#Susan Webb wardrobe

[missxspider]

This time of year the spiders come out to play...

#bdrpevent #bdrphalloween #bdrpwardrobe #Susan Webb wardrobe #tw: spiders #tw: bugs

[rorygilmoreguide]

Rory Gilmore Book List:

- [ ] 1984 by George Orwell

- [ ] The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

- [ ] Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

- [ ] The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

- [ ] An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

- [ ] Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

- [ ] Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

- [ ] Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

- [ ] Archidamian War by Donald Kagan

- [ ] The Art of Fiction by Henry James

- [ ] The Art of War by Sun Tzu

- [ ] As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

- [ ] Atonement by Ian McEwan

- [ ] Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

- [ ] The Awakening by Kate Chopin

- [ ] Babe by Dick King-Smith

- [ ] Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

- [ ] Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

- [ ] Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

- [ ] The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

- [ ] Beloved by Toni Morrison

- [ ] Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney

- [ ] The Bhagava Gita

- [ ] The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy

- [ ] Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

- [ ] A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy

- [ ] Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

- [ ] Brick Lane by Monica Ali

- [ ] Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner

- [ ] Candide by Voltaire

- [ ] The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer - well some of it

- [ ] Carrie by Stephen King

- [ ] Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

- [ ] The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

- [ ] Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

- [ ] The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

- [ ] Christine by Stephen King

- [ ] A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

- [ ] A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

- [ ] The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

- [ ] The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty - some

- [ ] The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

- [ ] A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

- [ ] Complete Novels by Dawn Powell

- [ ] The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

- [ ] Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker

- [ ] A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

- [ ] The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père

- [ ] Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac

- [ ] Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- [ ] The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

- [ ] The Crucible by Arthur Miller

- [ ] Cujo by Stephen King

- [ ] The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

- [ ] Daisy Miller by Henry James

- [ ] Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

- [ ] David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D

- [ ] David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

- [ ] The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown

- [ ] Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

- [ ] Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

- [ ] Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

- [ ] Deenie by Judy Blume

- [ ] The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

- [ ] The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

- [ ] The Divine Comedy by Dante

- [ ] The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

- [ ] Don Quijote by Cervantes

- [ ] Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv

- [ ] Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

- [ ] Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe - again some

- [ ] Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

- [ ] The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

- [ ] Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

- [ ] Eloise by Kay Thompson

- [ ] Emily the Strange by Roger Reger

- [ ] Emma by Jane Austen

- [ ] Empire Falls by Richard Russo

- [ ] Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol

- [ ] Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

- [ ] Ethics by Spinoza

- [ ] Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves

- [ ] Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

- [ ] Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

- [ ] Extravagance by Gary Krist

- [ ] Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

- [ ] Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore

- [ ] The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan

- [ ] Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser

- [ ] Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

- [ ] The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

- [ ] Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

- [ ] The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

- [ ] Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

- [ ] Fletch by Gregory McDonald

- [ ] Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

- [ ] The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

- [ ] The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

- [ ] Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - never finished

- [ ] Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

- [ ] Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

- [ ] Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

- [ ] Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

- [ ] George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg

- [ ] Gidget by Fredrick Kohner

- [ ] Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

- [ ] The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

- [ ] The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo

- [ ] The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – started and not finished

- [ ] Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky

- [ ] Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

- [ ] The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

- [ ] The Gospel According to Judy Bloom -  this isn’t a real book!

- [ ] The Graduate by Charles Webb

- [ ] The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

- [ ] The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

- [ ] Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

- [ ] The Group by Mary McCarthy

- [ ] Hamlet by William Shakespeare

- [ ] Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

- [ ] Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

- [ ] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

- [ ] Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

- [ ] Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

- [ ] Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare

- [ ] Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare

- [ ] Henry V by William Shakespeare

- [ ] High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

- [ ] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

- [ ] Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris

- [ ] The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

- [ ] House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr)

- [ ] The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

- [ ] How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

- [ ] How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss

- [ ] How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland

- [ ] Howl by Allen Gingsburg

- [ ] The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

- [ ] The Iliad by Homer

- [ ] I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres

- [ ] In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

- [ ] Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

- [ ] Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy

- [ ] It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton

- [ ] Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

- [ ] The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

- [ ] Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

- [ ] The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain

- [ ] The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

- [ ] Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

- [ ] The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

- [ ] The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

- [ ] Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence

- [ ] The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal

- [ ] Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

- [ ] The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

- [ ] Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

- [ ] Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

- [ ] Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

- [ ] Life of Pi by Yann Martel

- [ ] The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

- [ ] Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

- [ ] The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway

- [ ] The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

- [ ] Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

- [ ] Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

- [ ] Lord of the Flies by William Golding

- [ ] The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

- [ ] The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

- [ ] The Love Story by Erich Segal

- [ ] Macbeth by William Shakespeare

- [ ] Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

- [ ] The Manticore by Robertson Davies

- [ ] Marathon Man by William Goldman

- [ ] The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

- [ ] Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

- [ ] Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman

- [ ] Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

- [ ] The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

- [ ] Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken

- [ ] The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare

- [ ] The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

- [ ] Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

- [ ] The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

- [ ] Moby Dick by Herman Melville

- [ ] The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin

- [ ] Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor

- [ ] A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman

- [ ] Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

- [ ] A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars

- [ ] A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

- [ ] Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

- [ ] Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

- [ ] My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

- [ ] My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken

- [ ] My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest

- [ ] My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

- [ ] The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

- [ ] The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

- [ ] The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

- [ ] The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

- [ ] Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen

- [ ] New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

- [ ] The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay

- [ ] Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

- [ ] Night by Elie Wiesel

- [ ] Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

- [ ] The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan

- [ ] Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

- [ ] Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

- [ ] Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

- [ ] Old School by Tobias Wolff

- [ ] Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

- [ ] On the Road by Jack Kerouac

- [ ] One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

- [ ] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

- [ ] One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

- [ ] The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan

- [ ] Oracle Night by Paul Auster

- [ ] Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

- [ ] Othello by Shakespeare

- [ ] Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

- [ ] The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

- [ ] Out of Africa by Isac Dineson

- [ ] The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

- [ ] A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

- [ ] The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan

- [ ] The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

- [ ] Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

- [ ] The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

- [ ] Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington

- [ ] Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

- [ ] Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

- [ ] The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

- [ ] The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

- [ ] The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche

- [ ] The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

- [ ] Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

- [ ] Property by Valerie Martin

- [ ] Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon

- [ ] Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

- [ ] Quattrocento by James Mckean

- [ ] A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

- [ ] Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers

- [ ] The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

- [ ] The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

- [ ] Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

- [ ] Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

- [ ] Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

[of--starlight]

“Does that make sense?”

Name: Tama Li-Petrov Faceclaim: Jessie Mei Li  Pronouns: she/her Birthday: Nov. 29, but does not know the year she was born!! (scorpio rising, pisces moon tho) Sexuality: Bisexual  Occupation: witch who lives on the outskirts of town and is open for spell business

Biography

Three things that Tama Li-Petrov does not know:

Her arrival: Six years ago, Tama Li-Petrov woke up from a nightmare (she cannot remember what it was about, except she was running and running and running) in a little cottage she had never seen before. She stood up and found a cauldron on the hearth, walls covered with full bookshelves, and two cats sleeping at the foot of her bed. All the clothes in the wardrobe fit her exactly and all of it was to her taste. Though the backyard was overgrown, the food in the fridge was fresh. She stepped outside and the night had no moon, but above her was a sky full of stars. 

Her age: After collecting herself, she realized though she knew her birthday — and the fact she was a Sagittarius Sun, Pisces Moon, and Scorpio Rising — she had not a clue what year she was actually born. She knew the name of the town, somehow, and what year it was, but she had no idea where she fit in linearly with the town’s story. An outsider she was doomed to be, it appeared, not part of the narrative, always on the edge. For all the stars she can read, her past is just darkness that she cannot comprehend. 

Her home, her family, and if she ever had them: She believes she must have had them. She must have, for this gnawing ache in the pit of her heart could not be for anyone else. For the most part, she is content, and yet some nights she gazes out to the stars and thinks about how small she feels when she cannot remember the people she once knew. Do they miss her? Do they exist? They must, they must, they must. 

Three things that Tama Li-Petrov does know:

Her name: Tama is not her actual first name (she keeps that close to her chest, a secret, a riddle she is determined to solve, one that she is certain will help her find her past), but it is the name she chose for herself. Something in her memory tells her it means darkness, and for one whose past is nothingness, she finds comfort in that name. 

The stars and the stories they tell: When she looks to the stars, she knows things. She learns things. They tell her stories about this town and the people in it. She can collect reagents and cast spells, but it is the stars and their whispers that capture her heart the most. 

That she is not as lonely as she once was: The first year in Swynlake was hard. She had to figure out who she was when she had nothing to go off. She had to figure out who these people were and what they wanted. The stars helped her. They helped her remember that she is curious, that she is silly, that despite the overwhelming unknowns in her life, she believes in the goodness of people. They guided her to stranger who became acquaintances who became friends. She smiles wider these days and even though sometimes she feels like she does not belong — an odd girl plopped into a strange town without any recollection — when she sits at her usual table in Hatters and people greet her by name, she feels like the town itself is hugging her and for a moment, she wonders if the past is something she should simply forget. 

