*Insert Rocky music here*

So the most excellent Moonrat has set herself a challenge to create a list of 100 books that will fill in the gaps of both classics and modern fiction. She’s given her self five years to do it, and given herself a 25% leeway.

Always excited by books, lists, and reasons to stay in bed on a Sunday morning compiling said lists, I jumped  on board.

This is the list of books I have set myself to read by December 31, 2014. There is a bit of everything on here, but the idea (for me) was to list books that I’d wanted to read but had put off, wanted to read because it would make me a little bit of a literary snob, and also include a lot of Australian books, as I am horrifyingly lacking in that area.

1. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
2. The Iliyad – Homer
3. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
4. The Power of One – Bryce Courtney
5. Ulysses – James Joyce
6. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
7. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
8. Animal Farm – George Orwell
9. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence
10. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
11. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
12. The Boat – Nam Le
13. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
14. Carpentaria – Alexis Wright
15. Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
16. Dirt Music – Tim Winton
17. Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
18. 1984 – George Orwell
19. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
20. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
21. Middlemarch – George Eliot
22. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
23. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
24. The White Earth – Andrew McGhan
25. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
26. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
27. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
28. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
29. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
30. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
31. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
32. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
33. Everything I Knew – Peter  Goldsworthy
34. Wanting – Richard Flannagan
35. A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Toltz
36. Schindlers Ark – Thomas Kennally
37. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
38. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
39. The Eye in the Door – Pat Barker
40. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
41. The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
42. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
43. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
44. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchel
45. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
46. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
47. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
48. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
49. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
50. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
51. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
52. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
53. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
54. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
55. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
56. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
57. The Monkeys Mask – Dorothy Porter
58. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
59. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
60. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
61. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
62. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
63. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
64. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
65. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
66. The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
67. Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
68. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
69. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
70. The Poisonwood Bible- Barbara Kingsolver
71. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
72. Watership Down – Richard Adams
73. One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey
74. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
75. The Good Earth – Pearl Buck
76. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
78. The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
79. Tbe Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
80. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
81. The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
82. March, Geraldine Brooks
83. The Thornbirds – Colleen McCullough
84. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami
85. Middlesex -Jeffrey Eugenides
86. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
87. The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende
88. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
89. The Secret Life of Bees  – Sue Monk Kidd
90. The Gathering – Anne Enright
91. Life & Times of Michael K – J M Coetzee
92. The Sea – John Banville
93. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
94. The Divine Comedy – Dante
95. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
96. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
97. Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
98. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
99. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
100. Breakfast at Tiffanys – Truman Capote

Reading that list again has made me exhausted and a little bit hungry. Wish me luck!

Writers groups and where to find them.

I’ve gotten addicted to another website…like I didn’t already have enough problems. This time however it is blipfm and crikey is it addictive. This is all of course the  fault of my co-president in all things important, Courtney who is cooler than all of us. While there are holes in the song choices (read: You Suck by The Murmurs) there are some unexpected finds (The Klaxons singing No Diggity, which instantly transported me into fits of delight)

I’ve been thinking about critique groups, and online ones in particular. Is anyone a member of one? This writing caper is such a lonely job, its just me sitting in front of Albert my laptop trying to make sense of the jumble on the page. I sometimes think that it would be easier if I had someone (or someones) who I could nut out plot problems and things. (That is my main problem, FYI – my characters are deeply amusing but don’t seem to want to do much. Arguably, that would be how you know they are mine). Are they a help? What about offline? Where do you even find them?

I still intend to expound my Richmond theory, even if it is “WHY EVERYONE GOES FOR RICHMOND EVEN IF THEY ARE THE SUCKIEST BUNCH OF SUCKS THAT EVER SUCKED AND COULDN’T HIT THE SIDE OF A BARN WITH A FOOTBALL.” Ahem. Let’s just say that it was disappointing, and next week we play Geelong which always ends well for us.***

***Well stuffed. I remember the exact moment I heard the score for that game in 2007 when we lost by 150K points. I said a rude word or twelve.

