Readin' More than the BBC

Why, yes, I do read a lot.  Check this out:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.


Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not.) Feel free to add comments too.


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 (won't read this one, sorry)
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 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 (read this one SEVERAL times!)
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 - Kazu 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.

The Model of Human Behavior

Turns out I'm a "C" - cautious.

D = Dominant
I = Inspiring
S = Supportive
C = Cautious

Not the best description, but better than just leaving my post here.

I'm listening to a CD by Dr Robert Rohm from the TEAM program that my hubby is involved in. He wants me to be as fired up as him and listen to CDs and read, but I'm having a hard time with it. I'm starting with this very interesting CD about Personality Types.

Should you be interested, click the email me link over on the side bar (well, click my profile thingy first) and I'll send you more info.

Pillars of the Earth

I don't often read Oprah Book Club suggestions since they are often depressing and world weary. So I was surprised when I read the jacket for this book and was intrigued enough to continue on! Non-stop for the next week, I was hooked on the unabridged audio book. Give it a try!

Random Cracked Quotes

I'm completely wiped after preparing for the Halloween school carnival and am SO glad that it was last night. It was great fun - costume contest, food, pumpkin carving contest, candy, games, raffle, prizes, candy, inflatable jumpers, LOTS of people, more candy, and a good profit for the school, which was the real whole point.

Based on my good mood, here's some funnies from the fortune telling device on my Ubuntu Linux desktop:

Gone With The Wind LITE(tm)
-- by Margaret Mitchell

A woman only likes men she can't have and the South gets trashed.

Gift of the Magi LITE(tm)
-- by O. Henry

A husband and wife forget to register their gift preferences.

The Old Man and the Sea LITE(tm)
-- by Ernest Hemingway

An old man goes fishing, but doesn't have much luck.

I Lost My HYPHEN!!

From Reuters:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf, hobby horse, ice cream, pin money, pot belly, test tube, water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee, chickpea, crybaby , leapfrog, logjam, lowlife, pigeonhole, touchline, waterborne

A Sweet Story...

Come with me to a third grade classroom.....

There is a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened. It's never happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they'll never speak to him again as long as he lives.

The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his head down and prays this prayer, "Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I'm dead meat."

He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered

As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with water. Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy's lap.

The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is saying to himself, "Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!"

Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out. All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else - Susie.

She tries to help, but they tell her to get out. "You've done enough, you klutz!"

Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers, "You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

Susie whispers back, "I wet my pants once too."

May God help us see the opportunities that are always around us to do good.

Remember.....Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.

Each and everyone one of us is going through tough times right now, but God is getting ready to bless you in a way that only He can.

Keep the faith.

Do You Like Comments?

You see that badge over there in my sidebar? It looks like this:


It means that you will get linky love from Google when you leave a comment. And this means more comments for Y-O-U! I also come visit you when you leave comments. If you want to do an easy fix to bring your linkage up, please visit Randa Clay for badges and step by step instructions.

And another thing - I love comments because Blogger automatically sends me them via email. And I can reply to you right from the warm embrace of my very own Gmail page! But only if you check the box on YOUR Blogger profile page that says "SHOW MY EMAIL ADDRESS".

Now, if you're worried about privacy and real names, go over to Gmail or Yahoo or your favorite free email provider and set up an email that is something like your blog title@your favorite provider.com.

If you need step by step instructions on how to click that little box and get lovely emails from moi, visit Kisses of Sunshine for a very easy to understand (now with pictures!!) post on this very subject.

Come on, people. Check the box, let me send you my warm fuzzies via email!

READ THIS!

If Looks Could Kill... I'd be Smoldering Ashes!

Did you ever read any Shirley Jackson stories? They're kind of odd - drawing numbers to see who gets stoned in the village (The Lottery), a paranormal house that appears totally normal (The Haunting of Hill House), and so on.

I love literature and reading. I once aspired to be a writer and was fairly good at it. I love history, too. While this is all nice background info on me, it doesn't do much to add to the killing looks story.

So imagine if you were writing a story in the Shirley Jackson style based on the premise that looks could kill. Where would it go? Would the human race be discontinued in infancy? How many times in the life of a mother would she be reduced to a smoldering pile of ash?

Interesting idea, huh? When you write this story, dedicate it to me, your beautiful muse, for providing the idea.




This post inspired by a line in the book I'm currently reading:

What to Read: The Road

Yeah, it's an Oprah book club choice, but I didn't choose it because of that. The back of the book summary looked interesting! The book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

I've spoken before of reading books as the spoken word - audio books. I really enjoy this form since I can be reading at the same time I work, walk the kids to the bus, cook, clean, or whatever. I load the book onto my mp3 player and listen away.

So far, this has been interesting - I'm on the 2nd of 6 CDs, unabridged. So far, I'd recommend it!