✓ Imaginative, curious, passionate

✖ Wishy-washy, timid, pretentious 

Character Suggestions

Half-Chinese

Current Relationships

Monica Chino (friend, and also crush) Aurora Rosewood (friend) Terence Sparrowman (friend) Hera Alexander (friend, and also crush) Lou Bonfamille (one-sided crush)  Mei Qin (friend) Tiana Truitt (friend) James Hawkins (friend) Ting-Ting Qin (friend) Howl Pendragon (friend) Reza Kasraoui-Müller (friend, and also crush) Susan Webb (friend) Jessica Rabbit (friend) Jun Moon (friend, and also crush)

Possible Relationships

None 

Magical Abilities

Sorceress — Divination Speciality, specifically astromancy: By using the stars, she is able to know certain information about people and places, specifically the general “flow” of their stories. This is not something she knows off the bat, but instead needs to do big rituals by starlight in order to figure out. If you come to her for an appointment during the day, she will conjure little stars and play around with them to figure out your general path. This is definitely less powerful than a full starlight ritual: think of it like a tarot reading, whereas with the whole-ass ritual she’s definitely OP. 

#did NOT do all the flings lmfao #maybe seperately #bdrptask

[anomalietwelve]

Rory Gimore Reading Challenge

I put it there has a reminder to myself that I want to read more (so much more). The public library will be more accessible to me when I am going to be where I’m moving this summer, so, no excuses. Even if I should really work on my art more than on my reading. Would be nice if it could help me feel less... inadequate. Somehow. Just a little.

1984 by George Orwell

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Archidamian War by Donald Kagan

The Art of Fiction by Henry James

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Babe by Dick King-Smith

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – read – June 2010

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney

The Bhagavad Gita

The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy

Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner

Candide by Voltaire – read – June 2010

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

Carrie by Stephen King

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger – read

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

Christine by Stephen King

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

Complete Novels by Dawn Powell

The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père

Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Cujo by Stephen King

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Deenie by Judy Blume

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

Eloise by Kay Thompson

Emily the Strange by Roger Reger

Emma by Jane Austen

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethics by Spinoza

Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extravagance by Gary Krist

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore

The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan

Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)

Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

Fletch by Gregory McDonald

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg

Gidget by Fredrick Kohner

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

The Gospel According to Judy Bloom

The Graduate by Charles Webb

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – read

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Group by Mary McCarthy

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (TBR)

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (TBR)

Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare

Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare

Henry V by William Shakespeare

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris

The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr)

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss

How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland

Howl by Allen Gingsburg

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

The Iliad by Homer

I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy

It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 

Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway

The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – on my book pile

Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Love Story by Erich Segal

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

Marathon Man by William Goldman

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken

The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin

Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor

A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman

Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken

My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen

New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Night by Elie Wiesel

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan

Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan

Oracle Night by Paul Auster

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Othello by Shakespeare

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

Out of Africa by Isac Dineson

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Property by Valerie Martin

Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Quattrocento by James Mckean

A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier – read

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman

The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)

R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton

Rita Hayworth by Stephen King

Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert

Roman Fever by Edith Wharton

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi

Sanctuary by William Faulkner

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman

Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Several Biographies of Winston Churchill

Sexus by Henry Miller

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Shane by Jack Shaefer

The Shining by Stephen King

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton

Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore

The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos

The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

Songbook by Nick Hornby

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams

Stuart Little by E. B. White

Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett

Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

Time and Again by Jack Finney

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Unless by Carol Shields

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – read

Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker

What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles

What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh 

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Konde

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace 

Wild by Cheryl Strand

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

#Rory Gilmore #Gilmore girls #rory gilmore reading challenge #gilmore girls reading challenge #books #reading #to read

[halfwayinlight]

This is a collection of books mentioned or read on Gilmore Girls, minus travel and cooking books. Bold the ones you have read.

I italicized ones I’ve read part of

1984 by George Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank Archidamian War by Donald Kagan The Art of Fiction by Henry James The Art of War by Sun Tzu As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Atonement by Ian McEwan Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy The Awakening by Kate Chopin Babe by Dick King-Smith Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie Bel Canto by Ann Patchett The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Beloved by Toni Morrison Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney The Bhagava Gita The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brick Lane by Monica Ali Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner Candide by Voltaire The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer Carrie by Stephen King Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman Christine by Stephen King A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Complete Novels by Dawn Powell The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber The Crucible by Arthur Miller Cujo by Stephen King The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Daisy Miller by Henry James Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D David Copperfield by Charles Dickens The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Deenie by Judy Blume The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx The Divine Comedy by Dante The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells Don Quijote by Cervantes Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn Eloise by Kay Thompson Emily the Strange by Roger Reger Emma by Jane Austen Empire Falls by Richard Russo Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Ethics by Spinoza Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer Extravagance by Gary Krist Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce Fletch by Gregory McDonald Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Gender Trouble by Judith Butler George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg Gidget by Fredrick Kohner Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford The Gospel According to Judy Bloom The Graduate by Charles Webb The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Group by Mary McCarthy Hamlet by William Shakespeare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare Henry V by William Shakespeare High Fidelity by Nick Hornby The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland Howl by Allen Gingsburg The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo The Iliad by Homer I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken Life of Pi by Yann Martel The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold The Love Story by Erich Segal Macbeth by William Shakespeare Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Manticore by Robertson Davies Marathon Man by William Goldman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides The Miracle Worker by William Gibson Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Night by Elie Wiesel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Old School by Tobias Wolff Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens On the Road by Jack Kerouac One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan Oracle Night by Paul Auster Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Othello by Shakespeare Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan Out of Africa by Isac Dineson The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton A Passage to India by E.M. Forster The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Peyton Place by Grace Metalious The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Property by Valerie Martin Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Quattrocento by James Mckean A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton Rita Hayworth by Stephen King Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert Roman Fever by Edith Wharton Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf A Room with a View by E. M. Forster Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi Sanctuary by William Faulkner Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen A Separate Peace by John Knowles Several Biographies of Winston Churchill Sexus by Henry Miller Shane by Jack Shaefer The Shining by Stephen King Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut Small Island by Andrea Levy Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker Songbook by Nick Hornby The Sonnets by William Shakespeare Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sophie’s Choice by William Styron The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach The Story of My Life by Helen Keller A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams Stuart Little by E. B. White Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry Time and Again by Jack Finney The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Trial by Franz Kafka The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Ulysses by James Joyce The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Unless by Carol Shields Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett Walden by Henry David Thoreau Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

#bella reads

[ksfd89]

Rory Gilmore’s Reading List

This is a collection of books mentioned or read on Gilmore Girls, minus travel and cooking books. Bold the ones you have read.

1984 by George Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank Archidamian War by Donald Kagan The Art of Fiction by Henry James The Art of War by Sun Tzu As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Atonement by Ian McEwan Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy The Awakening by Kate Chopin Babe by Dick King-Smith Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie Bel Canto by Ann Patchett The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Beloved by Toni Morrison Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney The Bhagava Gita The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brick Lane by Monica Ali Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner Candide by Voltaire The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer - well some of it Carrie by Stephen King Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman Christine by Stephen King A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty - some The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Complete Novels by Dawn Powell The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber The Crucible by Arthur Miller Cujo by Stephen King The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Daisy Miller by Henry James Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D David Copperfield by Charles Dickens The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Deenie by Judy Blume The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx The Divine Comedy by Dante The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells Don Quijote by Cervantes Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe - again some Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn Eloise by Kay Thompson Emily the Strange by Roger Reger Emma by Jane Austen Empire Falls by Richard Russo Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Ethics by Spinoza Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer Extravagance by Gary Krist Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce Fletch by Gregory McDonald Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - never finished Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Gender Trouble by Judith Butler George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg Gidget by Fredrick Kohner Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – started and not finished Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford The Gospel According to Judy Bloom -  this isn’t a real book! The Graduate by Charles Webb The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Group by Mary McCarthy Hamlet by William Shakespeare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare Henry V by William Shakespeare High Fidelity by Nick Hornby The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr) The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland Howl by Allen Gingsburg The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo The Iliad by Homer I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken Life of Pi by Yann Martel The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold The Love Story by Erich Segal Macbeth by William Shakespeare Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Manticore by Robertson Davies Marathon Man by William Goldman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides The Miracle Worker by William Gibson Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Night by Elie Wiesel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Old School by Tobias Wolff Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens On the Road by Jack Kerouac One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan Oracle Night by Paul Auster Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Othello by Shakespeare Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan Out of Africa by Isac Dineson The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton A Passage to India by E.M. Forster The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Peyton Place by Grace Metalious The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Property by Valerie Martin Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Quattrocento by James Mckean A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien  R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton Rita Hayworth by Stephen King Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert Roman Fever by Edith Wharton Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf A Room with a View by E. M. Forster Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi Sanctuary by William Faulkner Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen A Separate Peace by John Knowles Several Biographies of Winston Churchill Sexus by Henry Miller The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Shane by Jack Shaefer The Shining by Stephen King Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut Small Island by Andrea Levy Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker Songbook by Nick Hornby The Sonnets by William Shakespeare Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sophie’s Choice by William Styron The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach The Story of My Life by Helen Keller A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams Stuart Little by E. B. White Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry Time and Again by Jack Finney The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Trial by Franz Kafka The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Ulysses by James Joyce The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Unless by Carol Shields Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett Walden by Henry David Thoreau Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

#Gilmore Girls #rory gilmore #I've read lots of bits of these #like dorothy parker

[wreathedwith]

How Not To Be a Boy reaction post

I finished this book – Robert Webb’s memoir – last week and it’s a book very dear to me that I had been eagerly anticipating. My thoughts are in chronological order below. Full spoilers for the whole text, hence the read more link (also for reasons of length). If you’ve also read this book and/or this post, please let me know your thoughts!

