Chick lit

Recent reserch by the uni of London has compiled a list of liturature that has changed your life. The reseach, based on about 500 interviews found that "the novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion."

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals." Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence, and tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or assupport and inspiration.

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books. "We were completely taken aback by the results," said Prof Jardine, who admitted that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.

Can you pick which list is which?

• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Middlemarch by George Elliot
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Golden Notebook by Dorris Lessing
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• Rememberence of Things Past by Marcel Proust
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Oranges are not the only fruit by Janette Winterson
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
• Little Women by Lousia May Alcott
• Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
• The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Tourist in my own town

I went to Coogee Beach today. I think I've only been there about 4 times before, once on a sunny winters day to start the cliff top walk to Bondi with two women friends. Today I walked the other direction, south, and discoved the divine Coogee Women's only baths. Its still 20 cents entry (possibly price fixed since the 30s!) and you can swim laps while looking at the little fishies, feeling safely enclosed by a concrete wall from those sharks that made them close the beach a month or so back. It looks like this.

Todays's quote "All knowledge has value". Honours Religious Sociology Student to Council Worker at Sydney Uni Bus Stop.

Tortugitas

Wildlife conservation is not just about oh so serious scientists with clipboards and population counts. Out on the Uruguayan coastline it means being part of the community. Which means creating a parade (desfile) as part of Carnaval, where a dozen local kids (and adult volunteers) get to dress up in morphologically accurate costumes of the local marine fauna. Of course.