Random Stuff Again (Last post of June)

Found this in Mun Cheng's blog, thought it'd be interesting to see the stuff I've read so far from this list:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller'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 - CS Lewis (if anyone owns the whole set, please lend it to me? =P)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen (didn't read this voluntarily)
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Where's 99 and 100? O.o Anyway, 15 out of 98. Not bad I guess. Seriously though, if anyone who reads this blog and knows me personally own any of the italized(word??) titles, could you please lend it to me? Thanks in advance lol =P

Last but not least...

GERMANY V SPAIN in about an hour and a half!

Go Spain! Crush those Germans! XD

Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends

Music: Lovers In Japan/Reign of Love - Coldplay

Okay so I downloaded the album a few days ago, and I'm currently listening to it.

And I thought I'd write a review for Viva, so here goes nothing.



Love the album cover lol. Funky.

Well...what can I say about the album...it is not what I expected it to be at all, to be honest.

I read some reviews for it from a few prestigious...uh...reviewers, and I have to admit that I'm a little surprise at the rather high ratings. Overrated, definitely.

In my humble opinion, it's just a little too mediocre. Nothing special, none of the songs really stand out other than the lead singles, Viva La Vida and Violet Hill, and perhaps a few other songs. And is it just me or do they sound WAAAAAY too much like U2? The Coldplay magic is just not there anymore.

The first half of the album pretty much transported me to slumberland. I just wanted to snuggle under my blankets and sleep. It's so freaking boring and monotonous, seriously. Suddenly I understood what my mum meant by "Aiya Coldplay's songs are so boring la. Why you listen to them ah?" And why the Brits voted them as the Band Most Likely To Put You To Sleep.

The second half is a little better, I guess? Really enjoyed listening to Cemeteries Of London, Viva La Vida, Violet Hill, Death and All His Friends and Strawberry Swings. But everything else? Just meh. (This feels like Minutes to Midnight all over again...another U2 inspired band eh)

Truthfully, it's not a bad album at all, but it's not really my cup of tea. I'd give it 6.5/10, and I'm being quite generous since I hated X&Y.

To those who feel that Keane is just a carbon copy of Coldplay, well I'll have to disagree, I feel that Keane's music has a distinctly different and unusual style. I would describe their music as 'hauntingly melodic' lol. And I prefer Keane over Coldplay if you wanna know (If you didn't realize before that I'm a huge, huge fan of Keane, well now you know =D). Now Coldplay sounds almost completely like U2. It's not like I have something against U2, I like U2, but I just don't like it when a band sounds way too much like another band. I mean, you're Coldplay, so sound like Coldplay, not U2! Yes, I know that both Keane and Coldplay were inspired by U2, but Coldplay took it a little too far.

Here's hoping that Keane's third album won't sound too much like U2 either.

It's supposedly coming out in September! I can't wait for it, but I just hope it won't be as disappointing as Viva.

A Formal Disaster

Music: The Time of My Life by David Cook

...the budget presentation yesterday was a TOTAL disaster seriously =/

It all started the moment I set foot on the 5th floor of Inti at 8am in the morning. I stepped out of the lift and saw some classmates of mine all dressed in formal clothes. Pants/ skirts, shirts/blouses, like how one would dress if they were working in some high-end business company or something. And what was I wearing wearing? I assure you, it was anything BUT formal.

The first thing that crossed my mind was DAMN IT WE'RE SO SCREWED.
I looked around for my other group members(it was a group assignment) and guess what - the four of us (at that moment) were the only ones in casual clothing. Obviously we were in serious trouble.

Luckily the presentation was for our afternoon class, which would only start at noon. Thank god I live nearby, so I could go home during the break in between classes to change into something more presentable. Suet Nee was not so fortunate though, she lives in Farlim or Paya Terubong I think, so she had to leave midway through our 8 - 11am Finance class. Santi had her aunt(or rather her aunt's friend) send her something formal lol. Haan-Ming(her apartment's near my house) and I left around 10.30(had to ask Mr Loo's permission to leave early) to get into our formal clothes. At least she had something suitable to wear. Me? Well I don't own anything formal, so I had to ransack my mum's closet (I'm so not joking!) for clothes. It took me about 40 minutes to find something that fits, as everything else was too lose, and left the house around 11.30, arrived back in Inti by 11.45.

You'd think that I'd at least go through what I was suppose to present in that 15 minutes right? But nope, that's not what I did. I just stood around mumbling to myself to keep cool. And yeah, I was so 'cool', I didn't even know what was in the slides I was suppose to present. Uh huh. That bad. To cut a not-a-very-long-story even shorter, we were totally unprepared. And we were the first group. Yeah. Wonderful huh? There was nothing else that I could do but read the slides blindly(and we were a little too short and precise, to be honest) and finish it off as fast as I could. And what was the feedback from Ms Leon? "Amanda, you seemed to be rushing through the whole thing, and it looks like you were thinking, 'let this be over asap!'. Also, you lacked eye contact.'

Of course I lacked eye contact woman! I was too busy staring blankly at the slides, trying to make sense of what was in there! *cough* Ok, ok I know it's my fault for not going through slides the night before but...(Seriously, it just totally slipped my mind! I know, bad excuse but hey I'm not lying =/ Honest!)

Hopefully that would be the first and last time I screw up an important thing like that.

Lesson learned. That. Will. Not. Happen. Again.

Ever.

Marathons

Music: Tsuki Hitotsu - See-Saw

Yeah.
Marathons.
No not the running kind, I'm talking about movie marathons.
Or in this case...Gene Simmons' Family Jewels Marathon!
Can you believe it? Channel V was (actually it is still) showing that all day long and guess what...this idiot here actually watched quite a lot of it!
Pathetic yes? But it's really phony- funny to watch =P

Oh and did I mention that they're showing reruns of Friends? Everyday? From 8 to 9pm on Starworld? And yep, this nutcase here is watching that too. Bwahahahaha! And I downloaded a few interesting episodes to watch again and again XD Am I crazy or what?!

I really should start studying for tests (or work on my assignments) instead eh? =/

And It's All Coming Back...

Music: Viva La Vida by Coldplay (8 more days!)

...what's coming back, you may wonder? Assignments, that's what! =(

I hate assignments with due dates.

...who am I kidding? All assignments have due dates! =(

At least, most of them are due in July. Except for Cost & Management Accounting. Which is due next Monday. And a presentation on Wednesday. Next Wednesday I mean.

What on earth is there to present about budgets? I don't get it. Then again I don't get that subject. On the bright side it's group work. And so far I've done nothing for the group. Crap.

Gotta start now.

Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends will be released on the 17/18th of June '08!

Am I the only one who cares about that? =( Any other Coldplay fans?

TV Addict

House is back! And so is Monk! =D

Criminal Minds too!

Looks like I'll be addicted to the tv again, something my mum really fears lol.