Traveling around Facebook is a list of books that supposedly the BBC thinks you will have only read 6 of. I kept my count at the end of the line. I was doing good with 6 out of 7 to start.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (2)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (3)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (4)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (5)
6 The Bible - the whole thing and not just parts. (I tried and gave up, several times)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (6)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (7)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (8)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (9)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (10)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (11)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (12)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (13)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (14)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (15)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (16)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (17)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (18)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (19)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (20)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (21)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (22)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (23)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (24)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (25)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (26)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (27)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (28)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (29)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (30)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried several times - 2)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (31)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (32)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (33)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (34)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (35)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (36)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (37)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (38)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (39)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (40)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (41)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (42)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I tried - 3)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (43)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (44)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (45)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (46)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (47)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I tried multiple times - 4)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (48)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (49)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (50)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (51)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (52)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (53)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (54)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (55)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (56)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (57)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (58)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (59)
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 (60)
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 (61)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (62)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (63)


So out of the 100, I read 63 and 4 of them I tried to read and decided they weren't worth it.

25 things that make me happy

This is for the 3 people in the last week who "tagged" me with the 25 things post on facebook.
1. Higgy
2. Big boy O - he won't let me call him baby anymore
3. Baby L - she'll always be the baby
4. Reading a really good book
5. Recommending a book to some one and finding out they really enjoyed it
6. My comfy bed - feather bed, soft sheets and down comforter
7. thick fuzzy socks - my favorites are pink and purple stripes and they have a face with ears that stick out on the ankles
8. Getting letters in the mail, e-mail - whatever, I like to hear from people
9. the smell of fresh baked bread
10. Hot chocolate with whipped cream, although marshmallows work too
11. Hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, nuts and a cherry
12. sleeping children - bonus for 2 kids taking naps at the same time
13. laughing children
14. Quiet - with rain on the roof
15. Watching silly teen romance movies in the dark in my comfy bed
16. Skipping
17. Eating dinner in a restaurant by myself - especially eating just dessert and appetizers
18. Being able to touch my toes the first time I try
19. Having bicep muscles that I can actually see
20. Friends who travel to a different city for a girl's weekend and the friends who just wish they could make it
21. Making a fancy recipe and having it actually come out the first time
22. Photos or paintings of a single tree and either the sun or the moon
23. A warm bath with smelly bath salts (Hurray for the arrival of Lush in Sacramento)
24. A cat curled on my lap who doesn't bite when I move (unfortunately, the one in my house bites..., I miss my Waldo cat)
25. Christmas cookies - Yummy Carmel Bars, Pecan tarts, lemon bars, crisp decorated sugar cookies - why are the only for Christmas?

Tournament of Books

Every year The Morning News conducts a Tournament of Books ala March Madness.

According to a friend, they have some great authors as judges and the commentary on the books is often both insightful and funny. She looks forward to it every year and often adds several titles to her "want to read" list of books.

I'm going to try and follow along this year, maybe you want to as well????

Iodine - Haven Kimmel

This was just a strange book, a puzzling book. I still enjoyed the style, but I had to really pay attention to follow along. It follows a girl who is coming close to graduating from college when she becomes involved with a professor - that is the easy part. But the rest of the story is the flashback to how she got there; her relationship with her family and her past. It is these flashbacks and remembrances that are the bulk of the book - and where the confusion comes in. Trace/Ianthe, the main character, is trying to reinvent herself but her past keeps coming back in. It makes it painful to read, painful to think about living like she does.

It is the kind of book that I am still thinking about a few weeks later. But it is not a book I am likely to read again.