Here’s one that I got a while back and don’t think I ever posted. I’ll take the directions one step further, though, and boldly italicize those books that I intend to re-read (for whatever reason).

Instructions:

• Bold the books on the list you have read
• Italicize the books you intend to read
• Underline the books you loved
• Reprint the list on your own so we can try and track down the people who have read under ten and force books upon them!

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 Darl Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglass 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. The 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 - AA 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 Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Hebert
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 - Adous 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 - Alexander Dumas
66. On the Road - Jack Keroac
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Charol - 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 - EB 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-Expury
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Doyle
96. A Town Like Alice - Necil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Have read 40… pretty pathetic… must start reading the italicised ones!

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Software: TimeTo
Developer: David Berman Communications
Original Review: 8/15/2007

Review Summary: Every week I discover something about TimeTo that makes me wonder how I made it through the week before.

I originally reviewed TimeTo a little over a year ago, and much of what I said there is still applicable. This is some powerful software. After talking with David Berman, however, it’s necessary that I clarify some issues regarding the pricing structure because I was flat out wrong in my assessment of what the cost of the software is (you can follow the beginnings of our conversation in the comments of the original review).

There are four different Licensing Options in place that range in cost from the Competitive Upgrade ($59.95) to a Single License for Business or Government ($129.95). Tucked in the middle is the one I am most interested in, the Personal or NFP option, which David specifically states on the website order page as “Whatever donation you can afford: we suggest US$79.95.” Make note of the “whatever donation you can afford” part of that. How I missed that when writing the first review is beyond me, and I offer David my sincerest of apologies for that error.

Rather than rehash the rest of that initial review (since the positives I mention there remain firmly in place in this year’s release) allow me to expand on a few new things I discovered about TimeTo.

I’ll state right up front that I am a fiddler, not a power user. I dabble and experiement with what I am able to figure out by exploration. My most often asked question seems to be “wouldn’t it be cool if….” and then flipping to the detailed manual to see if that cool thing is actually possible. More often than not, I have discovered that the cool thing is not only possible, but not even that complicated. The tutorial items were plenty to get someone like me up and asking questions. With software as robust as TimeTo is, this kind of approach makes really getting into and learning everything about the software a very long process. Long enough, that after two months of use, while I have a firm grasp on the majority of the major features, I am also certain that I am still only scratching the surface of what TimeTo is capable of. But even that scratch has made managing my day-to-day and week-to-week activities amazingly more efficient. As the school year begins next week, I am actually looking forward to becoming insanely busy, as I am convinced I have now have a tool that will help me get through it without losing my sanity.

I also became more involved with the user and developer community this time around. Rather, I found them, subscribed to their conversations and eavesdropped on everything that they were talking about. The developers encourage questions and discussions about features and capabilites, and share the direction future development is taking the product. The resulting dialog has led me to more advanced usage on my end much quicker than I would have normally achieved.

The single drawback I discovered this time around with TimeTo may not even be a TimeTo issue. For some reason, the software seems to crash quite often. I think that it is the result of a conflict on my end, but I haven’t had an opportunity to track down exactly what or where the conflict is.

This drawback, however, led me to discover something quite remarkable about TimeTo. There were several occasions where I was editing or creating entries in a hurry, moving calendar items from one day to another, marking an item partially complete, assigning items to various projects, whatever. During these moments of rapid data entry/modification is when it seems the application would crash. Upon re-launch, I was very happy to discover that TimeTo’s autosave feature is extremely robust. Never did I lose more than one minute’s work, and most often I didn’t lose any data whatsoever. TimeTo even knows when to enter a kind of safe mode after a crash and verifies the integrity of the recent data entries.

The Bottom Line remains much the same. TimeTo is powerful, dynamic software aimed at both the personal and business enviroments. The user and development communites are extremely involved in communication in and among themselves and eager to not only support the product, but help everyone get the most out of it. In short, I’ll be keeping TimeTo firmly in place on my system and delving deeper into the manual whenever it tells me I have the time to spare.

