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 Fitzgerald23 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 Brown43 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 Austen55 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 Dickens72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett74 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 Dickens82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker84 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!
Sometimes silence is scary. If I happen to leave Colter in a room by himself for a few minutes, and the house suddenly gets strangely still, I never know what I might find when I run to discover the reason for the quiet. Sometimes though, I find a sweet little scholar reading in his room! Even though it makes a big mess, I love it when he sweeps all the books off his shelf and onto the floor into a big pile. It's so cute when he sits in the middle of the pile to "read." It gives me hope that maybe someday, someone in our household besides me will read something other than sports books and the news (I love you, John, even though my inner bookworm really wishes you would pick up some fiction every now and then).
