Reading is sexy.

I'm a big fan of reading. When I grew up, my dad used to take me to the library once a week, and even after he stopped bringing us, I continued to go by myself; fat, primary 5 me commuting to borrow some books at the old National Library near Fort Canning. I wasn't a very active boy, on account of me being chubby and rounded, so I took to books very quickly.

I managed to sustain the habit up to this point, where I'm reading (at least trying to) about one book per week. So yeah, I'm pretty much one of the most well-read people you know.

When I saw my friend post a note on facebook about reading, a sort of survey on how bookish you are, I jumped on it.

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.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds.

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 Faulk

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 The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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 - A.A. 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 Inferno - Dante

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 - E.B. 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

Finished - 21

Started on - 14

I read 21 books where a normal person has only read 6 books. I feel like some sort of...reading jock hahaha. I've read 3.5 times more of BBC's "quality" books than a normal person. Perhaps it's because I have 3.5 times more free time than a normal person. Hmm.

Anyway, I haven't updated in a long time, but after a little bird told me that people have visited this blog of late (rubythesnowman), I felt like I just had to.

Pray.

OK, so I logged on to Facebook yesterday night and was faced with an onslaught of friends who changed their profile pictures to cartoon characters. And some accompanied their change with the following update:

Change your facebook profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday, there should be no human faces on facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is for violence against children.

WTF. Reading this statement sends alarm bells ringing at the back of my mind. Something's not right here. If you want to make a statement against violence on children, I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to do it.

Ok, I can see how changing your profile picture will take us back to the good old days of our childhood. Some people change their profile picture, say "Oooh, I liked this cartoon,", and then look at their friends profile picture and say "Ooh, cool, he/she liked that cartoon," and whatever. But that's not really the point of this exercise, right?

Most people are just taking this time to show off what "cool" or "funky" or "cute" cartoons they liked when they were younger, and they think that through that, they're fighting violence against children, taking a stand for violence against children, but that's fuckshit. You're not doing anything!

This changing of profile picture is just a facebook FAD. You're not furthering a cause, you're showing your friends what cartoon you liked as a kid and THAT'S ALL.

If you really want to do something, there are other more meaningful ways, you know? Through facebook, you can post links, information and videos. Or, you can change your profile picture to a picture of you donating to charity, and encourage your friends to do the same! More action please!

Justin Bieber is doing more than you, that's for sure.

You're not that awesome.

So I went to my friend Jonathan's house for a swim today. It's part of my Standard Chartered preparations...I'm supposed to be resting my legs, so instead of running, I took a dip in the pool.

And as with all times you go swimming with a friend, sooner or later, one of you will challenge the other to see who can hold their breath under water longer. I've always lost this, but what the heck, you know? I'm not even good at swimming (which is something I'm hoping to correct by February next year so that I can do a duathalon...)

So anyway, he said go, and we took deep breaths and dived in. 10seconds, 20seconds, and 30seconds, and he's out. What about me? I'm still inside, cool as a cucumber, wet as a fish. I surface and I'm like, "Why you come up so fast?" and he's like "Dude, my lungs are bursting, how come you can hold your breath for so long?"

So we did it again. He surfaces in 30-odd seconds, and 1min20seconds later, I'm still down there. I surface again, and you know, why not try for 1min30seconds, and I tried, and I succeeded. Ownage. I thought I was awesome.

Which brings me to right now. I was going to go on facebook and post something like..."Just when I thought I couldn't get anymore awesome, I find out that I can hold my breath for a really really really long time!" To not feel foolish, I google "average time a person can hold his breath underwater".

The result according to a Time article is...2 minutes.

Turns out I'm not that awesome. I managed to avoid looking foolish on facebook, but I can't help feeling foolish anyway. Sigh, such is life!

The Rain Will Kill You

I woke up early this morning to go for a run, but the rain stopped me. So I postponed it to the afternoon, and then it's raining again. Damn, I already canceled my afternoon plans just so I could go for a nice 12km run, but then it just had to rain. Am I supposed to cancel my evening plans too?

The thing is, I've done my hardest to prepare for this coming Sunday's 42km...up to a point, and that point was last week. There's this part of marathon training called "tapering", and man, I fucked that up big time, I think. I've rested too much, the weather hasn't been on my side...and now I'm not sure whether I can live up to my expectations.

I got complacent, after running 35km...I thought the hard part was over, but it wasn't. Sigh. Let's just hope for the best. Gonna run my own race.

Katana Umbrella

I want this for Christmas. I want this so badly I'm willing to buy it for myself. It's on ThinkGeek. After an hour or so of browsing around the site, looking for other things I can by, I was ready to check-out, but gasp, horror of horrors, they don't ship to Singapore.

Sigh! How can you ship to fucking Swaziland and not ship to Singapore? I can not comprehend this, I want my Katana Umbrella.

Kanye West is fuckin' ridiculous.

I've been listening to Kanye's new album a lot of late. It's one of the best albums I've heard, full-stop. I downloaded all his work a few years back, and I thought, "This guy's not bad". But his latest album, My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy is on a whole new level. I'd compare it to the Beatles, if I could, and I am comparing it to The Beatles, it's awesome.

"What's a white Beatle? A cockroach," - Kanye West.

He's the best lah. He's a superstar for our day and age. He makes gaffes, like that time with Taylor Swift, but at least he's honest. He plays it straight, stays true to himself.

Go download his album, and buy it. If you have the time, watch the video of Runaway on youtube, which is 34minutes long, a video accompaniment to his album. And check out this interview of his with Rihanna:

Kanye: So what inspired you to have that pink tank on your last tour? That was amazing, when you were sitting on top of the army tank.
Rihanna: I love to combine femininity with a kind of extreme masculine egde, and I felt like the tank is just not a typical thing that you think of when you think of a girl — or in any kind of relation to a girl. Then we made it hot pink. We just added that touch.
Kanye: I mean, people really need to see a photograph — the entire tank was pink. That was a great piece of commercial pop art. Was the idea of that to kind of portray an American Dream — like the fantasy of a this hot black girl sitting on a top of a pink tank?
Rihanna: I never actually thought of it like that.
Kanye: How does it feel to know that you could have any man in the world. Or woman. How does it feel to know that you can turn straight women gay?
Rihanna: Is that a real question?
Kanye: Yeah.
Rihanna: Well … Thank you. I don’t know how to feel about that. I guess that’s flattering.
Kanye: But just to have that level of power. How do deal with it? No one woman should have that much power.

Vampires Suck.

I wish the following images are fake. With all my heart, I thought to myself, let these be bad photoshops. But they're not. They're real, and if you go to this link, you'll see proof.
http://browseinside.harperteen.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061962257






































































These association with Twilight kinda cheapens the classics, know? I'm sure the authors would be somersaulting in their graves if they knew their works are being promoted by Twilight, of all things. Twilight barely qualifies as literature, to me. I don't mean to take away anything from Stephanie Mayer and I respect the fact that she was able to produce 4 books. Writing is no mean feat.

I respect her, but I hate her books, so there. Cliched, bordering on fanfiction, with cookie-cutter characters. Oh, it reinforces this idea of girls=damsel, which I'm against, because I'm a male feminist. I'm cool like that.