I need a movie Intervention Now!!!

So on a whim I decided to see how many Netflix movies I rented over the last 52 months.  The answer? 749! This made me try to figure out how many movies I have watched over the last few years.  I had to add the 10 movies I have borrowed from the library every  2 weeks for the last 2 years, the 40 movies I have watched Netflix's streaming services since it began and the fact that I have averaged a movie a week in the theater over the last 2 years.  This is a 52 month average of 29 movies a month, or a movie a day.  It may seem that I sound proud of this, but it is more like I am impressed the way you might be impressed watching that little Chinese dude eat 57 hotdogs by dipping them in water.  It is a little sickening... I don't even dare add up the hours.  I'm sure I could have build a pyramid or saved the whales by now had I applied the hours to a more worthy cause, but, whatever.  Anyway, I have made a vow to myself to read more.  About 3 years ago I got interested in Graphic Novels (comic books) and systematically read the highest rated series I was interested in.  When I walk into a book store or library, I have read most of the graphic novels on the shelf.  I have read every Stephen King book, every John Sanford, every Clive Barker (except Imajica), every Neil Gaiman, every Grisham (except the Bleachers), every Crighton, every Peter Mayle, and many others.

Recently, I found a Time Magazine article that listed the 100 best modern novels.  I went through and took out the ones I really couldn't read like Pride and Prejudice and checked off the ones I have already read.  I now have a goal to pick at this list over the next 5 years.  I feel this is a worthy cause and hope to be successful.  I picked up Dicken's Bleak House and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo to start.  I know I won't stop watching movies cold turkey... I will keep my 2 at a time Netflix.  I also have to get a guilty pleasure book every few weeks from the library or I may lose my mind (gots to have my Stephen King now and then.)  Wish me luck in this venture.  If you would like to participate with me, let me know.  I'm not organized enough for a book club, but I would be glad to start a separate blog to discuss the books as we go.

Here is my starting list.  I plan on adding or subtracting as I get deeper into it:

	A	B
1	Books	Read
2	1984 by George Orwell	x
3	To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee	x
4	The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger	x
5	The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien	x
6	The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald	x
7	Animal Farm by George Orwell	x
8	The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck	x
9	Lord of the Flies by William Golding	x
10	Brave New World by Aldous Huxley	x
11	Great Expectations by Charles Dickens	x
12	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain	x
13	Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut	x
14	The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien	x
15	The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis	x
16	Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury	x
17	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey	x
18	Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck	x
19	Frankenstein by Mary Shelley	x
20	Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card	x
21	Life of Pi by Yann Martel	x
22	On the Road by Jack Kerouac	x
23	The Stand by Stephen King	x
24	Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad	x
25	Dracula by Bram Stoker	x
26	The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway	x
27	The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver	x
28	For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway	x
29	Siddharta by Hermann Hesse	x
30	Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut	x
31	The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown	x
32	A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
33	A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
34	A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
36	A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
37	A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
38	Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
39	Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
40	Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
41	As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
42	Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
43	Atonement by Ian McEwan
44	Beloved by Toni Morrison
45	Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
46	Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
47	Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
48	David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
49	Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
50	Dune by Frank Herbert
51	East of Eden by John Steinbeck
52	Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
53	Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
54	His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
55	I, Claudius by Robert Graves
56	Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
57	Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
58	Light in August by William Faulkner
59	Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
60	Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61	Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
62	Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
63	Middlemarch by George Eliot
64	Moby Dick by Herman Melville
65	Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
66	One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
67	Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
68	Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
69	Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
70	The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
71	The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
72	The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
73	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
74	The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75	The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
76	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
77	The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
78	The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
79	The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
80	The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
81	The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
82	The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
83	The Stranger by Albert Camus
84	The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
85	The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
86	The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
87	The Trial by Franz Kafka
88	The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
89	To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
90	Ulysses by James Joyce
91	War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
92	Watership Down by Richard Adams
93	Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Got to go read!

TV - The Black Hole of Death

I don't understand Television any more.  I don't exactly know when my love of the tube changed, but at some point in the 90's, I quit watching mainstream TV.  If I turn on the television anymore, it is only to watch a random Simpson's episode, a cooking show, or a DIY home improvement show.  From what I can tell here are my reasons:

1) I have less time than in the past and so whatever I choose to do can only last an hour or two.

2) We got rid of our TiVo and I'm too lazy to program our DVR or actually plan my life around a show.

3) We seem to be busy every night of the school/work week.

4) The bedtime circus (as I affectionately refer to the act of putting 3 boys to bed) falls right during prime time.

5) Without a TiVo I don't want to invest myself in a series like Lost when I know I will miss at least one episode.

6) I don't understand why I would forfeit watching a movie with normally a higher caliber of acting, special effects and writing to see something that is just interrupted by commercials.

7) Reality TV that I hate more than Hitler has diffused it's way into every channel.

8) I would rather read than watch TV.

9) I feel that watching a movie adds something to my mind, while watching TV subtracts.

10) I am a snob since I bought an HD TV, HD DVD player, and Blu Ray player and only want to watch something clear that sounds beautiful in surround sound.

11) I can control what I and my kids see in a movie by using the web site "kidsinmind.com" but I have no control over what images pop up during commercials or the tv shows themselves.

12) I have an elitest belief that TV is for dumb people and it makes me feel superior. (just threw that one in to see if you were listening.)

13) The purpose of making a movie is for people to spend money on watching the movie and buying the Blu ray where the purpose of TV is to get people to buy other products.

14) A note to all you video game haters... You wag your fingers and call video games destructive and a waste of time, yet have no problem watching reality tv where people marry midgets for money or eat spiders.  You watch CSI Miami which is about as gory as it gets.  You watch Desperate Housewives and get your jollies.  So unless you have burned your tv, thrown away your romance novels, and stopped buying the SI Swimsuit Issue to ogle the painted on bikinis, then you can't cast stones at me playing a little Rockband.  It may be a waste of time, but not any more than watching 3 football games in a row.