Here’s the wardrobe that never yielded to Narnia no matter how faithfully I reached for the cold air.

Lovely.

Tall, Welsh and handsome, the presenter Steve Jones…

Apparently this is a key aspect to note of RW’s Flashdance experience.

And after everyone has left and Abbie has gone to bed, I’ll sit in our little garden and drink another two bottles of red wine and smoke about thirty Marlboro Lights. Tomorrow I’ll do something similar – but in the pub in the middle of the day. This behaviour won’t change when our daughter is born, and the moment will come when Abbie will tell me about these months and say as she looks at me steadily: ‘You let me down.’

These parts, mostly come back to later, are very tough reads – it’s sad to think about RW letting his wife down, and there’s more catharsis in the overcoming than the (partial) repeating of his childhood. It’s not so unusual to find searingly honest memoirs, but unlike most of the rest of the book RW doesn’t have time’s distance, substituted names or the death of those involved to fall back on here – he’s being very honest about something quite recent and similar to his current life, even ongoing. On the other hand, a narrative ending where everything was perfect would have seemed trite and not rung true.

15: You sound quite posh. 43: Ah yes. Well, that was your idea. You want to sound like Stephen Fry, don’t you? 15: What’s wrong with that? 43: Nothing. I mean it’s a bit – 15: Look, I just don’t want to sound like fucking Dad, all right? I want to be the opposite of Dad.

Self-evidently this ‘exchange’ says quite a bit about class, emulating heroes and RW’s relationship with his father in under 50 words.

‘Quiet boy’, ‘painfully shy’, ‘you never know he’s there’: these are some of the phrases I catch grown-ups using when they talk about me. But not here, not in the car with Mum.

I found this extremely affecting. It made me think about moments carved out when you feel safe when you generally don’t, being told you’re quiet, time craved alone with parent(s) without siblings, and my own mum of course.

(Shyness: see also: ‘He’s just very shy,’ explains my embarrassed mum. I hear that word a lot. ‘Shy’ is my defining characteristic. Everyone tells me I’m shy so I must be.)

I take a more cautious approach to the outdoor life and I don’t do it with other children. Unless, of course, you count the Guy-Buys. The Guy-Buys are my imaginary gang of friends. I am the Captain of the Guy-Buys, obviously, and they are my twelve – yes, twelve, like the apostles – men.

See also Would I Lie to You?, Series 5 Episode 2.

But mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts… Expectant mothers who know the foetus is male are more likely to report foetal movement as ‘violent’. So the odds are that Huckleberry, compared to India, is expected to be more independent, more aggressive, more outward-facing and less interested in personal relationships since before he was born. With the best will in the world, bunging him a Barbie when he’s five years old isn’t really going to cut it

This is a fair point, but how do we stop doing this? (It’s fine – I didn’t expect this book to provide me with those sort of answers.) Any unconscious biases are difficult to overcome, but I suppose being more aware of them is a start.

Susan and Lucy in grief for their dead king, the great lion; Charlie, eking out his year-long ration of Wonka Bar; Emil, alone on a train (before he meets his detectives), pricking his finger on the safety pin; the Doctor, losing his mind on Castrovalva; his companion Tegan, longing for home; Luke Skywalker, looking for adventure in a twin sunset – together with Mum or alone in my bedroom, stories were a way to reach distant places. But also, and without my noticing, a way to reach distant people. That’s where I really caught a break. I don’t mean I suddenly had miraculous powers of empathy; I just mean that empathy had a chance.

No note, just appreciation.

Roger has a Commodore VIC-20 which, technically speaking, has a much smaller memory than my 48K Spectrum, but does have the advantage of actually looking like a computer. Still, I’ve grown to love my ‘Speccy’ and treat it with almost religious respect. After each session with Horace Goes Skiing, Jetpack or The Way of the Exploding Fist, I carefully put the Spectrum back in the box that first revealed itself to me under the wrapping paper last Christmas Day.

Gamer chat! (Sadly I think this is it all for the whole book.) RW has also talked about playing arcade games on family holidays to Skegness on S2E6 of Go 8 Bit.

I like it when he calls me ‘Rob’ as he used to at Coningsby Juniors. It’s strictly ‘Webb’ and ‘Baxter’ on the school bus.

Why did (does) this happen even at a mixed sex grammar school. And the girls don’t get it at all? Society is weird. (That’s one way to put the theme of this book, broadly.)

‘What do you want to be when you grow up then, boy?’ he asks. I do the usual. ‘Computers.’ It’s the fastest way to close down this sensitive line of enquiry. Nobody over twenty has the faintest idea what a job involving computers could possibly mean, so it works well.

This is funny and, I would assume, no longer work.

I say, ‘I was always Cowley. Roger Baxter and Matthew Tellis took it in turns to be Bodie or Doyle.’ David Mitchell puts his pint down in surprise.

FUCKING FINALLY, like 33% in, Jesus Christ RW. (I know he doesn’t really fit in for the most part, but what RW does say about DM is completely lovely, so I’m happy enough.)

(DM first mentioned RW 19% of the way into Back Story.)

I say, ‘I was always Cowley. Roger Baxter and Matthew Tellis took it in turns to be Bodie or Doyle.’ David Mitchell puts his pint down in surprise. ‘How come you always got to be Cowley?’ ‘Well, they – hang on, what do you mean, got to be Cowley. No one wanted to be Cowley.’ ‘What are you talking about? Cowley was in charge. Cowley gave the orders.’ ‘What, so at your school everyone wanted to be Cowley?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Seriously? You were all queuing up to be Cowley?’ ‘I don’t remember a queue, but yes, essentially.’ He takes the drag on a cigarette I just gave him. ‘To be fair,’ he says, ‘we were quite weird, our little gang. It’s probably more normal to want to be the macho men.’

I mean they had fairly different upbringings, despite (I would assume) the general assumption of them being broadly similar, and that is made amusingly clear.

David will spend his twenties being the only example I’ve ever known of a successful social smoker. He bums a couple of fags in the pub (good luck with that, American readers) and then doesn’t dream of having another the following morning. I don’t mind this because every now and again he’ll turn up with a pack of ten and hand them over as a contribution to an ongoing tobacco kitty where I keep the change.

Whatever this is just adorable.

It’s more that we just chat while keeping half an eye out for a funny idea creeping up on us. They always do – they wander in from the edges of sight. If you look straight at them, they disappear, like faint stars. You wait until they’re in plain view before stealthily picking up a pen. Then you’ve got them. Talking about TV is typical of us on these occasions, but talking about school is not – we’re in our mid-twenties and too young to find children interesting.

Mid-twenties *sucks in a deep breath*. An insight into the Process here. A focus on TV, often daytime TV specifically, is clear to any watcher of That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Many years later I’ll be talking to a friend (not David, but another comedy writer) who puzzlingly seems to have moved from one terraced house to an almost identical one in a slightly different part of Brixton. He tells me that, in the last place, the neighbours started using his bins for their overflowing rubbish. I ask him, ‘What did you say?’ ‘Oh God, I didn’t say anything,’ he replies. ‘No, we decided it would be easier to move house.’ This makes me laugh for about three minutes. I know he’s joking, but mainly I’m enjoying the idea that I’m not the only grown man who will go to incredible lengths to avoid an awkward conversation.

*Me, scrolling through my BritCom rolodex* who is this

One of QEGS’ battier traditions is the Eisteddfod

I have NEVER heard of a non-Welsh school (I went to a Welsh school) putting on an Eisteddfod; please get in touch if you can give me further evidence to the contrary.

It becomes obvious that once you’ve got their attention, you can wait. And you can make them wait with you. In fact, the longer you make them wait for ‘Indeed, sir’, the bigger the laugh will be when you say it. Confusingly, if you wait too long, they won’t laugh at all. So I start to listen to the audience. I start to time it.

I’ve read (*cough*) quite a lot of books about comedians’ early lives, and something like this generally happens in them, but I think RW does write about it particularly well.

Suddenly I have a name for that feeling I had in Dad’s car on the way back from the Flashdance fireworks. That feeling, the one that made me blush, was an overwhelming desire to be famous.

I mean, I can’t believe there is a linear through-time Flashdance narrative in this book. Amazing.