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Film: The X-Files: I Want to Believe
Director: Chris Carter
Screenwriter: Frank Spotnitz & Chris Carter
Primary Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly, Amanda Peet

Review Summary: I wanted to believe, too. Really. I did

Back in the day, I was a huge fan of The X-Files television series. In fact, if memory serves, it’s the first show I ever recorded when my schedule didn’t put me at home in time to watch. Perhaps it’s this fondness that caused my expectations to be higher than Carter and company had hope of reaching, but there were some pretty major plot items that I took issue with, almost from the very first scene. But before I go too much further, let me get it out of the way now… as a generic movie, with no franchise affiliation and no preconceptions based on the previous movie or television series, I think this is an ok movie. If it’s just called I Want to Believe (regardless of how stupid a title that would be) it would be easier to overlook some of my concerns, and alot of them wouldn’t apply at all. But the title is X-Files: I Want To Believe, and that creates a certain air of expectation.

Right off the bat, one of those expectations is shattered… even though she had a few episodes that focused on her in the television series, The X-Files was never about Scully. Ever! It was always about Fox… his belief, his pursuit of the truth, his devotion to finding his sister. In I Want to Believe, everything about Fox is secondary to what Scully is experiencing. The film isn’t about Fox, or the Russian doctor, or the kidnapped FBI agent… it’s about Scully’s own internal struggle of religion vs. science. Regardless of the fact that I find it ludicrous that after spending years with Moulder Mulder (oops… thanks heads up One Breath) she still sees anything as black and white, this particular issue and the way it is communicated by Carter simply isn’t strong enough to carry the film. Exterior action becomes secondary to interior conflict and the result is a primary pacing that plods along in opposition to that exterior action. In short, the movie isn’t about Fox’s love of truth being rekindled and the search of a missing FBI agent, it’s about Scully coming to grips with her faith (or lack thereof).

Which brings us to the absolutely shocking revelation that (gasp!) Moulder Mulder has grown a beard! During the course of the setup for this sight gag I lost count of how many shots we went through of just seeing the back of Moulder Mulder’s head, but it was overdone to the point of absurdity. Once is hinting, twice and thrice are creating suspense, anything more than that and the effect diminishes. By the time Moulder Mulder turns around, not only did I know he had a beard, but I knew it would be very Ted Kaczynski-ish. Not only that, but with the series just about a decade old, there are bound to be audience members unfamiliar with Fox Moulder Mulder and completely lost as to what the big deal is that he even has a beard.

Next up… A pedofile priest? Really? That’s the best Carter could come up with? I know it is supposed to play against Scully’s whole science vs. religion struggle, but please… old and busted doesn’t even begin to describe this trope. It seemed so constructed, so convenient, so unintelligent compared to the writings of both the series and the first film. I will say, however, that Billy Connolly was a surprising bright spot in the film. While I thought the script he was given was petty and trite, I thought he did as much with the role as he possibly could to try and break it out of the stereotype that Carter created for him.

Lastly, with every scene blanketed in at least eight inches of snow, why was this film released in the middle of summer? Likely it’s a personal thing, but  everything seemed so out of place simply because of all the snow. When combined with everything else, I found myself unable to get past it. I just couldn’t buy into the settings at all. They just didn’t ring true to me no matter how much I wanted to believe.

In the end, X-Files: I Want To Believe would be an ok movie for a rental, but it is a terrible X-Files film. I saw a review somewhere (if I find it again I’ll link to it) that said it was more Saw than X-Files and I think that’s a dead-on comparison, only I’ll take it one step further… Saw was a better film than X-Files because it didn’t try to be anything that it wasn’t. In order to capture the younger audience as well as the generation that grew up with the TV series, Carter tried to tap into the kind of audience that Saw so successfully grabbed. The result was a film that, in pretending to be something it wasn’t, strayed too far from what it should have been.

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Film: The Dark Knight
Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenwriter: Johnathan & Christopher Nolan
Primary Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman

Review Summary: Don’t believe the hype! Well, ok… believe it a little bit.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but whatever it was, The Dark Knight certainly wasn’t it. That’s a good thing, though, it really is. You see, when it comes to films, my expectations tend to be inversely proportional to the nature and vehemence of the hype created by the studio and media. So when I saw Christopher Nolan compared to Hitchcock and Heath Ledger to Brando, you can almost imagine the little hairs on the back of my neck beginning to stand up. Add in the dubious fact that this is summer blockbuster season and I was already bolstering my check-brain-at-door tolerance levels. Mix in that this was a comic book adaptation, or, more precisely, yet another comic book adaptation, and I was fully prepared to change my mind at the last minute and rent it on DVD in 4 months.

