Cool Book List

I found this list on Ally's blog and thought it was a fun idea.

The Big Read is an National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE .

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

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
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
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
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
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
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

I faired okay 28/100. Interesting many of my favs are on this list (11/100). Notably Jane Austen did quite well with no less than 4 books - go Jane!

How did everyone else do? My guess is that of my friends and family Mary H will take first place, followed by my Mom and William, then Wendi, Desiree and Mary M. I also bet I am at the bottom of my well read friends list.

Tightwad Gazette

"The Complete Tightwad Gazette" is one of my favorite books. It is a collection of newsletters over a period of six years. Ryan thinks I am a little crazy for reading it or perusing it as often as I do. But honestly it is a great read.

The whole premise of the newsletter (and therefore the book) is that frugality is a great way of life and can help you achieve your dreams. Amy (the author, who I feel is a kindred spirit and therefore I feel entitled to take the liberty of referring to her by her first name as if we were great friends) loves a challenge and she looks at being frugal as a great way to use her creativity - to fix a household item in need of repair or turn a failed batch of jam into something else useful and edible, etc.

I like Amy's no nonsense approach to life, parenting, decorating, organizing, etc. She is an upbeat person with a sense of personal responsibility - which I like. I also enjoy her sense of humor and her great drawings. Another aspect of tightwadding that I really appreciate is environmental. The whole idea that if you consume less you are causing less waste. I like her approach to recycling more than just bottles and paper - she finds new uses for all kinds of things. And I must say I am jealous that her family eats so well (and on so little). They have a tremendous garden and they can the surplus to use throughout the year. I have a few memories of eating home canned peaches and apricots and I can't remember anything store bought tasting quite as good.

For many years I have been a closet reader of this book with only Mary (I hope she won't mind me outing her) as my fellow tightwadder (I sent her a copy of the book for her birthday as soon as I discovered it - there are several other readers of my blog who almost received the same gift for your weddings, birthdays, xmas, etc.). My hope is that by telling the world that I am a proud tightwadder, perhaps other friends and family will join in the movement - it is really much more fun to be thrifty with friends. I do realize this is not for everyone, so do as Amy suggests and check it out from your local library first.

Anne of Green Gables

I borrowed some of the Anne of Green Gables series from my MIL under the auspices of reading them aloud to Audrey. At first I did just that. But truth be told, Audrey is a bit young to listen to a story being read to her without pictures or the like, so she got bored of listening and played while I still read aloud to her. Then I just got into the story too much myself and I just kept reading without her. So I just finished reading Anne of Green Gables for the first time in its entirety. (Prior to this I read an abridged version once.) The real thing was absolutely delightful! I can't wait to read the rest of the series. And I really want to visit Prince Edward Island - which sounds so magical.

Harry Potter

Last month, I found out that HP 7 is finally going to come out in July. I am definitely not a fanatic, but I do like Harry Potter quite a bit. I remember when HP 6 came out I hadn't read the first 5 books for several years and I felt like I was forgetting so much history and depth to the characters. So this time I decided I was going to reread all 6 books before I read HP 7. I figured if I read one a month I would be done just in time to get book 7.

I am happy to report that I finished the first two books already and I am really enjoying this. Harry Potter books are just fun and have a way of making you feel like you are in on some secret world - just hiding among the muggles like the other great witches and wizards.

If anyone else would like to join me, it isn't too late...

Bergdorf Blonds: book review

Sadly I am reviewing chick lit on my blog. Perhaps even more sadly, I am reading chick lit. And saddest of all, I enjoyed this book immensely.

It took me a while (probably 30 pages) to get into the characters and their non-frugal ways (which I found annoying - don't even bother with the shopaholic series if you are frugal like me) but in the end, I thought the characters were well developed and I really liked the twist at the end.

So if you are looking for a light and easy read, dig right in.

Suddenly Strangers - book review

Suddenly Strangers, Brad and Chris Morin, 2004

I know you are traditionally supposed to wait until you finish a book to post a review, but I wanted to say how much I am enjoying this book right now.

Synopsis: This book is written by two brothers who were born and raised Mormon and left later in their adults lives. It is more or less (from what I have read so far) just their personal experiences in leaving. The brothers were very happy in their faith and in their families prior to leaving.

The good: I like this book because I can relate. I know everyone has their own personal religious experiences regardless of what religion you are, but in many ways, there are some common threads that happen to most people when they are making a transition. I also like the title, I think it is a great description of the way it feels to lose the religion you were born and raised in.

The bad: I think this is a niche market book. For people who know nothing about Mormons, they will probably be bored quite quickly. Also, so far, they are going to great lengths to tell just how great their family lives were - maybe a bit of overkill. The formatting is a little awkward - it is really 2 stories in one book.