So I’ll be famous. And funny writing and acting is what I’ll be famous for. That will help because famous people are safe. Famous people don’t have problems. And they can probably have the radiator on as often as they like. And maybe girls like them.

We move into self-psychologising here quite thoroughly, but I will choose to take this as pretty insightful.

The only person I want to kiss, and to kiss her would make my decade, is Tiffany Rampling, friend of Zelda and the younger sister of my future dream-girl Tess Rampling. Yes, that’s right. One day I will adore Tess and get nowhere. But only after two years of getting nowhere with her sister Tiffany.

‘I only went with her 'cos she looks like you. My god!’

(This is an extremely esoteric observation, but I was slightly disappointed there were no Pulp references within the various music mentioned in this book. I just have to accept RW is a Suede (actually mostly Prince) man.)

I’m in my bedroom, reading in bed. It’s a pity that the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa, has chosen to part company with the Doctor, staying behind to help with the space leper colony. But then, I think, as I remove the last of my clothing, that’s Nyssa for you: beautiful and kind-hearted. I put the book to one side, and think about beautiful Nyssa and how, on the space leper colony, she wouldn’t have anyone to help her if, for example, she somehow got a splinter in her vagina…

…HANG ON, SOMETHING VERY ALARMING BUT FANTASTIC IS HAPPENING! I SHOULD STOP THIS – IT’S MAKING ME GOING TO DO A WEE! NO! IT’S NOT A WEE, IT’S SOMETHING ELSE! IT’S . . . OH MY FUCKING LORD! And thus it was that the would-be Doogie Howser MD of space cunnilingus had his first orgasm.

Ahhhhh hahahaahaha.

Also: points (?) for first getting off to getting a woman off, albeit mostly through the ego-boosting prism of being very good at it.

Also: this is a fandom-related wank, right? This is a first fandom wank. I’m sticking a flag in this for fandom.

‘You’re born naked and the rest is drag.’ RuPaul

You think this book wasn’t going to have a RuPaul quote? Pfft.

‘I’m a man, he says!’ I almost yell at Mum. ‘Only a boy would need to say so.’ It’s a line I’ve been waiting to try out for days.

Ah the performative cleverness of teenagehood *stares back through the mists of time*.

‘I mean, they’re not exactly The Beatles, are they?’ she says, cheerfully. I scowl at the TV and say in a slow pantomime of controlled rage, ‘Not everyone . . . can be . . . the sodding . . . Beatles.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘Soz, Rob,’ she teases. I blink at her queenily and then do a reluctant grin.

Nice use of the adverb ‘queenily’.

And I’ve just noticed that wanting to be famous just for the sake of becoming famous makes you look like a massive twat. I’ll have to come up with a better reason. I’ll have to start saying that fame is an unfortunate side effect of my, I dunno . . . art.

The boy matures. (A bit.)

So what is it about this ‘Will’?

I’ll level with you: it’s when Will turns up the ‘Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.’ message starts coming up on my Kindle highlights.

I adore how RW has written Will, and how he has written Will as a first love. We know exactly how RW sees Will (rather than who Will actually is), we feel his awed lust and love. Again, RW doesn’t hold back and it does pay off. I fell in love with Will (well, at least got a bit of a crush on) because I’m reading RW’s point of view of him, and RW is in love with Will, and that is the result of a successful clearly-rendered memoir’s voice.

He’s about the same height and build as me. His hair is darker and he can grow it longer… Will can get his to just wavily flop either side of his thin-framed glasses.

This reminds me of someone else a bit

More Will just because I can:

He’s skinny like me but his collarbones travel just that little bit further before they reach his shoulders, his muscles are slightly more defined, his knees just a bit less knobbly, his legs . . . But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I was talking about his attitude, right? Not his body. It will be instructive that, when introducing you to my new Best Friend, the first thing I want to do is undress him. Probably because I would spend the next five years trying to do exactly that. He’s cool… His clothes just fit. It’s mesmerising. They cling and swing around him like adoring fans. Still, as I say, I just like his attitude. Also, his legs.

I’m not seriously suggesting anything here, but I am reminded – when RW is talking about how completely cool Will is – of the part of Back Story where DM meets RW for the first time.

The second thing I noticed about Robert Webb was his earring… the first thing was his long hair – by which I mean the fact that it was long. I don’t want to accidentally sound romantic: ‘As soon as he walked in I was dazzled by the sheen of his golden locks.’ No, I noticed he had long hair which, I’m sure he’ll mind me saying, at that point in his life was a touch mullety. He looked like a bit of a rebel, a bit cool, left-wing, metrosexual.

The SDP/Liberal Alliance poster in the window of Mr and Mrs Slater’s Horncastle home in 1987 has not gone unnoticed. Neither has the fact that Mum is a Labour supporter or that almost everyone who makes me laugh on TV is some kind of leftie. Politics is suddenly an area where secret hopes (university, being a funny actor) neatly overlap with a general wish to side with Mum against the Men. The facts may be that the Parliamentary Labour Party is composed almost entirely of men and that Mrs Thatcher is a woman, but these facts are to be overlooked for the time being. Where Mum agrees with Mrs Slater and both agree with Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood . . . and where all four disagree with Derek, Dad, Norman Tebbit and Bernard Manning . . . well, let’s just say it will be a long time before I feel the need to read a manifesto. I’m Labour. That’s it.

Politics! This makes RW’s recent-ish leaving of the Labour party seem an even Bigger Deal.

For example, Will does a pleasingly smarmy impression of Education Secretary Kenneth Baker (whom I devastatingly rename Kenneth Faker – oomph! Eat that, Tories!) and I play a contemptuous interviewer which owes a great deal to other people’s impressions of Jeremy Paxman.

This made me laugh in a very ‘self-aware of your teenage self’ sort of way.

Sometimes when I make Will laugh, he throws his head back and I stare at the symmetry of his jaw. I like to think he doesn’t notice.

*internal screaming*

I have three CDs: Revolutions by Jean-Michel Jarre, Kick by INXS and Lovesexy by Prince. All read by a laser. Cool.

I mean, really.

I muster what I imagine to be a knowing smirk, as if Han Solo is big enough to take another of Princess Leia’s witty put-downs.

Oh yeah, and there’s a Star Wars linear thread throughout AND it has a really fucking amazing pay-off at the end! RW may only keep to one massive fuck-off celeb story, but it’s a good one.

The Han Solo thing is really not working for me any more. Lucy doesn’t go out with Han Solo: she goes out with a spotty twenty-year-old called Dean who is often in fights and can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure. Surely everyone but me can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure. Obviously, Will has a guitar and can play the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure.

The… History Boys… crossover?

I’m counting the hours with dread. Will is nothing if not frank, and I know that when he Does It With Daisy, I will be literally the third to know... How does he get to touch her at all? How does she get to touch him at all? One morning before registration, he wanders round to Form 5S and announces that he’s going to see Prince at Wembley. That is, he’s going with Daisy, Daisy’s dad and some of Daisy’s friends. To London. To see Prince. Because he’s going out with Daisy. I am not invited. Why would I be? No wonder I yearn for a time long ago in a galaxy far away. This galaxy obviously hates me. I start writing poetry.

arghhh this is so painful (and, of course, essentially universal)

Reader, I suspect you think you want a piece of that, but trust me you don’t. I’ve been as candid as my ego allows but I have to draw the line somewhere. No teenage poetry. Not even a Best Of.

hahahahaaaa

‘OK, so . . . you know that thing when you’re trying to get Cresta Run to load on a Spectrum and it doesn’t work because you’ve set the volume on the tape too . . . No.’

OK, I was wrong about the last mention of gaming thing.

I think I was drawn to [Michael Jackson] partly because of his stolen childhood, which manifested as childishness. It turns out that some dads do hit famous children… And what he reminded me of in 1987, when he released Bad, was a painfully shy child playing at being tough. If you want to see a real-life Guy-Buy, have a look at that album cover. There he is with his silly costume and unlikely bravado. And that terrible fear very nearly hidden in make-believe… I’ve never seen a performance like it... It’s so beautiful. The way he moves around that stage, you’d have to be mad to take your eyes off him for an instant. It’s also a hell of a song, despite, or perhaps because of, the same weird boy/man disconnect – he’s written a song about contested paternity when the last thing you can imagine Michael Jackson doing is having sex. I like it that he might be a virgin. I also have to admit that I like the way he’s accidentally outperformed his older brothers and utterly eclipsed his violent father.

This whole section (being a fan, again) is wonderfully written.

And I find out something else too. Even though I think I’ve worked out how he does it, when I watch the whole thing again, it still looks like magic. Taking something to pieces doesn’t spoil the whole when you put it back together. You can still love the effortlessness even when you’ve noticed the effort. Not before time, I finally start reading books in the same way. Not just to enjoy what a writer did, but for the pleasure of figuring out how they did it.

I like this part too, although I do have some slightly more complicated thoughts on this. (This is the root of moving from reading to creative writing – the root in any skill from moving from a fan and consumer to creator as well – but if you love a piece of writing for non-literary reasons and you have a sinking feeling it would not stand up to the scrutiny of close analysis, it is tempting to leave it well alone. On the other hand, much of my personal joy in the consumption of something creative that I adore comes from relentlessly close analysis, as is self-evident from my long relationship with fandom and this ludicrously long blog post.)

