Books and Sex
“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. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you've partially read."
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
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 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 - 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-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 Miserables - Victor Hugo
A four-year education as an English major and I can honestly say I've only read 13 of these. Gah. As if I don't question my education enough as it is. I really wonder if my time would be far better spent while I'm out of school on educating myself. Obviously, I didn't do myself any favors making things easy on myself.
Well, other than that unpleasant wake-up call, winter break is on, and it's been only a week and I can already say I've been fantastically lazy. Some things are going to have to get done, but my personal projects keep shifting to the back burner. This has got to change.
On a random note, as I spend time with my best friend while I'm back home, I grow increasingly amused at the realization that my friend as she grows older is becoming a prude. This is interesting to me as she is a rather pretty girl and is in college and all the rest. But she's also not as involved in college culture as even I am (man, whenever I'm more involved in something than someone else they're just being completely sheltered) and her up-bringing is throwing a larger influence over her as the teenage hormones calm down.
Another reason why I think this is funny is because she's more needy than I am. I've gotten to the point where the idea of sex is pretty much "whatever works" with me. I don't feel like it has to be more complicated than that, though I think for the unexperienced it has to be treated with some degree of caution. There are too many pitfalls in the way we as a society think about sex, especially for women. It's easier for us to get emotionally trapped, I think. For various reasons. But anyway, despite my attitude on sex I'm still a virgin and have no plans on changing that for any frivolous reason. It feels like there's a huge pressure not to be inexperienced in sex in my peer group, and I'm aware that as I grow older I'm put in a greater minority. Still, I haven't seen any long-term benefit for deflowering yet. And I am very patient.
For my friend, she talks about how she feels like she needs male-attention and male-touch sometimes. It's only occasionally, and it's normally cured by a night of clubbing, but I have to admit that feeling is foreign to me. Another friend of hers, who is a feminist and much more open to free sex, gets the same need so I know it's not just an issue of repression. I don't have all the rules my friend has about touching in clubs. I'm adequately covered so I'm not worried about it getting too invasive, and hands over clothes is not something that can turn me on unless I want it to. I don't think this is an issue of orientation. If I got turned on by doing the same thing with a girl, I think it would be more the taboo of the act that would do it (and maybe the tighter clothes), rather than where the touch was coming from.
I've been reading up about it a little lately and I think I might be slightly more asexual than the norm. I have a sex drive, and in a fulfilling relationship I'm positive I would be having sex, but since I'm not in a relationship it doesn't seem to matter that I'm not having sex (with other people). It hardly seems worth it to get involved with someone to fuflfill a need that I don't feel strongly. I feel much more strongly the need for contact and companionship, and sex is more of an extension of that than seperate. It's difficult to describe, especially when I am lacking in experience, but I definitely feel that sex is not such a defined need for me as it seems to be for others.
As for my friend, as amusing as it is, I question whether this attitude is very wise. I think it works out well for her (she told me once that if it wasn't for her beliefs she thinks she would have been a slut, something I'm quite sure I would have never been in any particular circumstance, religious or not), but I wonder if that doesn't limit her understanding of people who aren't as tight as her. I suppose it doesn't matter so much. She might also mellow more in age.