I'm a Bookworm

I love to read. The only time I got in trouble in school was when I was reading when I was supposed to be listening. Well, almost the only time I got in trouble. I did get in trouble in kindergarten for vandalizing the bathroom wall. I found a crayon on the floor and for some reason wrote my name (my name...as if they wouldn't know who did it) on the bathroom wall. I obviously didn't know I was doing anything wrong, or I wouldn't have advertised that fact that I was the culprit by putting my name on the wall, but I got in trouble anyway and had to stay in from recess. Recess! Everyone else went outside to play, and I was left in the room alone and told to keep my head down on my desk until everyone came back. I did leave my head down for a few minutes while I cried my eyes out. Then I did cartwheels across the room (well, cartwheel attempts) and stood on the teacher's desk. I don't know why. I guess I thought that would show mean old Mrs. Cope (whom I loved dearly most of the time). But I digress.

I really am writing this post to explain while I was looking for a widget to put on my blog to show what book I am currently reading (because I'm always reading something) I came across this list of top 100 books that the The National Endowment for the Arts came up with. It's estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, some people have made a meme (blog game) of this list, and I'm going to play too.

Here's what you do if you want to play:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I skipped this step--I feel the need to read them all now that I know these are the 100 most popular books--well, supposedly.)
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

Here's my list!

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] Actually, there's a few OT books I've never made it through...just a few though.
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 Not sure I'll ever make it through this...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 [The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger I know I won't read this one. I tried once. It's not for me.
19 The Time Traveler’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 I started this once...not sure why I didn't finish.
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 - CS Lewis]
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 Ack! So boring! At least the first 100 pages were.
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

Hmm...I feel that as a former English teacher I should have done better than that. I'd better head to the library!