I wait till no one else is in the Form room and ask Mrs Slater if it’s ridiculous for me to think of Cambridge.

This takes bravery as, of course, does the reapplication of himself and the getting-in-eventually, the going back to school for another year, rather than just going to another university, all from a 17, 18, 19 year old who had lost his mum. It says something about RW’s focussed desire to go to Cambridge in order to be a famous comedian (and he also cites some snobbery), but it’s also hugely impressive.

Will puts 50p in the jukebox. ‘Bobs, at some point you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re about as likely to have sex with Tess Rampling as I am with bloody . . . Trevor McDonald.’

A note: it’s interesting to see RW’s name change throughout this book according to the situation: Robert to his mother, Robbie to Mark, the little brother, Rob when he’s at university, ‘Bobs when Will’s being all casual and cool here, Bobbington when that outgoing Footlights president is being a bit of a dick… there are a lot of different names.

[Will] runs a careless hand through his hair in a way that makes me want to jump him right here and right now

*swoons*

‘Have you fingered her yet, then?’ enquires Pete through another gobful of crisps. ‘Honestly, Peter, don’t be so crude,’ Will replies, putting his brandy down and producing a soft-pack of Lucky Strike out of his black 501s. ‘Of course I’ve fingered her. She’s lovely.’

This is like, I don’t know, if the Inbetweeners interacted with their idea of a successful human being.

At home I listen to ‘Slow Love’ by Prince and think of Tess. I listen to ‘I’m Not in Love’ by 10cc and think of Will. It’s difficult to know which one to have a hopeless wank about first.

*Me, screaming through the void* It’s going to be OK Robert Webb! It’s all going to be OK!

I try to look on the bright side – at least the way I feel about Tess proves that I’m not gay. Rationally, I can see that being gay is fine, but it looks like gay men have to put up with a whole world of stupid nonsense that straighties with a one-off fixation get to ignore. And, if I’m honest, the way I lust after Will feels not only dangerous and exciting but also shameful and wrong. The Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia has done its work. It’s like I’m left with a closet homophobia – a Farage in the garage. Or, as I would have pronounced it at the time, a Farridge in the garridge.

There’s not loads of this chat in the book (and why necessarily should there be) but the reader gains some important internal feelings of teenage-RW context here.

[Diary extract] He [Will] hit me with it. He started talking about how he’s shagged Daisy on Friday night while watching a video of Krull.

The Krull detail is a beautiful one to be recorded for posterity.

-

I found out that Mum had cancer in early March, and three weeks later, I found out that she wasn’t going to survive it.

As RW has rightly said when doing interviews and other press for this book, the grief in this book is universal: everyone has lost someone. I’m not claiming I’m special. But not only as someone who left a comprehensive school in an isolated area to study English at a newer Oxbridge college you don’t hear so much from, but also as someone who lost their mum at a fairly young age (I was 22 – this is, to be noted, very much not the same as 17) to cancer on almost exactly as swift a timeline as RW’s mum, I had yearned for this book and I was emotionally steeling myself for this part of the text – after all, through RW’s structural choices (and from what I knew about RW already), we know it’s coming. We are exactly 50% of the way through the book and this profound loss is the heart of the book. Yes, I cried.

I’m remembering its implacable seriousness. The way the danger, the terror was unswervable, non-negotiable – this was going to hurt and there was nothing to be done and nowhere to hide.

-

Compared to the mad-cat-on-a-wall-of-death infatuations with Tiffany, Jill, Tess, Will, Marina and about three other girls and a boy that I haven’t troubled you with…

This intrigues me because of RW describing Will as a ‘one-off fixation’ earlier on (although that was written from the viewpoint of RW at a slightly younger age, and in the context of being worried about being gay). There’s also Sam, but he doesn’t come until university. It’s not just once, although he notes that the “Michael Portillo line” he uses later is true.

I’ve got an English exam in the morning, History on Thursday and Economics on Friday.

Perpetually surprised throughout this book over RW’s third A-level being Economics.

Two seventeen-year-old boys are holding hands in bed. One of them is Will; the other one has just stopped crying. Will is wondering how long this is going to take. It was likely that being best mates with someone whose mum has just died was going to involve some kind of emotional doobly-woobly, but he wasn’t expecting it here and now, at 5 a.m. in a double bed in a rented holiday house in Torquay. There again, there’s never a good time for this sort of thing. I feel an urge to get up and put some clothes on. But then – not so fast – because Will is holding my hand. He never holds my hand… I’m not thinking about this in bed. Instead, I’m thinking the thing that I usually think in the company of Will – ‘I wonder what Will is thinking?’ He shifts his weight slightly. ‘I didn’t hear Ralph come in. D’you think he’s sleeping on the beach again?’ Oh, OK – that’s that then. Gently, I let go of Will’s hand.

 Still, the emotional temperature is only just returning to normal and he leaves what he imagines to be a tactful pause before checking his watch with his now free hand. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to found a minor religion in his honour…

...It’s a hot summer and neither of us can be bothered any more with that extra bit of admin to do with special night clothes. Practical enough – and I guess there must be plenty of other male friends who would be happy to share a double bed naked. I just don’t know any. Something is clearly going on, although neither of us could quite say what. It’s unthinkable that Will is secretly gay or even secretly bisexual, but his curiosity – maybe his sympathy – allow him to be secretly something-or-other with me. And as for me, I don’t know what I am, but I know what I like, and what I like is Will. What happens exactly? I touch him; he doesn’t mind; I’m grateful. And repeat. It’s not exactly Torvill and Dean. A few years later, he touches me. I’m even more grateful. Frankly, the sex is pathetic. But the love . . . my goodness me. You don’t choose your first love. I was lucky with Will.

Whatever’s going on, it’s only the eye-catching headline of the real-life story of everyday teenagers titting around. We drive to Boston and walk into River Island, hearing En Vogue’s ‘Hold On’ playing through the speakers and suddenly notice we’re striding down parallel aisles to the beat. We get to the end of the shop, turn round and stride straight out again, like idiotic dudes. And all the rest – the hysterical argument about whether Oliver Reed was in Castaway or The Blue Lagoon, the underage piss-ups in fields before barn-dances, the joint love for all things Prince, Robin Williams, and Fry and Laurie, the competitive impressions of friends and teachers, the pound-a-pint games of pool, my attempts to teach him the moonwalk, his attempts to teach me the chords of A and D, the many splendid parties and the fun, the honest-to-God fun of it. And there he is, holding my hand in the dark because he’s friend enough and man enough.

The friendship will last. But soon, he’ll have a girlfriend, one he’ll be crazy about. The sense that he’s crossed the boundaries of his masculinity will catch up with him and he’ll become colder towards me for a while. And he’ll remember that he should care, as he currently does not care – now, in August 1990 – as he gets out of bed and saunters from the room towards the loo, that I am watching the lean, easy movement of his body in the breaking dawn light. As things are, he looks straight back at me with a tarty smirk as he goes through the door. In the window the closed drapes have begun to glow with the last day of the holiday. Gentle beams of light pierce the cracks and tears in the fabric as if a benign alien power were probing the room for signs of intelligent life. I notice the moment, and because I am seventeen, I notice myself noticing. I marvel that something so present will soon become real only in memory. This moment, a happy one, will vanish. But it will be there to be recreated another time, any time – just as I daily reconstruct the sound of my mother’s voice.

This is a ludicrous amount to quote in one chunk, but I won’t make much attempt at an apology because I think this is a beautiful passage that I found gentle and peaceful and cathartic and heart-skipping and it ends with RW, writing now, thinking back to something that happened but has not gone.

This gives me a windfall of £615 and I blow £500 of it on Chesney. It’s a sporty-looking two-tone blue coupé with a curvy back windscreen and a five-speed gearbox which belies its tiny engine. It beeps when you put it in reverse. I love it.

First car! Independence! (DM left home to go to Cambridge but he wasn’t escaping anything much and never learned to drive; RW learned to drive and bought a car with his mum’s life insurance policy and was desperate to leave home by the time he’d had to do a third year of sixth form – discuss.)

Carole, my mum’s top friend and increasingly one of my own, steps in with the offer of a lift, which becomes the offer of three lifts. We visit King’s College, then Robinson College and then finally she drives me to my interview – at Robinson College.

I can’t work out for sure from this book (I know no-one cares) whether RW applied to King’s and was pooled pre-interview or whether he just visited King’s and then ended up applying to Robinson.

(See later: I picked my Cambridge college – Robinson. They want AAB so I better bloody well pull my socks up.)

Robinson sends me an offer of a place if I get AAB. My second choice, Leeds, offers ABC.

Grade inflation – RW’s may have been a compassionate offer as he had to get AAA next year. Since the introduction of A*s at A-level the standard offer is A*A*A – A*AA. Leeds asks for AAA for their English Literature course these days.

