How many of these have you read?

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?



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 (on a side note, I detest Charles Dickens)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (I've read this 3 times do they each count?)
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 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 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
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
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- question- why is this on here if the complete works of shakespeare was earlier in the list? Why don't they just list them all separately?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo



Well, 39 of them isn't bad... especially since I've read a lot of classics that aren't on that list like works by Poe and The Odyssey.

One Word

1. Where is your cell phone? charging

2. Your hair? auburn

3. Your mother? Sheila

4. Your father? John

5. Your favorite food? Popsicles

6. Your dream last night? dunno

7. Your favorite drink? tea

8. Your dream/goal? fame

9. What room are you in? bedroom

10. Your hobby? scrapbooking :)

11. Your fear? stupidity

12. Where you want to be in 6 years? richer

13. Where were you last night? bed

14. Something you aren't? snotty

15. Muffins? blueberry

16. Wish list item? money

17. Where did you grow up? Lynnwood

18, Last thing you did? eat

19. What are you wearing? black

20. Your tv? off

21. Your pet? many

22. Friends? close

23. Your life? interesting

24. Your mood? tired

25. Missing someone? yes

26. Vehicle? Ruby

27. Something you're not wearing? hat

28. Your favorite store? Import

29. Your favorite color? Blue

30. The last time you laughed? yesterday

31. The last time you cried? ???

32. One place you go to over and over? work

33. Facebook? nope

34. Favorite place to eat? Zab Thai

As we step into 2010...

First day of school

It seems like Summer just started and here we are at the first day of school. I have to admit that I have already felt Fall in the air. We had a hot time for a while, but this has been a fairly mild, albeit dry, summer for us. I haven't photographed the kids' school pictures yet, but they were both good enough to wake me up this morning before they went to the bus to let me take the annual "First Day of School" picture. THe last couple years have only been separate, with Chloe in high school and Charlie in middle school, but next year, they will be together again (yikes! Both my babies in high school!) Anyhow, here's what they looked like before they left the house this morning:

I think Chloe was still tired... Charlie was pretty awake, though.

This week's Blog Prompt

Seeing as it's the end of the year and students are reflectng on the past school year. (okay, they're probably doing more planning for the Summer than reflecting, but I can dream.) Anyway,when you reflect on your school years, was there a particular teacher that made a big impact on you? that you still think of?

I think that during my school years, probably one of the teachers that made the biggest impacts on me was my 3rd grade teacher, Mr. McMullen. I was in a 2nd/3rd Grade split room and after the 2nd graders left for the day, we older kids were exposed to lots of cool things, including writing our own books (which were entered in a Young Author's Competition- mine won that year!) as well as I think that class fostered my love of reading because Mr. McMullen would read to us. However, he didn't bother with kids' books... we heard "Tarzan" and "Where the Red Fern Grows" and stuff like that.

Blog Tag

This is a fun little game!
Anyhow, if I tag you, all you have to do is just go to the place on your computer where you store your photos, then to the sixth folder, then to the sixth photo. Select that photo, pop it onto your blog and tell the story. Then you choose people to tag...
Here's my pic because I got tagged by Becky over at PageMaps :)

This is a bunch of stone archways at Gasworks Park in Seattle. It's a park that I've always loved to visit (even when I was little). On this particular day, I went with my kids and it was a nice sunny day. I just loved the way the shadows looked almost like stair steps.

I am actually tagging friends & family from my other blog since I don't have any listed on here yet, so, I am going to tag:

Amanda
Susanne

Unfortunately, I don't have emails for anyone else...