrists in under a half hour when I have to read her stuff. She's soooo bloody depressing. It doesn't suck to live in Canada, so why does she insist on making it seem like life here is so damn bleak? Maybe her anti-depressants aren't working. She needs to sue her shrink for malpractice.

[coffeesnob.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's why I love Margaret Atwood. My outlook on men doesn't seem so grim comparatively.