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I have established a new blog, Hinterland, where in future I will be posting – as the name suggests- about my interests outside work: films, art, books, shoes, ranting(!).
I will continue to update Intersecting Sets with posts where the primary focus is upon professional interests and Higher Education. The older posts on wider themes will still be available here, and have also been migrated across to Hinterland.
The bifurcation of content reflects a recognition that I blog for two rather different purposes (professional development and personal amusement) and, potentially, for two very different audiences (yes, people actually read some of this stuff!). I realised that although the starting point for Intersecting Sets was the personal intersection of a range of work, research and social interests, I am now more comfortable with posting to different ‘sets’ in separate places.
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Happy New Year!!
On the recommendation of University Diary, I tested GenderAnalyzer, which tries to determine whether a blog is written by a man or a woman – with the following result -
We guess http://intersectingsets.wordpress.com/ is written by a man (53%), however it’s quite gender neutral.
Hmmm…I don’t think the search engine picked up on the shoe posts!
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14 December marks the 90th anniversary of the election of the first woman to the British House of Commons, and the first election in which women were able to stand as candidates and to vote. The 1918 election was also the first in which all men aged 21 or over could vote (free of earlier property qualifications), while the female franchise was initially restricted to women aged 30 or over who met certain property requirements. The vote was extended to all women (aged 21 or over) in 1928 and cast a year later in what was dubbed the Flapper election.
See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography feature for more details: http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/freeodnb/votes/
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Reading a recent post on OUPBlog got me thinking (yes, I know…)
Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore.
There is a particular strand in publishing (and for that matter, TV) relating to the unusual or quirky challenge tied in with a book deal/TV show relating the ‘journey’ – from Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days to Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack or Charlie Connelly’s Attention all shipping.
Now I realise that I am unlikely to get a book deal to track the trials and tribulations of a year in higher education quality management or a year spent servicing committees, so I’m procrastinating from this morning’s ’stuff to do’ by thinking about what my challenge would be? What would be the quirk/USP? What would be the ultimate coffee, book, film, travel or shoe challenge?
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Tagged: books, challenges
Thanks to Casey for this – top 100 books as derived a survey for World Book Day a couple of year’s ago (printed in The Telegraph). As with all top lists and (University league tables) there are other lists from which to choose, including the BBC Big Read list and the Guardian’s more international list.
The challenge is:
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4. Reprint this list on your own blog.
I admit that I have a couple of problems with this list – not least, listing Hamlet and the complete works of Shakespeare! I seem to do well on books by dead beardy blokes (no surprise there), less well on children’s books (I grew up in Stoke. Nuff said) and I’m not sure I can bring myself to complete a work of fiction by Tolkien or C S Lewis (and I have tried!).
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 Hitchhiker’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’s Adventures 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
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 – A. S. 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
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