Books

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these.So, we are encouraged to:

So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read. (I had to underline them in order to get them to stand out)

2) Italicize those we intend to read.

3) Underline the books we LOVE

4) Reprint this list in our own blogs and share!






1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (LOVED IT)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (1 out of 3 anyway)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (no but I should considering I follow beliefs taught from this book.

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 (I think)

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (almost… minus a few)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

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 (Hillarious)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky


28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Hated it...really I did not enjoy this book)

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 (Loved it)

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (definitely on the list, I love 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 (I tried too)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (I had to look this one up to make sure I read it, but I did, I believe it was a Woman's studies class, very interesting from what I remember)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert (working on it)

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 (again, not a Steinbeck fan)

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

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (no, but I've read Frankenstein... does that count?)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I think)

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


Ok, my total was 18, which is not quite my best friends 23, but oh well. It is still better than the average 6. Plus, I am working on Dune, really, I am on page 90 something. And honestly, I think I have read some of them, but simply don't remember, because it was so long ago. Plus, I think I tried to read quite a few of them (3 Musketeers) and Les Miserables when I was young (i.e. 12 to 13) and should probably try again. I do note as well that many of these are award winning movies. It may be worth watching some- you know cliffs notes to make sure the book would be something I might read.

Moving States, New Jobs, New School, New House etc.

Well, it has been a ridicolously long time since posting, but alas, I have been busy.
Alex and I both started our new jobs on June 9th. Some saintly women from the Fout family (Grandma Karen and Aunt Jen) helped us out and watched James until he could start day care on June 30th. We have both had adjustment times at work. My work is very challenging on an intellectual level, but I am really enjoying it. Alex had to get his new account into shape and drivers into line, but he has done so, and things have calmed down for him too.

July 4th James and I went to the trailer, and well, some weekends are best left untalked about. Nothing bad happened, it was just a little more stressful than I bargained for. That being said, it was great to see my cousins and their kids.

The rest of July was spent working and being lazy on the weekends. When you are livng in an apartment (something we have not done in a while) there is a whole lot less to do "around the house" on the weekends. So, we did not do much. I did go to Ohio the last weekend in July and went to the Irish Fest with Anne and saw one of our favorite bands Gaelic Storm. It was fun, but really hot! I have to admit, Irish Fests do lose something when you can't drink.


So, while I did not write at all in July it was because there was not much going on in apartment living. Overall, apartment living was not for us and we are happy to report that as of this past Saturday, August 2nd, apartment living came to an end.

We are also happy to report that we no longer own the house in Kansas! We were very fortunate in that we only had a 15 day overlap in homeownerships. We closed on the house here on July 15th and the house in Kansas closed on July 30th. As you can imagine, this was a HUGE relief. The stress in our household went way down knowing that was done and we were not going to be paying a double mortgage.

So, we are in the house, with only the stuff we brought for the apartment. It looks pretty barren, but I am already enjoying my new kitchen. The rest of our household goods (163 boxes plus furniture) is supposed to arrive tomorrow in between 10:00 and noon. So, that should be fun.

James is loving the new house, he has a sand box and swing set and run of the house, no more small apartment! He is so much happier, it is amazing. He has been having a hard time adjusting to day care, or at least he has a problem in the morning when I drop him off. He does not shake off, I am told, until usually about half hour to 45 minutes after I leave, but when I a pick him up, he seems happy. However, I am hoping the mornings will get better soon, especially since he already seems so much happier in the house.

So, that is what is going on with us. I will try to post more often again, but that is a quick summary of our summer!