The [Revised] Rory Gilmore Book List

I have decided to embark on a reading challenge of astronomical proportions. The reason for this being that I am incredibly under-read, and now that a chapter of my life has come to a close (you know, graduating high school and whatnot), I have some free time for reading before the next one begins.

Anyway, I found this lovely thing called "The Rory Gilmore Reading List" and I'm going to use it as a reference for when I can't think of what book I should conquer next.

1984 – George Orwell
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister – Julie Mars
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
A Quiet Storm: A Novel – Rachel Howzell Hall
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
Agnes Grey -- Anne Brontë
American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand 
Atonement: A Novel – Ian McEwan
Autobiography of a Face – Lucy Grealy
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel – Dai Sijie
Bee Season: A Novel – Myla Goldberg
Bel Canto – Ann PatchettBeloved – Toni Morrison
BeowulfBrave New World – Aldous Huxley
Brick Lane – Monica Ali
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty – Eudora Welty
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems – Edgar Allan Poe
Cousin Bette – Honoré de Balzac
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Daisy Miller – Henry James
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Demons – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dombey and Son -- Charles Dickens
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Eleanor Roosevelt – Blanche Wiesen Cook
Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable – Mark Dunn
Emma – Jane Austen (currently reading)
Empire Falls – Richard Russo
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Extravagance: A Novel – Gary Krist
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World – Greg Critser
Finnegan Awakes – James Joyce
Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell 
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Holidays on Ice: Stories – David Sedaris
How the Light Gets In – M. J. Hyland
How to Breathe Underwater – Julie Orringer
Howl – Allen Ginsberg
Inherit the Wind – Jerome Lawrence
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Just a Couple of Days – Tony Vigorito
Leaves of Grass – Walt Witman (I didn't read the entire collection of poems, but I read enough.)
Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Living History – Hillary Rodham Clinton
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter – Simone de Beauvoir
Mencken Chrestomathy – H.L. Mencken
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Monsieur Proust – Celeste Albaret
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath – Seymour M. Hersh
My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru – Tim Guest
Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature – Jan Lars Jensen
New Poems of Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson
Night – Elie Wiesel
Northanger Abbey -- Jane Austen
Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 – Dawn Powell
Old School – Tobias WolffOliver Twist – Charles Dickens
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Oracle Night – Paul Auster
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
Othello – William Shakespeare
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk – Legs McNeil
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Property – Valerie Martin
Pushkin: A Biography – T.J. Binyon
Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
Quattrocento – James Mckean
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books – Azar Nafisi
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad – Virginia Holman
Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
Sacred Time – Ursula Hegi
Sanctuary – William Faulkner
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay – Nancy Milford
Seabiscuit: An American Legend – Laura Hillenbrand
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Small Island – Andrea Levy
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories – Ernest Hemingway
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos – Julia de Burgos
Songbook – Nick Hornby
Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabokov
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
Swimming With Giants: My Encounters With Whales, Dolphins, and Seals – Anne Collett
Sybil – Flora Rheta Schreiber
Tender Is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews – Peter Duffy
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Code of the Woosters – P.G. Wodehouse
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America – Erik Larson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Group – Mary McCarthy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Holy Barbarians – Lawrence Lipton
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar – Robert Alexander
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 – Gore Vidal
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
The Little Locksmith: A Memoir – Katharine Butler Hathaway
The Lottery: And Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
The Manticore – Robertson Davies
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Meaning of Consuelo – Judith Ortiz Cofer
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
The Nanny Diaries – Emma McLaughlin
The Opposite of Fate – Amy Tan
The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Polysyllabic Spree – Nick Hornby
The Portable Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker
The Portable NietzscheThe Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
The Scarecrow of Oz – L. Frank Baum
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir
The Secret Life of Bees -Sue Kidd
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Song of Names – Norman Lebrecht
The Song Reader – Lisa Tucker
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters – Elisabeth Robinson
Unabridged Journals – Sylvia Plath
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
Time and Again – Jack Finney
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship – Ann Patchett
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Unless – Carol Shields
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
When the Emperor Was Divine – Julie Otsuka
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Brontë
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West – Gregory Maguire

As you can see, I have yet to read a great deal of these. I've also decided to add to the list (I already added a few) as I collect more books I need to read. I'm actually quite embarrassed with the obvious lack of lines through the titles above... Ah well, that is precisely what the rest of this summer is for. 

On an unrelated note, the results from my IB exams were released yesterday-- I GOT MY DIPLOMA! Woohoo! Alright, I'm done. Guess I'll get my nose back in those books. Happy reading!

You Jealous?

I've spent the last hour or two on Tumblr enjoying one of my favorite pastimes-- stalking. Namely the talented and beautiful Zooey Deschanel. I honestly wish I could be her. She's unbelievably gorgeous is a totally real way; she has a wardrobe I'd kill for; I love everything she's acted in; and she has such a wonderful and unique voice. Basically she is definitely at the top of my "Perfect People" list.

So I'm sure you could imagine my dismay when I came across posts such as this:

And this....

I know these are really that harsh by any means, but for some reason they just really upset me. I get really silly when others insult celebrities or fictional characters that I love. It's almost like they've insulted a part of who I am...

Anyway, I started thinking about what exactly it is that encourages people to write posts like this, and I think I've come up with some likely reasons:

1. They are jealous of [insert celebrity here] and therefore are unable to find anything good about [aforementioned celebrity] simply because they wish they were more like [famous person]. The offender is unlikely to come to the realization that they are in fact harboring jealously for [beloved celeb] because humans are funny like that.