Two men in grief, two men who can’t cook and don’t know how to work the washing machine, two men who don’t know how to talk to each other and who haven’t got the first clue about bringing up a child. One man who is still a boy, who thinks his exams are the most important thing in the universe, but who can’t or won’t do any work. One man who left school at fifteen, but goes along with the idea of education while finding it faintly ridiculous.

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don't try. You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare… The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair. Not as good for staring in, blue gas, too regular each bud, each yellow spike. At night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we're alike! You're life's all shattered into smithereens. Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

- Book Ends I, Tony Harrison

In my memory, she’s alive and well, not poor and old. Any year now, I might have to say something. Actually no, easier just to move house.

This is a nice callback.

 At the same time I rack my brain for a memory of Woodhall Spa ever having a launderette. Like the one in the Levi’s advert with the soundtrack of ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and that beautiful model taking his clothes off. No, don’t think about the model…

It’ll be fine. As long as he doesn’t know I’m still thinking about Nick Kamen in his boxer shorts, it’ll be fine.

(Good god.) Happily, we do get some resolution as to the concern over fears of the reaction towards the end of the book as well.

As Will was wearing black 501s earlier, I’ve now cast Nick Kamen as Will in my head in some sort of terrible conflation.

Accountancy, for crying out loud. To me, Will is destined to be an accountant the way Jay Gatsby was always going to end up selling pet insurance. But I suppose the way I see Will isn’t the way he sees himself…

This is what I mean by the fact that Will in the book is how RW, in love, sees him, not who he actually is.

I notice that there are rumours about me and Will which I do nothing to discourage. In fact, I start to cultivate a deliberate sexual ambiguity. In a common-room chat about Thelma & Louise, I casually mention that Brad Pitt is ‘obviously some beautiful model they’ve given a few lines to’ and my co-winkies seem to appreciate my bullshit insights into Hollywood while going a bit quiet at that use of the word ‘beautiful’. It doesn’t take much.

I enjoyed these descriptions of RW, frustrated at being left behind to do another year of sixth form, rebelling further by cultivating an ambiguous sexuality.

Prince Hal is either going to leap onto his horse in a single bound or carry on getting pissed with Falstaff. Luke is either going to leave Tatooine forever, or go to work as a rent boy in the Mos Eisley cantina.

Striking This Is It turn of phrase.

I’m currently under the impression that it’s all to do with irony and detachment. I think that whatever they say, clever people don’t mean it. I expect in the next hour to be in the exclusive company of people who would never dream of calling a spade a spade. The very idea! Surely, it’s all going to be rather camp.

I actually wouldn’t say this was an incorrect perception.

And by the time we pass Huntingdon, my accent is finally in line with the geography of England. It was a good four years ago that I started to say ‘carstle’ instead of ‘caastle’ and ‘ahp’ instead of ‘oop’. All the affectations are coming home, I think. To the place where they won’t be affectations any more. No more pretending.

More accent affectation. People still do this, because I know people at university who did.

So far I’ve learnt that every one of their parents is a teacher, academic or writer. All ten parents are seemingly all still married.

We get a big change in a short space of time in the book, which works well narratively, between RW being desperate to be different, and RW feeling very aware that he does not seamlessly fitting in. He both does and does not now desire to be different from the people he does not seamlessly fit in with.

See also:

I’ve just turned twenty. With my September birthday and my unmissable third-year sixth form, it feels like I’m two years late to the party and also two years under-prepared.

Again, this would have been to quite a reasonable extent not the experience of DM. (To be considered, DM also went, by contrast, to Cambridge’s oldest college.)

And:

I like the general chuckle. But something is wrong. I’ve taken off my jumper to reveal what was once a grey T-shirt but which last summer I cut into the shape of a grey vest. My longish hair has grown much faster at the back, so I look less like a foppish public schoolboy and more like a mullet-wielding footballer. The gold stud in my left ear that was daringly effeminate in Woodhall Spa now feels weirdly aggressive, as do my Doc Martens boots and the box of condoms visible from within the bedside cupboard, left artfully ajar. The summer spent painting all ninety-four of the Dower House window frames has, for the first time, given me some muscle definition in my arms and shoulders but . . . did I have to wear a vest? And why, next to the Laurel and Hardy poster, is there a page of A4 on which I’ve written ‘Je suis une Communiste’ in chunky hip hop writing? Why, within hours of arriving at Cambridge, did I make a sign that said ‘Je suis une Communiste’ in chunky hip hop writing and put it up on the wall?

Oh my god, Je suis une Communiste did make me laugh.

So I re-cross my legs while unobtrusively lighting a cigarette with the Zippo that Will gave me as a going-away present.

(pause for minor swoon over Will’s going away present here.)

It’s about this time that I give up reading. That’s to say, at the beginning of my English degree. So, naturally, this is also where the lying has to start in earnest. As an English student, reading books and writing essays about books should really be quite high up there in a time and motion study of how I spend my day. The trouble is, much as novels, plays and poems have previously been a solace and an inspiration, reading them is now my job. I used to be practically the only boy who loved reading: now I’m surrounded by them. Therefore: screw reading.

He’s putting this down to his pushing back, his rebellion, but it’s not exactly surprising – we know from following the book through, from RW’s teenage diaries, that he wanted to go to Cambridge to be in the Footlights and become a famous comedy writer/performer. Lots of similar autobiographical writings, including RW’s hero Stephen Fry, mention how the academic work they put in to get to Cambridge drops off at this point now they are able put in the hours with like-minded people on comedy writing and performing.

It takes a particular type of focus and effort to do this, however – because of its reputation, the student comedy scene at Cambridge in and of itself is competitive and it’s also one without guarantee of paid work at the end of it (generally, of course, through comedians’ memoirs we here about the successful ones – although Tristam Hunt’s done alright for himself) and the stress from not doing academic work (as RW mentions later) and the pressure to expend your greatest amount of effort on that is substantial.

At this point, Dr Weiss gave me a one-to-one ticking off so gentle it had the effect of encouraging me to do even less. ‘Robert, it’s possible that you could secure a 2:1 with native intelligence alone, but unlikely. And certainly not a First.’ Oh Judy mate, that’s FINE! That’s BRILLIANT NEWS! Who needs a First? I’m going to be a wealthy TV star!

I think it also helps if you are reasonably sure of yourself.

God, this thing is starting to read like Confessions of a Sex Maniac! It’s awful I know, but I’m just recounting the facts. Let’s be clear, poppet, you don’t think it’s awful in the slightest. You’re having a ball and good for you. Pity about all the lying, though, dearest. Pity about the ‘facts’.

So it was always debatable how canon or how fanon it was that RW had a lot of sex and a lot of girlfriends, or whether this was just e.g. a contrast with DM, but yeah, he had quite a lot of sex.

It’ll come down to love and sex again. Unrewarding sex and unrequited love. Nothing very unusual, but then the privilege of being young is a total lack of perspective. So there could never be a sexier, more gorgeous woman than Lily-the-Goth. And there could never be a more beautiful, more enigmatic man than Mags’ friend Sam (the-former-Goth). And there could never be a turn of events more calamitous than my sort-of girlfriend Lily, and my sort-of minor deity Sam, falling in love with each other.

The nightmare: your crushes dating each other.

(I like how he calls men ‘beautiful’ quite often.)

Another man, and another tragic matter of the heart. At least it gets the poor boy to counselling.

At the end of my first year, the funny (and outgoing) outgoing president Miles Williams has left me a kind note asking me to give him a ring. I was immediately star-struck not just because the president had noticed my existence but also because he had his own telephone number. I nervously dial from one of the Robinson phone booths. ‘Aah, young Webbington! Thanks for calling, just catching up on a bit of cricket on the telly.’ Miles has been brilliantly compèring Smokers all year and I’m unnerved by the sound of his voice, as well as by the news that he’s in possession of not just a phone number but a television. Jesus, what else do you get if you’re president? A speedboat? An annuity?

This is amusing, but also quite a difference between 90s studenting and now-ish.

You and that Tristram Hunt boy. Do you get on with Tristram?’ ‘Er, I haven’t actually met him.’ ‘Nice chap, bit wet behind the ears, bit of a leftie by all accounts but you can’t have everything’

Ahhhh Britain is ridiculous part 927.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just learn Anglo-Saxon. I mean, how hard can it be? How many words can they have possibly invented before 1066? Boat? Sword? Rain? This is going to be a doss!

O.O

It’s with that attitude that I turn up at my first Old English seminar. In front of about seventy students, the Canadian tutor holds up a copy of his book: A Guide to Old English. ‘Read this book,’ he chortles in an accent that’s weird even for a Canadian, ‘and you’ll never need to come to one of my seminars again!’ The undergraduates around me chuckle indulgently. Not come back to the seminars! The very thought! My goodness!

The thing is, when people say things like this at Oxbridge is that they don’t expect at least some of the people there to take you seriously.

‘It’s all stupid, really. There’s a boy here that I fell in love with. I thought he was the best thing in the world. I’d just read The Picture of Dorian Gray and then he walked into the bar and I couldn’t believe my eyes. But I was wrong to give him my trust.’…

Bad enough he just had to endure an emotional outpouring from a semi-hysterical child, but he has also been made to consider that if there’s one thing that would look worse for Robinson than a 2:1 student getting a Third, it’s probably a 2:1 student lobbing himself off a high balcony.

