Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Are you well-rounded? (What does that mean?)

A friend sent this list to me on Facebook and I found it very interesting how much I had NOT read!  Of course, this list is just someone's personal opinion as to what constitutes a well-rounded reader and if I had been making the list, I would have definitely taken out some titles and added in a few others.  Still, it's interesting to see where you fall on someone else's reading list.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.  You are supposed to copy the list and bold or italicize the ones you have read.

I haven't read nearly as many of these as I would have thought, but I have read tons that are not on here.  Does that count?

Next on my list: "The Bell Jar" #76.


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 
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 Mitchel
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


Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Annie Dillard


So....I'm just now reading Annie Dillard.

Where have I been?  Why have I not read her before?

Presently reading "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."

I have only just begun, so am not in a place to totally recommend it.

But her writing is mesmerizing.

Have you read her?

Thursday, December 2, 2010

2011 Book List

Here is where we will share books for our 2011 reading list.

My startup pile includes:

The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me by Bruce Feiler

Faith Begins at Home by Mark Holmen

Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (I have started this book twice and can't get past the first chapter. I'm going to give it one more shot.)

On Earth as It Is in heaven: How the Lord's Prayer Teaches Us to Pray by Warren Wiersbe

Raising the Dead: A Doctor Encounters the Miraculous by Chauncey W. Crandall

The Lineage of Grace series by Francine Roberts  (It has 5 volumes)

Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory by William Forstchen

Operation Daybreak by David Norris

Thou Shalt Keep Them: A Biblical Theology of the Perfect Preservation of Scripture by Kent Brandenburg, Editor

Every Prayer in the Bible: Discover God's Patters for Effective Prayer by Larry Richards

How To Read a Book by J. Adler Mortimer and Charles Van Doren

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp

Instructing a Child's Heart by Tedd and Margy Tripp

The Contemplative Pastor by Eugene Peterson

As you can see, if I am going to read 52 books next year, I have 38 more to go.  So please post your comments with any suggestions.  (Or, if I'm going to be like Rick Warren, I have 349 more to go for 2011!)

reading and such

I am beginning my annual "season of reflection" which will last throughout the month of December.  I do not travel during December and try to keep any speaking to a minimum.  It is my time to draw close to the fire and reflect on the good and bad parts of the year that is ending and make resolutions of what to do better in the year that is ahead.


My resolution for 2010 was to make it "The Year of the Book."  Although I'm an avid book lover, various circumstances had forced reading to the back burner on way too many occasions for several years.  I felt stifled and felt as if a part of me was dying and knew that I had to return to a steady diet of books in order to see past the sameness of the every day.  I resolved to try to average one book per week in 2010.

So, my reflection has revealed that I actually averaged one book for about every 10 days.  I was very pleased about that until I read a tweet from Rick Warren yesterday that said:  "In January, I'm starting a Christian Leader's Library webcast.  For much of my life I've read a book a day."

A BOOK A DAY!!!

What kind of book?  Dr. Seuss or a 300-pager?  Retention rate?  Who pastors the church?  When does he find time to write?  Has his wife seen him lately?  Does he eat?  Does he sleep?  That may be it.  I could read a book a day if I didn't have to sleep.  Is he a speed reader?  A genius?

That just floored me.  Boggled my mind.  Did he mean a book a week?

Well, I will definitely be listening to his library webcast.

In the meantime, check out the Book Club label to get my thoughts on some of the books I have read this year and to add yours to the 2011 list.

A book a day.  How in the world...?