I still love you blog!

Ah blog. Poor neglected blog. I wish I could say I had been sucked into a whirlwind of writerly endeavour…but, I’ve been slack. And a little distracted, as those who put up with my twittering will know.

Tonight I opened a bunch of old MS files, and just gawked at them. I feel like I have temporarily lost my writing mojo, and I don’t know what to do about that yet.

Ooh Spicks and Specks is on!

…

…

Right, where was I? Right, so the writing, not so good and I don’t know what to do about that yet.

In happier news, I went to see Russell Brand at Hamer Hall on Friday night. Twas an excellent night, capped off by the fact that a) I watched about 37 girls try to get backstage after  the show and b) I have never seen such a mixed bag of an audience in my life. There were the cool people (like Rove McManus, whom I spotted and said to the Divine Miss Em “That bloke looks like Rove.” To which she replied. “That’s handy, it is Rove.”), the Emo looking people (including two who were Almost The White Stripes, and another person who looked like a transvestite hooker), the girls-who-wanted-to-sleep-with-Russell (of whom there were many – wouldn’t their mothers be proud of them?), and me, totally underdressed in jeans. Who’dve thought?

Last night I went with a bunch of work peeps to a trivia night at the Sherlock Holmes Inn around the corner. We ended up coming second (with a name like Trivia Newton John we were only destined for greatness), the highlight of which was me knowing the answer to the question “27 world capital cities start with which letter?”

I’ll give you a hint – all good things start with this letter. Anyway, when she read out the answer I pulled out the victory dance, only to have it curtailed by the stupid stitches in my armpit. Only I would be the girl who had to get her stitches replaced after a particularly energetic victory dance.

Which brings me to my next point – football is back tomorow night (huzzah), and soon I will expound my firmly held belief that EVERYONE IS A RICHMOND SUPPORTER, PEOPLE ARE JUST IN DENIAL. In the meantime, I think you should read this and wish that you had thought of it first.

Kung-fu strawberries make me happy.

Practically a victory.

I could tell you about how since rebooting my latest attempt at writing a novel I have been SO OVERCOME with inspiration that I haven’t had time to blog anything here.

I could tell you that. But I would be lying. I have, for the most part, slacked right off. But let’s not dwell on that.

The exciting news is that I had my first day back at university as a post-graduate student today.  Made me feel terribly old.  It took me back to my first week at La Trobe eight years ago, when I was seventeen, fresh off the plane from Tasmania, and all set to become Australia’s ambassador to Portugal (Like all my best ideas, I have no idea where this came from). Ah the memories.  Back  in those days I hadn’t even been to the uni bar, as opposed to later years when I was single handedly keeping them open.

Very nervous, but excited about the course. I haven’t used my brain for so long I’m fairly sure that the remaining brain cells that I have will die of shock.

And now, the good news. I had to do my hazard perception test today as a precursor to doing my actual drivers test at the end of April. Basically what happens is you sit in front of a computer, you watch a simulation and then you click the mouse when you think you need to turn/slow down/overtake.

At one stage, I recognised one of the streets as Beach Road in St Kilda. The following conversation ensued:

Briony: Hey it’s Beach Road! I recognise this!

Briony’s Brain: Ah, remember when you came down here and had margheritas with Rachel before the Damien Rice concert? That was fun.

Briony: Yeah, I need to give her a call, it’s been ages since I…oh bollocks.

Briony’s Brain: You just hit that old woman.

Briony: I don’t think I was supposed to do that.

[pause]

Briony (and Brain): Heh heh heh.

Briony’s Brain:  If they give you a license I’m bailing.

Briony: Shut up Brain.

I maintain that the old bird was a) jaywalking and b) waving her stick at me. Still, managing to pass the HPT despite mowing down of helpless old ladies = VICTORY.