19. Time Traveler's Wife

2009-04-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

My book club read this in March. Great book!

95. The Confederacy of Dunces

2008-10-06T04:27:00.000-07:00

I finished this last night; it took me forever to read! The protagonist had absolutely no redeeming qualities! I really liked Burma Jones and also Detective Mancuso. The second half of the book moved along better than the first half and I liked that the author pulled all of the characters together at the end.

68. Bridget Jones Diary

2008-09-09T19:04:00.000-07:00

This was a cute book and an easy read. And it makes me glad that I missed the whole "single in my 30's" craziness.

2008-08-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a list put forth by the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S. It lists the top 1oo books and asks how many you've actually read. The Big Read (which is an initiative of the NEA designed to restore reading to the center of American culture) estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the books on this list.Here’s how it works:

Look at the list and bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Reprint this list on your blog and link back to this post.

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 (LOVE them!)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (it’s a work in progress, but I’m going to bold it anyway!)

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 heart Little Women)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read a lot of them…)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (I’ll be reading this in March for my book club.)

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (maybe?)

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (saw the movie J)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (yeah, not happening.)

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

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 (Why is this on here if the Chronicles are also on here?)

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 (Better than the movie)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (I tried, Joelma, really, I tried.)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 (This book was fantastic…. Just get through the first 100 pages. Very thought provoking)

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 (funny that this in on here…)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (one of my favorites as a child)

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

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (Love anything by 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 (I don’t even know what this IS.)

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 (Did I read this in college? I think I did, but should it really count if I can’t remember?)

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

That looks like 38 total. Not so impressive. I read a LOT, but apparently I need to read BETTER! I love lists like this, because I love marking things off lists! I’ve listed 15 books to try to read.

Here is the challenge! Pick three books that you haven’t read but think you should. And let’s read them together. Leave me a comment with the books you pick!

The Big Read List

19. Time Traveler's Wife

95. The Confederacy of Dunces

68. Bridget Jones Diary