The Big Read

I stole this from Kali who stole it from Chrys:

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (Well, I can't figure out how to underline on here, so I'm going to star the ones I LOVE).
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.


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 - I've read some and I have aspirations to read the rest.
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 - I'm italicizing because I haven't read the complete works, but I've read enough.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
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 (the first one)
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**(for the leads it gave me)
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 (the first one)
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' 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

Well, I've read way more than 6 and some of them twice (mainly the books I was assigned to read during school, just to see if they'd have the same effect on a mature me vs. a teenage me. And they did. Heathcliff and Holden still rock my world). I'm going to add some as well:

American Gods - Neil Gaiman**(had to get some Neil on the list)
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore** (graphic novel representation)
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd**
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt**
Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes**

Disguises and Marital Advice

This is the min-blog, or jet-lagged blog before the real-deal blog which I'll get to at some point. Two things have stuck with me over the past few days that I want to write about. I was at a bridal shower yesterday and one of the 'games' we played was to write a bit of marital advice for the new couple on a card. The cards were then read aloud to the bride-to-be and she picked her top 5. The winners got prizes. This is what I wrote:

"Always make time for each other. Share your interests and your passions. Be friends."

It was a winner! Considering the demise of my own marriage, and my relation to the bride-to-be, I could not be considered an expert by any means on marriage. But I was flattered that I won.I do believe in what I wrote. I also believe that when my advice is not happening, or the parties could care less about sharing anything, the relationship is way over. I hope her relationship includes sharing and being friends, and does so for a very long time. I love the girl.

Saturday morning at the airport gate waiting for my flight from JFK to Philly, I noticed this guy. I noticed him because of his big bushy mustache. Then I saw his sleek body and nice physique which totally contradicted the out of date mustache. So then (and remember I am running on nothing, having just flown overnight from Seattle), I finally notice the sunglasses, weird longish blonde hair and red baseball cap. I realize the cap and hair is a wig, and the whole thing is a disguise. As I was watching him, he kept changing seats. I don't even know which flight he eventually got on, I think he was making a concerted effort to blend in, meanwhile to me, he stood out like a sore thumb. I'm sure he was some famous actor, but if he wasn't in disguise, I probably wouldn't have given him a second glance.

The whole idea of standing out more because you want to hide is what's running through my brain. Especially since, and I may blog deeper about this at some point, part of my trip was the realization that despite all the work I've done over the years, all the books I've read, the efforts I've made to be real, to live up to my authentic self - I am still not completely there. Its frustrating. Will I ever be?