17 posts tagged “reading”
Show us the book you're reading right now.
Submitted by Strive2Be.
Stolen from Hannahbanana
"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read.
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I have actually read the whole thing through)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell9 His Dark Materials – Phillip 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 – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Read this last summer and hated it)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
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 Tolstoy25 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 Milne41 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 Martel52 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
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 Dickens72 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
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 St. Exupery (parts of it, in French)
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 Shute97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Books that I want to read: 10
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith (my favorite-est. Ev-ah.)
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (or Tom Sawyer, which I haven’t read)
The entire Little House series – Laura Ingalls Wilder
Anne of Avonlea (seriously, if you are going to have that much Jane Austen on the list, you need some more LM Montgomery!)
Native Son – Richard A. Wright
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
What fictional character do you relate to most and why?
I don't know why I still feel that way as my life is certainly decidedly different that what this girl in turn of the 20th century America experienced.
I guess it is because I read this book when I was in junior high, and something about this character - her no-more-than-average looks, her love of reading and writing, her somewhat difficult relationship with her mother, her sensitivity to the beauty in life despite the harsh reality of where she lived and the things she experienced - spoke to me. I was enthralled with this book. And in many ways I still am. I've read it no less than 2 dozen times since then.
And every time I read it, the girl on the fire escape nibbling on peppermint candy and reading a book
looks just like me.
Simply put, they make me happy.
What's the best book you read this year?
This one, however, is my favorite now. It has a deeper, sometimes darker, side to it than those in the Mitford series, but it resonated something deep within me - pain, fear, love, hope, redemption, forgiveness - to name a few.
It is definitely worth the read.
Show us your favorite writer.
Her books make me laugh, cry, and think - sometimes all at once!
Books: Show us a great children's book.
I got the book for our kids when they were young, but it had different illustrations than this one. This, from what I recall, is the one that I had (or, if I never really owned it, which I am not 100% sure, it is the one that my teacher had). I can still see the illustrations of the cat and dog in my mind.
Come to think of it, this book has a great lesson for teens and adults too!
This summer I determined to read at least one "classic" novel. A novel that I somehow missed in high school and/or college. I got through two, and my feelings about each can only be described as polar opposites.
My first read was To Kill a Mockingbird. How in the world did I miss this book?! While I found the start a bit slow, a few chapters in and I was hooked. Outside of the occasional strange spelling to depict the character's southern accents (i.e., "nome" for "no mam"), the story unfolds fluidly and with great charm and conviction. I love Scout's development throughout the book, and while she and her brother's "savior" is not a surprise, it doesn't matter. You are in for the long haul and rooting for what is an inevitable, yet much welcomed, ending.
One of my favorite scenes in this book is when Scout and Jem attend church with Calpurnia. I love how Scout compares the freer worship of the Black community with the "stuffiness" of the Protestant service she was accustomed to.
I also love how the children "get it" but so many of the adults don't. It reminds me of that verse in Scripture: "I'm telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you're not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in." (Matt 18:3, TM)
The second book I tackled, The Catcher in the Rye, took me no less than 3 weeks to read (maybe more; I really can't remember). If you know me, you know that I devour books. I rarely take more than a week to read anything.
I just couldn't get into, yet I couldn't not finish it either. As I read it, I felt like I was reading one very long run-on sentence bumping about in the mind of a very confused teenage boy. And perhaps that is just the point Salinger is trying to make. Whatever the case may be, I found it annoyingly tedious and dull.
From what I've read, that puts me in the minority, but I simply can not comprehend why this book is consider classic reading. While I am sometimes frustrated that my kids will not read certain books because they attend an otherwise wonderful Christian school (hence the reason Rob and I instituted summer reading this year with the likes of The Great Gatsby and The Glass Menagerie), this is one that I am glad will not be on their required reading list.
Books: Show us the longest book you've ever read. (All the way through.)
It's been a while, but I have actually read through it a few times. The version I currently have is over 1100 pages, but I guess it depends on the print size and version. Even so, I think this is the longest book I've ever tackled.
I'd actually like to read through The Message version; perhaps I will start that later this summer.
Books: Show us a great beach read.
My choice: The Time Traveler's Wife, because I just read this while we were at the beach.
(Though I actually read it by the hotel pool, but the hotel was on the beach, so that counts, right..?)
It is an amazing ride. It seems kind of disjointed at the start, but it sets a mood...and without giving away the plot, you are immediately drawn to the main characters, Clare and Henry, and the joys and challenges they face because of the opening tone of this novel.
Audrey Niffenegger has crafted a poignant and original love story, one that you will be thinking about days after you finish the final page.
(Special thanks to the RIS group, because someone's recommendation there is the sole reason I grabbed this book in the first place.)
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