Rebecca St. James feels sad for Britney

With Britney Spears exhibiting more unsettled behaviour (along with more skin), Christian singer Rebecca St. James says she feels sad for Britney.

From a cnn.com article: "The biggest thing I feel for Britney is I feel sad for her," she (Rebecca) told Reuters in an interview on Saturday.

"I also feel sad for the nine or 10-years-old watching her who see her dressing in a very promiscuous fashion, almost asking for people to treat her as a sex object. They are going to start dressing that way too."

Australian-born Rebecca fronts the True Love Waits organization in the U.S. which urges teenagers to avoid pre-marital sex.

How well-read are you?



As an avid reader all my life, I've considered myself pretty well-read...but maybe not as much as I thought, after checking out this list from collegeboard.com...which I actually ran across on Scott McClare's blog.

The books that I have read are bold-faced. How do you fare?

Achebe, Chinua-- Things Fall Apart
Agee, James-- A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane-- Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James-- Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel-- Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul-- The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte-- Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily-- Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert-- The Stranger
Cather, Willa-- Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de-- Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton-- The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate-- The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph-- Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore-- The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen-- The Red Badge of Courage
Dante-- Inferno
Defoe, Daniel-- Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles-- A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor-- Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick-- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore-- An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre-- The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George-- The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph-- Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo-- Selected Essays
Faulkner, William-- As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William-- The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry-- Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott-- The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave-- Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox-- The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von-- Faust
Golding, William-- Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas-- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel-- The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph-- Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest-- A Farewell to Arms
Homer-- The Iliad
Homer-- The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor-- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale-- Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous-- Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik-- A Doll's House
James, Henry-- The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry-- The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James-- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz-- The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine-- Hong The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper-- To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair-- Babbitt
London, Jack-- The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas-- The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia-- One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman-- Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman-- Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur-- The Crucible
Morrison, Toni-- Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery-- A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene-- Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George-- Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris-- Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia-- The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen-- Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel-- Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas-- The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria-- All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond-- Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry-- Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.-- The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William-- Hamlet
Shakespeare, William-- Macbeth
Shakespeare, William-- A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William-- Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George-- Bernard Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary-- Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon-- Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander-- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles-- Antigone
Sophocles-- Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John-- The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis-- Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher-- Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan-- Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William-- Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David-- Walden
Tolstoy, Leo-- War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan-- Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark-- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire-- Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr-- Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice-- The Color Purple
Warton, Edith-- The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora-- Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt-- Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar-- The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee-- The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia-- To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard --Native Son

Now, some of those I've read partially, like Edgar Allan Poe's "Selected Tales." And while I didn't read George Eliot's "Mill on the Floss," I did read her "Silas Marner"... a few other Charles Dickens books besides the one listed, like "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations," and a few other Jane Austen books as well, including "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility."

As I commented on Scott's blog, many of those books were required reading for me in high school...others were read when I went on a big self-improvement kick as a teen-ager. Some of them I've always meant to read; some of them, I've seen the movie, and some of them I've quite frankly never heard of before seeing them on the list.

Still others, like "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights" and "Pride and Prejudice," are among my favorite books of all time.