Interesting Article: US Catholic June 2007

I just got my new issue of US Catholic in the mail today and a headline on the cover intrigues me. Because it just arrived and I have four children and one husband and several sewing jobs ahead of me, I won't have a chance to read it anywhere other than... well... you know. (The throne.)

How embarrassing!

Anyway, the point of my blather this evening when I should be doing at least 3 other things (sewing, counting Box Tops for the end of the year submission, dishes, laundry, mothering, etc.) is that the article I want to read FIRST is called Are Cohabitating Catholics Always Living In Sin?

Oooo, shiver of attentiveness because I recognize people I know and love in this situation. Hubbers just now tells me that he thinks it sounds like gossip. Is it? Or is it just educating yourself on a trend that is very likely to continue?

Nevertheless, there are a LOT of people in this situation. Here's some stats on this:

• In 2004 there were 5,080,000 unmarried couples in America.
• Between 1960 and 2004, the number of unmarried couples in America increased by over 1200%
• Cohabitation rates are 8.2% for Mormons, 20 to 24% for Protestants, 23.1% for Catholics, 32.5% for Jews, and 44.8% for nonreligious Americans.
• The risk of divorce after living together is 40 to 85% higher than the risk of divorce after not living together. In other words, those who live together before marriage are almost twice as likely to divorce than those who did not live together.
• Cohabiting couples have an 80%+ chance that their relationship will end. (40% breakup before they marry; the other 40% divorce within 10 years of marrying.)

-- All About Cohabitating before Marriage

Because I made mistakes in my life before kids and marriage, because I wish to teach my children not to make the same mistakes (make new and different ones!), because I wish to live the life of the religion I profess, because I believe that marriage is a sacrament, because I thought this article looked good, I'm sharing it with you.

You can't read it online just now - you have to purchase the magazine. I'd offer to share mine, but then what would I read while... occupied?

A few more resources:

Reasons Marriage is better
The Positive Benefits of Marriage


One last thing: 5 Mins for Mom is having a Nexcare bandage give away - 1 yr supply - 45 boxes! I really hope I win this one (but you can enter too) since we go through bandaids like candy around here, what with Hubbers being a skater, BoyBoy being a boy, and the girls thinking they can climb trees. Visit on over there and enter to win!

The Baby's Crying! Now What?

As a new mom, I found myself asking this question a LOT. As a La Leche League Leader Applicant, it's one of the questions I may have to answer. Check out this piece from the local paper:

In case you can't read the small type and don't want to click on it, it says:

The baby is crying. Should you pick him up? Studies show that infants whose basic need are met promptly and sensitively tend to cry less overall.

So don't be afraid to comfort your baby when he or she cries. You're helping your baby develop that sense of trust, the first step in becoming an emotionally healthy child.

Source: Brain Wonders 1998 -2001

In the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding there is a quote from the late Dr. Lee Salk, who was a pediatric psychologist. He wrote,

The baby whose cries are answered now will later be the child confident enough to show his independence and curiosity.

But the baby who is left to cry it out may develop a sense of isolation and distrust, and may turn inward by turning out he world that will not answer its cry.

And later on in life, the child may continue to cope with stress by trying to shut out reality.

Pretty stark, huh? While baby schedules have their place for OLDER babies, a newborn really needs to be picked up, loved on, nurtured. As moms we get so overwhelmed with doing everything JUST RIGHT that we forget to listen to our own instincts, our little voice inside. Sometimes we need a little help, a little sleep, a friend to cry upon, and that is when you make that call for reassurance. It's much better than crying along with baby.

Trust me.

I'm a professional mom...

Interesting Book Quotes

It was like a smile drawn by a child in flour.

-- Sweetwater Creek

Anne Rivers Siddons

THE Funniest Book!

I've been reading this book:



and it is SO funny! Kind of a satire on death and the grim reaper. SO good but funny at the same time. Not something I had expected. Read it!

Good Readin'

Revering the Crayon Marks - Susie Cortright

Nine Chores Your Child Should Do without Being Paid - Karen Fusco
You have to be a member to see this, but it's free and a wonderful place!

Grocery Store Gardening - Ellen Brown on Thriftyfun.com

Willie Waffle Movie Reviews - Willie Waffle

What I'm Reading Today

Books I'm Reading

Okay, I actually finshed the last two earlier this week as I'm a voracious reader. I enjoy listening to my books as audio books on CD or cassette. I can entertain my otherwise apt to be lax mind by reading while I clean, sew, or cook. Works for me!!

Embroidery Book and Sites

I was asked to recommend a book on embroidery along the lines of the dummies books. So look what Amazon.com popped up with!



Try this one out - I haven't used it, but hear that it's good. I taught myself embroidery by trial and error, but I do like several sites on the internet.

Free Patterns: Ant of Sweden - I really like this site.
Free Instructions: Johanna's Embroidery Page - I was searching for some instructions and this tells all about stitches and how to do them.

Good luck, Ladybug Mommy Maria!