I’m glad I didn’t. Oh, I don’t think that The Dark Knight is a brilliant piece of cinematography by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn’t what I was prepared for, either. It is atypical of summer fare in that, first and foremost, this film simply demands to be taken seriously. Nolan addresses some heady issues beneath the Batman legend, and has attempted to put together a film that not only entertains, but also questions public morality and political policy and procedure. While the film generally succeeds on the entertainment standpoint, the presentation of overriding social, moral, and political dilemmas leads to the story becoming mired in it’s own seriousness. In short, Nolan simply bit off more than he could chew by trying to address so many big issues in a single film. The biggest setback he encounters is not with the questions themselves, but rather with the frenetic pace he maintains throughout the entire film.

At over two and a half hours, the Dark Knight is unjustifiably long. The pacing Nolan utilizes to fill up the 152 minutes never gives the audience a chance to really take in the inflammatory situations that have been presented to them. The questions he asks are timely and pertinent… Is torture of a terror suspect acceptable? Are some lives worth more than other lives? Does the end truly justify the means? All questions that echo headlines of US news outlets over the past five years. But the scenes come and go, one after another, with explosions and chases and the great gusto of brilliant special effects, never allowing the audience to sit back and really take in what is being presented. There is just too much of the summer blockbuster getting in the way of Nolan’s story, so all that depth is lost. And though it may demand to be taken seriously, there is little that remains beneath the surface beyond the typical summer blockbuster. While this film is wonderful summer movie fare, it is nowhere near the deep, intellectual cinema that Hitchcock so brilliantly created.

“Batman movies are never about Batman. They’re always about the bad guy.”

A friend of mine said that not long before we walked into the theatre. At first I was a bit taken aback, but I think now that she may have been on to something. Think about the Batman films of the last two decades or so. It’s the villains you think about, isn’t it? Batman is there, and he will save the day in the end. It’s what superheros do. They confront the bad guy, get in trouble, get out of trouble, and then kick the bad guy’s ass. The only variable is, really, the bad guy, and it doesn’t matter how dramatic or comic booky you make the film. Whether you are talking about Burton’s Batman or Nolan’s, that generic template is followed, and the bulk of the film is going to rest squarely on the shoulders of whoever is playing the villain.

I have liked Heath Ledger in everything I have ever seen him in. I can’t think of a single film where he has turned in even a mediocre performance. His redition of The Joker is absolutely no exception to this. The character he created is devastatingly pathetic, eerily pitiful, and charmingly evil. I get the feeling, however, that his performance was held in check by Nolan. While I simply loved watching each and every scene he was in, I never got the feeling that he was going anywhere. He was introduced to the audience at a specific level, and he stayed at that level for the entire film. So while I sat in complete awe of the character Ledger created, I never saw him get the chance to really sink his teeth into The Joker and go on a journey with him, allow his character to change or grow with the film. Instead, I found him to be static, and, ultimately, predictably comic-book-like in his one-note presentation of character. For a film that so desperately strives to transcend the comic book adaptation tag, I found this particularly annoying. I want to reiterate, however, that my issues are not with Ledger’s performance. Granted, I don’t think he has earned the comparisons to Brando, but he did, for lack of a better phrase, blow me away with his character work in this film. I simply wanted more than Nolan was prepared to let Ledger give me.

The weakest element of The Dark Knight is the sub plot that revolves around Harvey Dent (Eckhart) and Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal). Simply put, not enough time is devoted to furthering this particular storyline and it falls flat. Dent, in particular, is difficult to believe in his nearly over-the-top change in character. This storyline is, I think, the primary reason the last 30-40 minutes of the film drags so terribly.

Overall, The Dark Knight hits the mark from the very first scene. It isn’t nearly as deep and thought provoking as it has been made out to be (or could have been, for that matter), and even though I think he’ll get at least an Oscar nomination, this isn’t Ledger’s best film by any means. His best character creation, perhaps, but not his best film. In the end, The Dark Knight is a good movie, and an unexpected treat during the typically lackluster summer film months.

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