3 July 2008

I'm going to CERN!

Omg! Omg! OMG!!!!1

Uh, yeah. CERN fangirl :)

Those profs at Oslo uni decided to take us along for a short trip to Switzerland before going to Budapest, so we'll get to see CERN! We'll get to see ISOLDE and ATLAS, according to the website. Can't effing wait!

I've just come back from Oslo - four days of chemistry. It was great, as usual. Spent a couple of hours messing around in the lab (organic lab is particularly awesome, except that the smell of ether makes my head go fuzzy) and some more hours with those bloody prep problems. By now I'm sure that at Hungarian universities, you can get a master's degree for completely butchering Nernst's equation without bothering to explain what you're doing, just because it suits your present needs.
And btw, I now have my very own labcoat!

Time for a meme? *glares at Gabriele* No, actually this one is pretty cool.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read six and force books upon them.


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis (well, I don’t love them all. The Last Battle positively sucks)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (can I have those hours of my life back, please?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
(my aunt keeps bugging me to read it, so I guess it must be good)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
(I read it when I was about eight and liked it and want to read it again, so)
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (I started it once but didn’t have time to finish it)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
(wouldn’t that be covered in Shakespeare’s complete works? Lol)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (one day I want to read it in French. That day is not today)

I've got most of the books I've italicised on my shelf, but I lack the time to read them all. The reason I've read so few of the 'classics' is because English classics are no big deal in Norway. We read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men during English a few years ago and that's basically it. We do have literature history at school (or we did, since I just finished school, omg), but that's all Norwegian literature. So we'd learn about rather obscure authors like Hans Kinck and Nini Roll Anker, while Dickens (just to name someone) isn't even mentioned. We hardly even read anything written by them, it was mostly excerpts. I've read, let's see, three works of literature at school - Bjørnson's Synnøve Solbakken (zzzz), Ibsen's Gengangere (zzz) and Gunnlaug's saga (no zzz).

Right, that was rather off topic. Right now I'm reading a book about organic chemistry. Theoretical organic chemistry is also rather fun, though there's a lot to remember.

Edited because I just finished Lord of the Flies.

3 comments:

Gabriele Campbell said...

Seems Norvegian schools are even more patriotic than German ones, we got to read at least some non-native books.

Gengangare isn't that bad, imho, I like most of Ibsen's work. And Gunnlaugs saga rocks, of course. :)

Btw, you should read the post below the last on my blog, it has Romans. ;)

Smarty said...

Well, there've been all sorts of educational reforms now, so everybody younger than I am will learn something about foreign literature in school.

Can't say I'm a huge Ibsen fan. And we had to overanalyse Gengangare, which made it all rather boring >.<

Kirsten Campbell said...

(Spots meme. Sneaks away from meme.)

I wish we'd got the opportunity to do some foreign literature at school. And I agree, overanalysing takes all the joy of it. That's the main reason I decided against doing English Lit. at uni.

Glad to hear you had a good time at Oslo!