I knew this would get me. And it did. Soren has been invited to a friend’s house for her first sleepover. She is so excited – until she whacked her shin on her bunkbed ladder, the grin didn’t leave her face. Our little girl is growing up.
There are few friends that I would feel comfortable letting our eldest stay with overnight, and this family is one of them. Their daughter was born on September 11, 2001, and you can’t imagine a sweeter, more loving child being born on such a tragic day. Her parents are sweet and loving people, and I know that Soren will feel secure with them.
But I am still verklempt…..[sob]
On an entirely unrelated note, I blatantly stole this list from Mrs. Chili’s blog. It’s a list of the Top 100 Novels of All Time Voted by Regular People. I have indicated the ones I have read in bold type.
1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I love this book!)
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Ulysses by James Joyce
14. Animal Farm by George Orwell
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
16. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
18. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (does the musical count? Do I have to read it in the original French?)
19. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
21. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
22. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
23. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
24. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
25. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
26. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
27. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
28. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
31. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
35. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
36. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
37. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
38. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
41. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
42. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
43. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
44. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
45. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
46. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
47. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
48. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
49. The Stand by Stephen King
50. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
51. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
54. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
55. Watership Down by Richard Adams
56. Dracula by Bram Stoker
57. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
60. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
62. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
64. Dune by Frank Herbert
65. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
66. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
67. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
68. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
69. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
70. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
71. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
72. The Trial by Franz Kafka
73. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
79. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
80. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
81. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
84. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
85. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LeRoux
86. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
87. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
88. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. Persuasion by Jane Austen
91. Light in August by William Faulkner
92. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
93. Call of the Wild by Jack London
94. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
96. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
97. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
98. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
99. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
100. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
I have read 29 of these. Is anyone up for a new book club? Let’s see, one a month. Blog about it on the first of the month? That would only take us, let’s see….8 ½ years.
Never mind.
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5 comments:
Heh. 8 1/2 years.
I have to tell you how much I appreciate your posting your list. I think of you as an intellectual equal (if not my better in many things) and I'm glad that you've only read as many as I.... does that make any sense?
I have to admit, I consider myself a Reader. I read all the time, I read all kinds of books -- fiction, non-fiction, Mystery, Romance, Teen Fic, History, TimeTravel, NYT Bestseller (thank the Universe for the public library and the second-hand bookstore, or I'd be in debt up to my eyeballs). I too was surprised that when all was said and done, I'd read only a quarter of the books on the list.
My book group meets next week to read one of the books (At-Swim-to-birds) from the TIME list. Maybe I can convince them to help me start chipping away at the rest.
Re: Les Mis, you don't have to read it in the original French but, sorry, the movie doesn't count, nor does the musical. And that, my friends, is why we haven't read more of these books. :)
Aha! So this is what you were doing while I was napping on the couch!
My total was higher 40 5/7), but it must be mentioned that the vast majority of them were read before I was 25. I simply don't take the time to read for pleasure as much as I used to. The fraction is because I haven't finished the Harry Potter series yet.
I'm with Kizz on books like Les Misérables: Read it in whatever language works for you, but read it. Having said that, I wish there were more books translated from Asian languages into English. I'd love to read the series that includes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but no one has translated it yet!
I'm fascinated by the list. There is very little contemporary fiction on it. And I'm not persuaded that it's because contemporary fiction is inherently "less good" than classical works of fiction. Maybe some of it hasn't yet had the chance to withstand the test of time, but I'm fascinated, nonetheless.
Also, Im interested by the fact that some of the "books" on the list are actually series - like His Dark Materials. Seems slightly unfair.
At any rate, I'm planning to post this onto my blog, and tote up how many I've read. I certainly join you in a long-distance book club, by the way. I'd love to read more of these, and have company doing it!
xo
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