The Education Committee scene is a set piece tour de force.

I kept hearing this first-year’s name and it was annoying me. I knew he had something, but people wouldn’t shut up. I was going to have to see for myself.

We’ve hopped back to my second year. I’m in a little performance venue called The Playroom to watch a one-hour non-Footlights revue called Go to Work on an Egg. A bunch of mates from Peterhouse and Jesus College have cobbled it together, apparently. Eddie had put me in charge of Smokers and I’ve auditioned most of them. They’re fine but let’s not get carried away. Except for one.

As a first-year, he was never going to be in the Tour Show, but he’d been asked to contribute material and I’d written a sketch with him. The sketch was nothing special, but that wasn’t unusual. It’s just that we’d nearly made each other sick with laughter while writing it. That was both special and unusual.

He’s on stage as the lights come up. Come on then, young David Mitchell. Let’s see what you’ve got. Oh, I see. You’ve got everything. I spend the hour enjoying the sketches without once taking my eyes off David.

He’s very funny, which helps. But I’ve seen other funny student performers. This is different. He’s completely committed, but entirely natural. He can afford to seem generous to the other performers because he’s going to get your attention just by standing still. It’s a precious combination of ease and focus that I conceitedly think reminds me of me. He looks like he lives there. It’s an exciting but also worrying turn of events. What am I going to do about this?

Fucking finally part 2. We already got DM’s perspective in Back Story.

This is lovely.

I pop the question. I don’t quite say, ‘Join me, and together we can rule Footlights galaxy as . . . two blokes’, but I do suggest we do a show. He’s a polite young man from a minor public school, as well as a first-year being asked out on a big comedy date by next year’s vice-president. So I can’t help hoping he’ll look pleased. What he actually looks like is Charlie Bucket just after Willy Wonka offers him a Chocolate Factory.

HEARTS FOR EYES

There again, once a sensitive young man belatedly understands that he’s been dumped, it’s only natural for him to start sensitively sleeping around. A whole eight days later, the panto cast party sees me trying to charm all the people I’ve variously ignored, patronised or insulted over the previous few weeks. One of them is a very nice girl called Jenna. She beckons me over . . .

I know it was fanon-canon to give RW a lot of girlfriends, but… eight days between one long term relationship and another! He’s probably had a good think as to whether this means anything, so I won’t go into it further here.

But I suppose I’m at least consistent. I didn’t come here to get an excellent degree. I came here to meet someone like David Mitchell. As it turned out, I met the actual David Mitchell, which was even better.

(hearts for eyes again)

David and I are two years into the business of creating a career in comedy and we do so with the quiet hysteria of the chronically obscure and stonily broke. We write together, we travel together to meetings, we travel back from them, we perform fringe stuff together, we watch TV, we stop watching TV and go to the pub, we walk home from the pub, we say goodnight. He is the first vertical person I see in the morning and the last at night. We’re annoying each other and I’m not helping the situation by living in his flat without paying any rent. But the flat for which I am paying rent seems a long walk away and contains a cat that isn’t house-trained. So I can either live with David, or I can live with a load of piss and shit. He doesn’t seem as flattered by my preference as I might have hoped.

It’s interesting to see this here, although of course they’ve talked before about getting fed up with each other.

Before then, for the two years after leaving college, I’d lived on Super Noodles and toast. I tried to avoid opening letters or answering the phone in case it was the landlord, the bank or the DSS. I was claiming housing benefit and taking whatever part-time work turned up. I worked as an usher in a theatre; I drove a lorry; I worked in a photo-library for a magazine about buildings (that’s Buildings Magazine). Jenna had a credit card and would occasionally bail me out. I tried to get my own credit card, but was refused. It was the Co-op offering a card to Labour members that turned me down. I must say, I thought that took the biscuit.

It’s been said before elsewhere by others, but I don’t know how you would do this in London today.

Jenna bailing him out with her credit card: shout out to partners enabling creative dreams.

And it seems to Jenna and me, as once again she goes glumly to bed and I stay up with a bottle of wine to play Civilization II for another two hours,

(OK, gaming again, fine.)

The pilot called P.O.V. has been commissioned for a whole Channel 4 series and the new title is Peep Show. I do the first week’s filming and Jenna even leaves me some warm food for when I get in at night.

I can’t believe Peep Show started so long ago RW wasn’t even with Abbie back then.

When she hears me say that none of Shakespeare’s comedies are actually funny, she starts singing a made-up song called ‘Pretty boy is a fucking moron’.

We all love Abbie, obviously.

We pack St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden – ‘the Actors’ Church’ – with lots of other family and friends. ‘This room,’ says my best man, David Mitchell, ‘is full of very nice people.’

Again, aw.

‘But before her . . .’ I take the Michael Portillo line because, it happens to be true, ‘as a teenager and a younger man . . .’ ‘Go on, boy. None of my business. Go on.’ ‘. . . not all the people I had, erm, relations with were girls. In fact, one or two of them were boys.’…

…Ultimately, we’re not talking about much sex with many people… Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son.

Well there you go then, I guess.

I look at my CV over those years and there’s persuasive evidence of breadwinning panic. Great Movie Mistakes, Argumental, Robert’s Web, Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, and almost any ad or voice-over going. I did all this stuff as well as I technically could, but my heart wasn’t in it and the audience noticed.

Hard to know what to say about this. I noted at the time that this stuff did coincide with starting a family and the higher costs that entails, but I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed they were to be regretted (except maybe the higher rate of panel shows).

But for now, there’s Daddy in the picture, standing outside, waving at his two daughters through the kitchen window. It’s as if he prefers it. It’s as if young families make Daddy sad.

tough read tough read (see my comments earlier)

How did you get on? If you scored 5,634, then congratulations because . . . That’s Numberwang! If you didn’t get 5,634, commiserations. Also, if you answered anything other than d) for any question, then you have been Wangernumbed and must now be taken out to be gassed. On with the show!

I love a good Numberwang reference.

I’m sure we’ve all seen it, the Care Home Kaleidoscope Synecdoche (I expect this phrase will catch on): a house concentrated into a single, glittering room. Trinkets, ornaments, pictures in frames – the mementos that survived the downsize. They stand for all the treasures – including the people – left behind.

I found this well-observed.

‘Well, yeah . . . she was a great reader, our Pat. By guy!’ ‘By guy’ is the way John softens ‘By God’ when in the presence of women or children. It reminds me of something, but I don’t follow the thought: before me is the great pleasure of reading to my daughter and grandfather at the same time.

‘By guy . . .’ John had said. By guy . . . Guy-Buy? Is that where I got the name, all those years ago? The name for the Guy-Buys, my gang of twelve disciples, by God? I doubt it, but it’s tempting to think so. Life is a mess and the desire is always to try and straighten it out instead of embracing it as it is; to unpick the cobweb into its silvery thread.

I like this: writing a memoir is about straightening a life (messy) out into a coherent narrative, with callbacks and foreshadowing just like any good fictional story, but even the most realism-centred novel isn’t as real as real life. In a story you’d never get two main characters with the same name because it would be too confusing. In this book, which is about real events, RW changed the name of his friend Jonathan Dryden Taylor because he had a John (his grandad) in the book already.

‘Are dragons real?’ I wrestle with this for a moment, but decide not to lie. ‘No, sweetheart. There are no real dragons.’ Ezzie takes this in and looks again at the pictures in the book. ‘But they’re real in the story.’ Gosh. That’s a good way of putting it. Must remember that one. ‘Yes, my love. They’re real in the story.’

Another good meditation on fiction.

Mr Rochester has a lot to answer for. Charlotte Brontë’s original Fifty Shades of Moody Twat is the direct precursor of Dirty Den and the accompanying notion that only a tall, dark emotional car-crash can make anyone come.

Well, excuse you.

I don’t drink alone and I’ve quit smoking. It remains a sexist world and I can’t change it for my daughters the way I would like to. But I can try to improve the situation one man at a time. Starting with me.

He had three grandsons. When I told him, in 2008, that Abbie was expecting a baby, he said, ‘It’ll be a boy, boy. The Webbs only do boys.’ And then when we turned up with a girl, followed by another girl, he was delighted and said, ‘Robert has to be different, doesn’t he?’ Yes. Robert has to be different.

I’ll leave with these final two quotes, except one final delightful DM thanks from the acknowledgements:

[Thank you] to David Mitchell for helping me to remember what happened and when. His excellent Back Story was a useful resource for the university section of the book, but I pestered him about chronology all the same. Without wishing to turn this into a mawkish BAFTA acceptance speech… I wouldn’t be in a position to write this book without the partnership that I formed with the gentle and brilliant David Mitchell.

#robert webb #how not to be a boy #britcom #mitchell and webb #text post #long post

[beafearless1]

Rory Gilmore’s Reading List

This is a collection of books mentioned or read on Gilmore Girls, minus travel and cooking books. Bold the ones you have read.

