Here Be Things With Words
Music
Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing. See which of your friends can name the most songs.
Step 3: Strike out the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game post your own.
If any of them have not been guessed in a week from now, I'll post the answers.
NOTE: There's a lot of classical songs here, so sorry to all of you who don't listen to opera and Lieder. And to those of you who speak neither German nor Italian.
1. Bächlein, laß dein Rauschen sein!
2. I’m looking through you - where did you go? Beatles - I'm Looking Through You
3. I change the key from C to D
4. Aprite un po quegli occhi
5. Summer soft, wakes you up with a kiss
6. You’re just too marvelous, too marvelous for words
7. Füllest wieder Busch und Tal Still mit Nebelglanz
8. Wir Kinder, wir schmecken der Freuden recht viel
9. Goodbye to you, my trusted friend Terry Jacks - Seasons in the Sun
10. This is the first day of my life Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life
11. Last clown, drinking in a bar Turin Brakes - Last Clown
12. I was a stranger in the city
13. Picture yourself in a boat on a river Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
14. Willst du dein Herz mir schenken?
15. You are my waking dream
16. Why do the nations so furiously rage together?
17. I’ve got another confession to make
18. They called him a hero in the land of the free
19. I’m strange and you’re strange
20. Fitter. Happier. More Productive. Radiohead - Fitter. Happier.
21. Your day breaks, your mind aches Beatles - For No One
22. Zu Hilfe! Zu Hilfe!
23. Three little words, oh what I’d give
24. I want to live, I want to give
25. Sometimes I get to feelin’
Books
"BBC reckons most people have only read 6 of the following 100 books. Put an X after the books you have read and a W after the books you really, really want to read but for some reason or other have failed to do so."
This list so didn't come from the BBC, by the way.
Some notes: Virtually no-one has really read Shakespeare's complete works, and Hamlet's already on this list, so I'm going to swap the Complete Works out for Romeo and Juliet. I figure both of his best-known works deserve a spot on this list, anyway. Also, I thought I'd replace The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - being a part of the Chronicles of Narnia, and all - with something a little more interesting: Beowulf. I think it deserves a spot on this list, no? Also, Jane Austen is totally overrepresented on this list, love her though I do.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë W (am reading it right now, actually)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (well, I've read pretty substantial portions of it, anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (ugh ugh ugh. maybe I was too young for it at the time, but I absolutely hated it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell W (I'd better read this at some point, I feel)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (almost as ugh as Wuthering Heights)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot W (I started it, but didn't have the time to finish)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell W (started this one too...)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald W
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy W
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams W (gasp! I haven't read it yet, I know! dreadful.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh W (I'm kinda curious)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky W
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck W
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (years and years ago)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens W (started this one when I was about eight, but never got into it)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen W (started, never had a chance to finish)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen W
36 Beowulf - anon X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell W
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 W
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen W
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 W
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddox W
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck W
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov W (even though I'm not sure I'll like it, I'd like to at least have an informed opinion on it)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X (what a ride, what a ride!)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie W
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X (in Icelandic translation, and, I think, abridged)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce W (though I'm not sure I can pull this one off)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath W
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt W
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro W (Never Let Me Go was fantastic)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert W
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (well, substantial parts, anyway)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad W
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery W (ideally in the original. I've read portions in French, but not the whole thing)
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 X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo W
I count 34 X's, and 27 W's. I could be persuaded to read almost anything on this list though. Except maybe Márquez. I've read passages from Love in the Time of Cholera that made me seriously nauseous.
Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing. See which of your friends can name the most songs.
Step 3: Strike out the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game post your own.
If any of them have not been guessed in a week from now, I'll post the answers.
NOTE: There's a lot of classical songs here, so sorry to all of you who don't listen to opera and Lieder. And to those of you who speak neither German nor Italian.
1. Bächlein, laß dein Rauschen sein!
2. I’m looking through you - where did you go? Beatles - I'm Looking Through You
3. I change the key from C to D
4. Aprite un po quegli occhi
5. Summer soft, wakes you up with a kiss
6. You’re just too marvelous, too marvelous for words
7. Füllest wieder Busch und Tal Still mit Nebelglanz
8. Wir Kinder, wir schmecken der Freuden recht viel
9. Goodbye to you, my trusted friend Terry Jacks - Seasons in the Sun
10. This is the first day of my life Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life
11. Last clown, drinking in a bar Turin Brakes - Last Clown
12. I was a stranger in the city
13. Picture yourself in a boat on a river Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
14. Willst du dein Herz mir schenken?
15. You are my waking dream
16. Why do the nations so furiously rage together?
17. I’ve got another confession to make
18. They called him a hero in the land of the free
19. I’m strange and you’re strange
20. Fitter. Happier. More Productive. Radiohead - Fitter. Happier.
21. Your day breaks, your mind aches Beatles - For No One
22. Zu Hilfe! Zu Hilfe!
23. Three little words, oh what I’d give
24. I want to live, I want to give
25. Sometimes I get to feelin’
Books
"BBC reckons most people have only read 6 of the following 100 books. Put an X after the books you have read and a W after the books you really, really want to read but for some reason or other have failed to do so."
This list so didn't come from the BBC, by the way.
Some notes: Virtually no-one has really read Shakespeare's complete works, and Hamlet's already on this list, so I'm going to swap the Complete Works out for Romeo and Juliet. I figure both of his best-known works deserve a spot on this list, anyway. Also, I thought I'd replace The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - being a part of the Chronicles of Narnia, and all - with something a little more interesting: Beowulf. I think it deserves a spot on this list, no? Also, Jane Austen is totally overrepresented on this list, love her though I do.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë W (am reading it right now, actually)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (well, I've read pretty substantial portions of it, anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (ugh ugh ugh. maybe I was too young for it at the time, but I absolutely hated it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell W (I'd better read this at some point, I feel)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (almost as ugh as Wuthering Heights)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot W (I started it, but didn't have the time to finish)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell W (started this one too...)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald W
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy W
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams W (gasp! I haven't read it yet, I know! dreadful.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh W (I'm kinda curious)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky W
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck W
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (years and years ago)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens W (started this one when I was about eight, but never got into it)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen W (started, never had a chance to finish)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen W
36 Beowulf - anon X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell W
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 W
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen W
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 W
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddox W
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck W
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov W (even though I'm not sure I'll like it, I'd like to at least have an informed opinion on it)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X (what a ride, what a ride!)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie W
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X (in Icelandic translation, and, I think, abridged)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce W (though I'm not sure I can pull this one off)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath W
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt W
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro W (Never Let Me Go was fantastic)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert W
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (well, substantial parts, anyway)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad W
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery W (ideally in the original. I've read portions in French, but not the whole thing)
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 X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo W
I count 34 X's, and 27 W's. I could be persuaded to read almost anything on this list though. Except maybe Márquez. I've read passages from Love in the Time of Cholera that made me seriously nauseous.