My sister posted a blog about the top 100 books, and noted that studies show the average american adult has only read 6 of them. I don't know where she got the list, and she doesn't know where the list came from. Seeing as The DaVinci Code and Bridgett Jones' Diary are both on here, plus the fact that several books are listed twice - singularly and as a part of a set (i.e. Chronicles of Narnia and Lion, Witch and Wardrobe), and the fact that no Graham Greene are listed, I'm a bit skeptical at holding much stock in this list, but being an avid book lover, and having a number one strength of input (see left), I'm up for a list about books!
Oh..and I've read 28 of the 100 listed, counting the combos as one, not individually (I've read all 7 Harry Potter books, thank you very much!)
The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Put ! by ones that you have seen in movie form
6) My rule: Put $ next to ones you've seen on stage.
6) Post. (Don't forget to tag me.)
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 1984 - 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 *$ (read most)
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
20 Middlemarch - George Eliott
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 !$
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
A Week In The Life Of...
I follow Ali Edward's blog. She's a professional scrapbooker, works for magazines and companies and the like. She blogs a lot about her projects and her son, Simon, who is autistic.
Next week, she's doing a week long project called A Week In The Life Of... where she's documenting a week of her life. The idea is to scrapbook the ordinary, the boring, the everyday, those routines that we get into.
I'm planning to do this project. I hope I can keep up with it! Ali's said on her blog that she's blogging about it as a way to be accountable - her readers will hold her accountable. So, I'm thinking if I blog about it, then maybe I'll actually do it, and I'll blog more! (My sister tells me I don't blog enough... :-) ). You guys will hold me accountable, right?
Plus, I'm getting involved in a photography group at church, and I've found it really hard to find photographic inspiration in the every day. Each week I come back with nothing, or with pictures from years ago, because I just feel like my every day is boring. And (back to the child thing) since I don't have children, I don't really feel like I have much to scrapbook about, but I know that's not true. I just haven't found the right angle for inspiration.
So, my hopes for this project:
-Record a week of my life: have a record of my everyday routine.
-Blog about what I'm taking pictures of and my thoughts through the process.
-Find photographic inspiration in my every day life.
-Create a scrapbook/pages about life! (Isn't that what scrapbooking's all about?)
Wish me luck...and if you don't see posts, ask me about them!
Next week, she's doing a week long project called A Week In The Life Of... where she's documenting a week of her life. The idea is to scrapbook the ordinary, the boring, the everyday, those routines that we get into.
I'm planning to do this project. I hope I can keep up with it! Ali's said on her blog that she's blogging about it as a way to be accountable - her readers will hold her accountable. So, I'm thinking if I blog about it, then maybe I'll actually do it, and I'll blog more! (My sister tells me I don't blog enough... :-) ). You guys will hold me accountable, right?
Plus, I'm getting involved in a photography group at church, and I've found it really hard to find photographic inspiration in the every day. Each week I come back with nothing, or with pictures from years ago, because I just feel like my every day is boring. And (back to the child thing) since I don't have children, I don't really feel like I have much to scrapbook about, but I know that's not true. I just haven't found the right angle for inspiration.
So, my hopes for this project:
-Record a week of my life: have a record of my everyday routine.
-Blog about what I'm taking pictures of and my thoughts through the process.
-Find photographic inspiration in my every day life.
-Create a scrapbook/pages about life! (Isn't that what scrapbooking's all about?)
Wish me luck...and if you don't see posts, ask me about them!
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
To Child or Not to Child
There are many divisions in our world. Race, religion, political beliefs, income, the list goes on. The more time I spend being an adult, the less I see these divisions matter. I can have a perfectly good, even wonderful, conversation with someone of a different race, someone of a different denomination or religion, someone with different political beliefs as me, someone in a higher or lower tax bracket than myself. But I find that there is another division that is becoming more and more prevalent each day. That division is whether or not you have children.