I have seen it in a lot of blogs and I don’t know which is the original, I’m sorry.

1984 by George Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank Archidamian War by Donald Kagan The Art of Fiction by Henry James The Art of War by Sun Tzu As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Atonement by Ian McEwan Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy The Awakening by Kate Chopin Babe by Dick King-Smith Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie Bel Canto by Ann Patchett The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Beloved by Toni Morrison Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney The Bhagava Gita The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brick Lane by Monica Ali Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner Candide by Voltaire The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer Carrie by Stephen King Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman Christine by Stephen King A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Complete Novels by Dawn Powell The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber The Crucible by Arthur Miller Cujo by Stephen King The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Daisy Miller by Henry James Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D David Copperfield by Charles Dickens The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Deenie by Judy Blume The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx The Divine Comedy by Dante The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells Don Quijote by Cervantes Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn Eloise by Kay Thompson Emily the Strange by Roger Reger Emma by Jane Austen Empire Falls by Richard Russo Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Ethics by Spinoza Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer Extravagance by Gary Krist Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce Fletch by Gregory McDonald Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Gender Trouble by Judith Butler George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg Gidget by Fredrick Kohner Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford The Gospel According to Judy Bloom The Graduate by Charles Webb The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Group by Mary McCarthy Hamlet by William Shakespeare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare Henry V by William Shakespeare High Fidelity by Nick Hornby The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland Howl by Allen Gingsburg The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo The Iliad by Homer I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken Life of Pi by Yann Martel The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold The Love Story by Erich Segal Macbeth by William Shakespeare Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Manticore by Robertson Davies Marathon Man by William Goldman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides The Miracle Worker by William Gibson Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Night by Elie Wiesel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Old School by Tobias Wolff Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens On the Road by Jack Kerouac One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan Oracle Night by Paul Auster Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Othello by Shakespeare Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan Out of Africa by Isac Dineson The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton A Passage to India by E.M. Forster The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Peyton Place by Grace Metalious The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Property by Valerie Martin Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Quattrocento by James Mckean A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton Rita Hayworth by Stephen King Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert Roman Fever by Edith Wharton Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf A Room with a View by E. M. Forster Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi Sanctuary by William Faulkner Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen A Separate Peace by John Knowles Several Biographies of Winston Churchill Sexus by Henry Miller The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Shane by Jack Shaefer The Shining by Stephen King Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut Small Island by Andrea Levy Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker Songbook by Nick Hornby The Sonnets by William Shakespeare Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sophie’s Choice by William Styron The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach The Story of My Life by Helen Keller A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams Stuart Little by E. B. White Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry Time and Again by Jack Finney The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Trial by Franz Kafka The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Ulysses by James Joyce The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Unless by Carol Shields Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett Walden by Henry David Thoreau Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

#rory gilmore reading challenge

[preston-logan]

An Open Letter to the Cast & Crew of Teen Wolf

Dear Teen Wolf Cast & Crew:

As the beginning of the end (6B premiere) draws in, I want to say thank you to you all. Thank you for the characters you created, the stories you’ve told, the friends you’ve helped me make. But most of all, thank you for giving me a safe haven. For years, this show has been my escape when things got rough. I know for a fact that my life would be no where like it is right now if it wasn’t for Teen Wolf. There’s many things, big and small, I want to thank Teen Wolf for. Thank you Dylan for portraying Stiles and brightening up my day with the sarcasm (which I’m glad is slowly returning to S1-2 like sarcasm). Thank you Linden, Susan, and Melissa for portraying the parents, the relationships and love they have with their family is something that means a lot to me when I watch. Thank you to the Teen Wolf writers for, of course, creating these amazing stories, but also for sparking my ever-growing interest in the world of writing and creating stories. Thank you, Laura Webb for helping me find a brand new and life-changing meaning to music. Now, it was hard for me to shorten up my thanks for these next to that mean so much to me, but I tried:

Thank you, Holland Roden for portraying Lydia Martin and the writers for creating her. Seeing how smart Lydia was motivated me beyond belief for me to excel in my academics. There’s days when I don’t want to study or am procrastinating, but then I remember Lydia’s smarts and it makes me want to improve mine, so I do the work. Not only has Lydia’s knowledge helped me, but seeing her strength and just her development in general. Seeing how she went from someone who hid her knowledge for the sake of popularity, being in an emotionally abusive relationship, and hiding her scars and pain develop into this openly smart, caring, badass banshee has been something that helped me greatly. And, I’m not going to lie, her wardrobe has helped my clothing style greatly (thank you TW wardrobe department!).

Thank you, Tyler Posey for portraying Scott McCall. There’s days when I’m scared and anxious, then I look at Scott and his bravery and that brings me my bravery. Scott and his loyalty and kindness helps me to always try and be kind and to help others. Just everything about Scott has the power to bring me out of my negativity, his positivity and values remind me to try and push the negativity aside. But most importantly, if it wasn’t for Scott McCall I wouldn’t have found Tyler Posey. Tyler Posey has taught me the most important thing that I needed in my life. If he wasn’t open about mental health, I would have still been in the terrible mindset I was years ago, sidelining my own mental health. But thanks to Tyler, I realized that I shouldn’t be ashamed to want to get help for my mental health and wound up the courage to speak up. My life has only gotten better since then.

Teen Wolf will always hold a special place in my heart. Saying goodbye is going to be hard. Sometimes, I get a bit nervous thinking of what I’m going to do with this huge part of my life gone. But that’s when Mama McCall’s wise words of advice step in. It’s time for me to be my own anchor.

Thank you, Amanda Twitter: @lvdiastiies

#teen wolf #teen wolf season 6 #Tyler Posey #dylan o'brien #lydia martin #perfectcombonet #youcamebacknet

[paceywittersherocomplex]

Rory Gilmore’s Reading List

This is a collection of books mentioned or read on Gilmore Girls, minus travel and cooking books. Bold the ones you have read.

I saw this list on @ksfd89 ‘s blog and was curious. Since it’s looking really depressing, I also decided to italicise things I’ve read partially (except poetry collections). Not that much better, it turns out.

1984 by George Orwell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank Archidamian War by Donald Kagan The Art of Fiction by Henry James The Art of War by Sun Tzu As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Atonement by Ian McEwan Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy The Awakening by Kate Chopin Babe by Dick King-Smith Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie Bel Canto by Ann Patchett The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Beloved by Toni Morrison Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney The Bhagava Gita The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brick Lane by Monica Ali Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner Candide by Voltaire The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer - well some of it Carrie by Stephen King Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman Christine by Stephen King A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty - some The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Complete Novels by Dawn Powell The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber The Crucible by Arthur Miller Cujo by Stephen King The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon Daisy Miller by Henry James Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D David Copperfield by Charles Dickens The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Deenie by Judy Blume The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx The Divine Comedy by Dante The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells Don Quijote by Cervantes Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe - again some Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn Eloise by Kay Thompson Emily the Strange by Roger Reger Emma by Jane Austen Empire Falls by Richard Russo Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Ethics by Spinoza Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer Extravagance by Gary Krist Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce Fletch by Gregory McDonald Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - never finished Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Gender Trouble by Judith Butler George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg Gidget by Fredrick Kohner Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – started and not finished Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford The Gospel According to Judy Bloom -  this isn’t a real book! The Graduate by Charles Webb The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Group by Mary McCarthy Hamlet by William Shakespeare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare Henry V by William Shakespeare High Fidelity by Nick Hornby The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr) The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland Howl by Allen Gingsburg The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo The Iliad by Homer I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken Life of Pi by Yann Martel The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold The Love Story by Erich Segal Macbeth by William Shakespeare Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Manticore by Robertson Davies Marathon Man by William Goldman The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides The Miracle Worker by William Gibson Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Night by Elie Wiesel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Old School by Tobias Wolff Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens On the Road by Jack Kerouac One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan Oracle Night by Paul Auster Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Othello by Shakespeare Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan Out of Africa by Isac Dineson The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton A Passage to India by E.M. Forster The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Peyton Place by Grace Metalious The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Property by Valerie Martin Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Quattrocento by James Mckean A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton Rita Hayworth by Stephen King Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert Roman Fever by Edith Wharton Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf A Room with a View by E. M. Forster Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi Sanctuary by William Faulkner Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen A Separate Peace by John Knowles Several Biographies of Winston Churchill Sexus by Henry Miller The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Shane by Jack Shaefer The Shining by Stephen King Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut Small Island by Andrea Levy Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker Songbook by Nick Hornby The Sonnets by William Shakespeare Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sophie’s Choice by William Styron The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach The Story of My Life by Helen Keller A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams Stuart Little by E. B. White Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry Time and Again by Jack Finney The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith The Trial by Franz Kafka The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Ulysses by James Joyce The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Unless by Carol Shields Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett Walden by Henry David Thoreau Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

#21 oops #as you can see i haven't read most of your classics #which makes sense because we don't have to read them in school #over here #and i haven't gotten around to them otherwise #or we read like the first scene of hamlet but nothing more #there are a lot of books on this list i still want to read though #also i just remembered how much i hated ulysses #rory gilmore #Gilmore Girls #books