2. They are attempting to be a hipster and hating on whoever and whatever the so called "mainstream" is currently obsessing over. I could go into a whole rant about hipster right here and now, but I already wrote a blog post about that, so you can just go check that out if you'd like.

3. They really just aren't too fond of [celebrity in question]. Now there is nothing wrong with not being obsessed with someone other people really like. There are a slew of celebrities that I really don't think are as amazing as everything thinks, but I usually save the harsher reviews of their character/personality/talent for my personal friends and family. I don't go posting all over the internet about how someone's singing makes my ears bleed, or something about how people who like [celebrity here] have no taste. In fact I thin that is the one thing that bothers me the most-- the reason I get so upset when I see posts like this. Most of these posts don't just say negative things about the celebrity, they go even further to insult the fans of said celeb. I feel that is going too far. It's fine and dandy to express your own opinions so long as you don't attack others for having opinions different from your own.

Now I must admit that I am guilty of doing the above, but after having this recent epiphany I am going to try and be more respectful in the future. Though I can't promise that I won't be a dirty hypocrite occasionally because I'm human. Anyway, I'm sure you've already seen this video (it went viral almost instantly it seems), but I just feel like sharing it again because I really do love this duet:

I Liked That Before It Was Cool

Hipster. According to Cracked.com (my go-to source for all things hilarious), the term first arose in the 40's to describe middle class whites acting like black musicians, now referred to as "nerdcore".

Today, a hipster is self-centered elitist who, in their quest to avoid and cast judgement on the mainstream, is actually controlled by the mainstream. Even worse than the angsty, complaining hipsters are those who just wear clothes that almost pass as vintage and call themselves hipsters. The majority of self-proclaimed hipsters are just obnoxious teenagers who want to be accepted by society, but aren't man enough to just admit it. So instead, they choose to join the ranks of emos and goths; pretending that they don't give a crap when in actuality they do.

Anyway, I do believe that true hipsters do exist, but I prefer to call them indie. Indies are similar to hipsters in that they wear vintage-styled clothes and whatnot, but their attitudes are entirely different. For one, indies do not claim to be hipsters, or anything else-- they just are who they are (not intending to sound like a Ke$ha song...).

My main problem with hipsters is that they all claim to hate society for being so mundanely mainstream, when in fact they are just as much a part of the mainstream. Without mainstream, hipster would cease to exist as they would no longer have a constant supply of music, clothes, etc. to judge and dismiss. It's pretty ironic when you think about it.

All this being said, I do believe that true hipsters exist in this world, but I prefer to call them indie. See, indies are similar to hipsters in that they wear vintage or vintage-looking clothes, but their attitudes are completely different. Indies do what they do; wear what they wear; and like what they like because it is just what appeals to their personal tastes. Hipsters are tied to the mainstream, but indies are only tied to themselves. If indies like something that also happens to be mainstream, then that's fine because the reason they like it is not because it's mainstream. Hipsters, even if they liked something considered to be 'mainstream', would never admit it because that would destroy their 'reputation'.

This is why whenever I am told that I could easily be hipster, I get offended. Just because I like vintage clothes and accessories, which, mind you, I have been quite fond of for quite some time (not trying to sound hipster there, it's just a fact...), does not make me hipster. There are plenty of mainstream things that I like, and then some I don't. I like whatever I think is rad and if what I like happens to be mainstream then I like something mainstream.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that you shouldn't put something down just because it's 'mainstream'. I mean, it could be mainstream simply because it's really awesome and a lot of people think that. At the same time, don't turn into one of those people (we can probably point out hundreds of them at our high school) who treat fashion magazines like their Bible and can't wear something that's 'not in fashion'. Just, man this is going to sound cheesy, be yourself and dress in whatever you like and you feel comfortable in. Don't conform. Don't be elitist.

We Meet Again

Wow. Hello there, New Post screen. It's been awhile...
I guess you can say that I've been a little preoccupied with life. Senior year is turning out to be even more stressful than junior year, despite many assurances that after junior year it was pretty much smooth sailing to graduation. Except for us poor IB kids. For us, senior year is the worst-- it's when we have all our exams.

Anyway, you haven't missed too much other than my intense school stuff like the 3,500-4,000 word essay I had to write over the summer. (For those interested my final word count was 3,647.) And I am not in my school's production of Beauty and the Beast. "WHAT?" you ask, "I thought you really wanted to be in that musical? Belle's your idol!" Yeah. I know. I still do want to be in the show, but I was sent home and callbacks and the director made it clear to me that I would not be recieving either of the rolls I desired (Belle and Mrs. Potts), which basically meant that I would have been in chorus had I chosen to do the show. I told her that I was only interested in those two roles (as I had previously indicated on my audition sheet)and so I was not cast. Despite her assurance that seniors would always be given precedence over underclassmen as long as the underclassmen were not vastly more talented.

Long story short: the director was a dirty hypocrite. Whatever. I'm mostly over it. It just would have been nice to be in my senior musical since I won't have as many opportunities to act in college since I am pursuing a music career, not musical theatre.

Anyway, enough ranting. Good things have happened to me as well since we last spoke. (Because clearly this is a conversation. It's just very... one-sided...) For one, I love being captain of Madrigals. It's super stressful at times, but it's also rewarding at others like when the choir director compliments me on my leadership skills. It's always nice to be appreciated.

Well, now everyone is up-to-date and I can start being sassy and opinionated in my next post, which will hopefully be in the near future. Possibly even tomorrow! Until then-- DFTBA [Don't forget to be awesome]

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