Sunday Salon and Weekly Geekery

Thanks for all of the time management advice! I think I just hit bottom on Friday, and since then I’ve been much calmer. I think I’ve figured out a way to find a good balance, and I’m just going to remind myself that the next two years won’t determine my entire life. ;)

First, a short Sunday Salon. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t have any time to read this week (well, except for listening to The Last Juror as I fall asleep each night…), but then last night I felt a little bit of a cold coming on so rather than go to a party, I decided to stay in and read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It was pretty much as wonderful as I expected!!! There were a couple things that disappointed me, but I can’t talk about it without giving away key plot points, and I understand why Gaiman went with those events. I haven’t read The Jungle Book, which I bet would make the reading experience that much richer! But I think The Graveyard Book will be my new go-to when people ask where they should start with Gaiman…it’s written for an older audience than Coraline and I think it really captures what’s so wonderful about his writing.

Now on to Weekly Geeks! I’m not going to have time to go around and try to collect all 100 quotes, but I thought I’d post the ones I know in case it helps anyone. :) The challenge is to identify first lines from novels, fyi.

Call me Ishmael.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1984 by George Orwell

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I am an invisible man.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

124 was spiteful.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Mother died today.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

It was a pleasure to burn.

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

You better not never tell nobody but God.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”

Satanic Verses by

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith