Culturefication

I’m a little slow in posting this but, you see, there really hasn’t been time. So, dear readers, I ask that you rewind your brains to Valentine’s day weekend and the days leading up to it. For all of the MBAs here at the RSB this meant that finals were fast approaching, we were getting several emails a day congratulating the new leadership of clubs that we are not members of and getting stir crazy – ready to get out of Ann Arbor and hopefully to somewhere warm and sunny. I went to New Jersey – something I will tell you about in another post. Along with all of the generic goings on I also had the opportunity to attend two concerts in the Hill Auditorium with some of my sectionmates. First up was a group called Sweet Honey in the Rock. While they are very good musicians and I found their music uplifting and inspiring, I found them to be overly political for my taste. I mean, I’m jazzed that Obama is the president but I don’t feel the need to turn every conversation into an opportunity to sing his praises. Next up was Kodo, the Japanese drumming group. Going into this concert I have to admit that I was less than excited. I don’t really like loud sounds. I think that this has something to do with the number of ear infections I had as a child, my ability to actually feel my eardrums moving (or at least I think I can… I wonder if I am alone in this sensation or if other people feel it too) and my paranoia that they are going to burst again. Something that most people don’t know about me is that I am hyper vigilant about my ear health. Now that I got that off my chest, back to Kodo. The concert was the day before valentine’s day and clearly prime date night. The problem? I went with a classmate of mine who is engaged. We’re friends and all but it was a little awkward especially because we ran into several people we know. We also just met in our seats and parted ways right after the concert. In that way it was like sitting next to a stranger except we aren’t strangers. Aside from the awkwardness and the loud noises I have to say I LOVED IT and I would totally go again. The drummers were amazing and the music was moving, soothing and exciting all at the same time. If you have the opportunity to see them I highly ask that you seize it.

Aside to Hill Auditorium: Only people that are 5’2” could possibly fit in those chairs. Do us all a favor – remodel and get yourself some legroom.

What does this say about me?

One of my friends posted this on her blog (apparently the BBC has speculated that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books in this list) and I thought it was interesting because as I was scanning down the list I noticed that I had read more than six of these books by the time I was 13. Additional proof that I attended some seriously fantastic schools. I've also read some crazy things like Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English. What does your list look like and what does that say about you? 

Key:

x - I've read it

+ - I love it

* - I plan on reading it

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x+

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x+

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x

6 The Bible x+

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x

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

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewisx +

34 Emma - Jane Austen x

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x+

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x

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 x

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *

52 Dune - Frank Herbert x

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x+

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 x+

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 x+

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x+

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce x+

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x

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 x

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 x

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x

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 x

A Magical Place

This is a magical place we at the Ross School of Business like to call the "Winter Garden"... never mind that we like to call it that because that is what we have been told it is called. Oddly enough there are no plants. Can a place be a garden if there are no plants? Just one of the profound questions I ponder while sitting here (which I am doing right now... the sitting, not the pondering). Shockingly enough I know many of the people in this picture. For example, the red head with her feet up on the table... I've never talked to her but she is friends with the girl who picked up my blackberry and returned it to me when I dropped it in a lecture hall after hours in the school of education a few months ago so I have to like her plus she always wears scarves and I like scarves. But we were talking about the winter garden. It is our main common space in the new building, the cafeteria is there and there are plugs in the tables so it pretty much satisfies all the needs of your average MBA. Food, power for your laptop and lots of people like you to talk to about things you are mutually interested in - like how to make money and/or get an internship. I really like sitting here. The chairs are comfortable and the ceiling is made of glass which makes it feel like you are outside even when you are desperately trying to avoid ever being outside. I like it so much that I spend all my non-class time here which nets out to several hours a day. Basically what I'm saying is that if you ever need to find me this is where you should look because it is probably where I am. Thank you and goodnight.