Think about it. Everyone who has children can talk about their children non-stop: good or bad. I see it everywhere. I hear it everywhere. I'm a scrapbooker, and as I peruse blogs and sites, everything scrapbooking has to do with children (or travel). Maybe it's just that it's that time of year: starting school, new beginnings, parents are realizing that their children are growing up, so they want to reminisce and hold on to what they currently have before their children turn into adults and, for sure, have children of their own. Maybe it's because my husband and I are now the only ones of his immediate family who are childless. But it seems everything always comes down to the kids...so and so did something cute, so and so was really trying my patience, try this on a page for your kid, how do you deal with this aspect of being a parent?, etc. Not that I exactly mind...I love kids! I want some of my own someday. But I think I really feel left out, because I can't relate. I joke that I don't have kids so I have to scrapbook my dog. And I do (scrapbook my dog, that is). But no matter how cute my dog is, there's really a limit to the variety of pages you can do about a dog. Playing ball...going for a walk...rubbing his belly...that's about it. (I refuse to scrapbook about his bathroom habits, even if they are endearing to me.)
No matter what else divides us, I think it's the kid factor that divides us most, maybe because that's one of the few things that actually affects our daily lives. You have to think about kids daily, if you have them. You don't necessarily think about your religion (even if you should), or your politics (except for right now), or your income (unless it's not high enough). And maybe it's that all of those life factors are thought of a taboo topics. What are you not supposed to bring up in polite conversation? Politics and religion. But kids are fair game. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And though I refrain from scrapbooking my dog's natural system, I know moms who don't refrain from the same about their kids!
And so I wonder if it really is something that changes in you, that moment that a child enters your life. I guess it's kind of obvious that it does. But is it a chemical change? Something physical? Because I've seen it happen to people who haven't actually given birth to the child, just embraced them into their lives.
And I wonder if the same will happen to me when I have kids. I have lots of friends who don't have children. Will my husband and I cross a bridge that separates us from all the other childless people of the world? And if that's an inevitable change, is it one I really want? And is it possible to prevent that change from totally consuming our lives?
Parent or not - what do you think?
Think about it. Everyone who has children can talk about their children non-stop: good or bad. I see it everywhere. I hear it everywhere. I'm a scrapbooker, and as I peruse blogs and sites, everything scrapbooking has to do with children (or travel). Maybe it's just that it's that time of year: starting school, new beginnings, parents are realizing that their children are growing up, so they want to reminisce and hold on to what they currently have before their children turn into adults and, for sure, have children of their own. Maybe it's because my husband and I are now the only ones of his immediate family who are childless. But it seems everything always comes down to the kids...so and so did something cute, so and so was really trying my patience, try this on a page for your kid, how do you deal with this aspect of being a parent?, etc. Not that I exactly mind...I love kids! I want some of my own someday. But I think I really feel left out, because I can't relate. I joke that I don't have kids so I have to scrapbook my dog. And I do (scrapbook my dog, that is). But no matter how cute my dog is, there's really a limit to the variety of pages you can do about a dog. Playing ball...going for a walk...rubbing his belly...that's about it. (I refuse to scrapbook about his bathroom habits, even if they are endearing to me.)
No matter what else divides us, I think it's the kid factor that divides us most, maybe because that's one of the few things that actually affects our daily lives. You have to think about kids daily, if you have them. You don't necessarily think about your religion (even if you should), or your politics (except for right now), or your income (unless it's not high enough). And maybe it's that all of those life factors are thought of a taboo topics. What are you not supposed to bring up in polite conversation? Politics and religion. But kids are fair game. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And though I refrain from scrapbooking my dog's natural system, I know moms who don't refrain from the same about their kids!
And so I wonder if it really is something that changes in you, that moment that a child enters your life. I guess it's kind of obvious that it does. But is it a chemical change? Something physical? Because I've seen it happen to people who haven't actually given birth to the child, just embraced them into their lives.
And I wonder if the same will happen to me when I have kids. I have lots of friends who don't have children. Will my husband and I cross a bridge that separates us from all the other childless people of the world? And if that's an inevitable change, is it one I really want? And is it possible to prevent that change from totally consuming our lives?
Parent or not - what do you think?
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