OF READING 33/100

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:
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 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
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

OF LOVE ON A DAY OF LOVE

My boyfriend never disappoints me on a holiday (or ever really). I woke up to these beautiful roses and daises, as well as a box of little mini cheesecake tarts from my Valentine ♥

And since my boyfriend had to work at night and I had evening classes, we went to Chelsea Market for lunch. And let me tell you: if I could live there, I would. The place is so cute and charming: the best place to grab some lunch, especially if you have some out-of-town friends in town. The Lobster Place, especially, can do no wrong in my book. They have the best and freshest sushi in New York; I get the Spicy Dragon Roll every time. And of course, I am a sucker for oysters, and here they're creamy and freshly shucked. Yum. I'm going back later this week for some lobster.

And of course, my darling little baby makes my day complete. Whenever I come home to find him sleeping, like this, I can't help but shower him with love and kisses.

OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

I've updated my portfolio website! Pretty please visit. I would love any and all feedback. And if any of you out in the vast expanse of the internet world happen to see this and would like to hire me, I would love you more than any and all of that feedback I was asking for. and sans serif condensed fonts. and my boyfriend. Combined. Seriously;)

a s h l e y m s h e n . c o m

OF WORKWORKWORKWORKWORK

For more than twenty-five years, Charles LeDray (b. 1960) has created sculptures of astonishing technical facility and poetic resonance. Often emblematic of past experiences and evocative of our common humanity, his deftly wrought works reflect a variety of traditional techniques learned through careful observation and experimentation. His sculptures range from re-creations of stuffed animals and tailored clothing to tiny ceramic vessels, bound books, and meticulous carvings of human bone. Inspired by the underlying history of objects, both precious and mundane, LeDray's work evokes pathos and reflection.

LeDray's sculptures often appear miniaturized or otherwise intentionally manipulated in scale; they are assigned a proportion and size that will best reinforce their metaphoric significance and expressive potential. Simply said, everything is the scale it needs to be. While devoid of figuration, his pieces implicate the human form by association and encourage viewers to imagine their own narratives. Drawing on the relationship between the individual and the collective, LeDray's body of work highlights the complexity of identity and experience.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork at the Whitney

The fastidious attention to detail and meticulous precision of LeDray's pieces almost defies my understanding of time and patience. It's riveting, really, how much love and care has been invested to create every single little detail of every single object. And walking through the exhibition, I could feel that love and care... or perhaps it's more so a sense of a nostalgic love. A sense that these objects once held such meaning and sentiment for someone, somewhere, once upon a time, but have now been forgotten and abandoned.

I saw the exhibition for my New Media in New York class, but in many ways, the work actually reaffirms my appreciation for handmade art, as opposed to the digital "new media." I find that "the handmade" requires not only a different level of technical facility, but also more dedication and care, on the artist's part, to his craft, that new media sometimes lacks. And because these works have that "touch of a human hand," there's a kind of heartfelt poetry to it, a sense of humanistic warmth.

OF THE QUICK BROWN FOX

This goes on my wishlist. This probably goes on most of my Communication Design major friends' wishlists too. Found via whatdidwe, a Communication Design friend.

From BIS Publishers, designed by ps. 2 arquiteture + design

OF MY PRECIOUS LITTLE KITTEN

I love him so much ♥

OF CINEMATOGRAPHE

Films by the Lumiere Brothers , the first photographers, cinematographers, filmmakers. But perhaps most importantly, the first documentarians, recording the world before their lens to create snapshots of the everyday (and even arranging the everyday to construct a better, more luminous reality), that which legitimizes our constructions of the past. Non-fiction moving images.

Finding myself once again enamored with black and white. Truly believe that the most beautiful, timeless pieces of art and design can stand on their own without color—moving or unmoving.