Fellowship- Advice on Advice

As can be seen from the title, I'm still reading The Fellowship of the Ring. It's been a bit slower than I expected, but I'm still enjoying it immensely.

I just wanted to post this small quotation. It's from an elf named Gildor.

"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift,
even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you?
You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better
than you?"

This seemed like a particularly wise passage, and I felt like it should be singled out. People can deal out advice with no thought to the end of the course that choice will bring. No one knows exactly what the future holds, we can only use our previously gained wisdom to attempt to make the best choices possible in the moment.

This is not to discredit the usefulness of advice. Many times, it is good for one to have the opinion of an outside observer. But take every bit of advice with a grain of salt, for no one knows all of your life experiences but your own self.

Project for Awesome

So... I once again failed at this project. But it was because I was participating in something so much more worthwhile!

The Project for Awesome on YouTube.

This began in 2007 and basically YouTube is taken over by charity videos for a day. The Vlogbrothers (John Green-author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and his brother Hank Green who writes songs) started this to do what Nerdfighters do, decrease world suck.

So, I've been watching, commenting, liking, favoriting, and donating all day. I finally got to the point where I made my own video about freerice.com and the Harry Potter Alliance. (Link-http://dft.ba/-p4aNad10)

Connection! The Harry Potter series is an item on the YLC list and is a series that is very near and dear to my heart. The HPA is an organization that takes the themes broadcast in HP and makes them applicable in today's society. Go and check it out! http://thehpalliance.org/

Well, that's about it for now! Back to our regular scheduled program tomorrow!

DFTBA!

And It Begins...

I officially started my YLC project today! YAY! My first official item on the list is #2 The Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien. I didn't get as much reading done as I probably should of, but I think it's going to take a few days to get used to reading for fun again. I've hardly read anything for pure enjoyment over the last three months. College sure does consume time like a black hole consumes, well, anything.

I'm only through Chapter 2 of FotR, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The book is a lot more enjoyable than I remember it as, but it has been quite a few years. Hobbits are strange creatures; their exclamations make me giggle though and add to my amusement.

Here is my favorite quotation so far. It is from Gandalf of course, who is almost as quotable as Dumbledore in my opinion.

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

To close this post, I would like to clarify that the "confinement" referred to in the title should not be seen as a prison. I'm attempting this project for many different reasons. One is that I have become bored with my usual genres that I read from. The classics are much more intriguing to me at this moment than contemporary fiction. I should also clarify that the title is a hyperbole. If I wish to read a book that is not on the list, I will read it. I'm not going to restrict myself to the list completely. But when I'm in that moment where I'm looking for something new to read, I will be going to the list before the YA section of my library.

DFTBA!

YLC MASTER LIST

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK 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 - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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 - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS 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

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM 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

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 Zafon

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

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS 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

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

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserable - Victor Hugo

I'm Insane

Well, it's official. I have lost my mind. Let me tell you about it.

I start with a related and short, but slightly uninteresting ancedote. I just put in my retainers for the first time in over four months. (Uninteresting) I have a huge headache and am unable to sleep. (Related) So, I started thinking.

I just started reading LotR:tFotR. That's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, for the non-nerds out there. This is my second endevor in the reading of this series, I only got through about 70 pages last time. That got me thinking about this list I saw and posted as a note on Facebook. One that lists 100 novels/series/collections. This is the part where I went insane.

I decided that I'm going to try to read all 100 of the items listed in about a year. Let's say, by midnight of December 31, 2011 to be exact. I have already read 21 of the items listed, but I would re-read them in the time frame. This is going to be a huge challenge. The list includes hefty items like The Complete Works of Shakespeare, War and Peace, and The Bible. I've never been a huge reader of the classics, which adds to the challenge even more. I'm sure there will be books on the list that I will hate and never want to be in the same room with ever again. But I will read them anyways, for the sake of the challenge. (Actually, I should name this challenge... *muses* I'll get back to that later.)

I will also try to do daily (or at least every other day- bidaily? Or is that twice a day?) posts updating my status. This will force me to write, and give me motivation to continue.

A Year of Literary Confinement (YLC) here I come!