the big read

First of all, THANKS for all the notes about the last depressing entry. It really really helps to hear of people who have had this same thing and it turned out fine. My father is STILL in the hospital, but he’s in good spirits. Of course. No word on what the CAT scan said, no word on when he’ll be coming home. When he had a bypass operation three (four??) years ago, the VA kept him THREE WEEKS before they even did the operation. I really think that the more patients they have, the mone money they get. But he LOVES the VA. He worked there from the time he got out of the Navy (he was 17 – not even old enough to legally join the Armed Forces) until he retired, and I guess it’s like being at his second home. When he was waiting for the bypass he’d go down to the boiler room, where he used to work, in his pajamas. And visit his friends.

So in the absence of anything else to talk about, I’ll do this fun Book Survey swiped from both  Cousin E and Clanky .

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The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read project is a direct assault on the rather frightening statistics for the steady decline in reading in adult Americans.  Check out the website:  http://www.neabigread.org/index.php 

 
a) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
b) Italicize those you intend to read.
c) Underline the books you LOVE.
d) Strikethrough the books you have no intention of ever reading, or HATED.
 
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 Like everyone else, I ask -does reading some of them count?
 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
  18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger Although I loved Franny and Zoey more
 19 The Time Traveller’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 Hitchhiker’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 Austin
 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
 36 Peter Pan – James M Barrie
 37 The Kite Runner – Khaleed 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 Most overrated and poorly written book EVER.
 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 I LOVED this movie, but I don’t suppose that counts.
 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 Nighttime – 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 LovelyBones – Alice Sebold Read it, but didn’t like it much. 
 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 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo