Bookworms Unite!

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative called the Big Read. According to the Web site, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Jeez! I originally found this list on my friend Jill's blog. I've read 34 of these. Take a look and let me know which ones you've read and loved.

Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. (My bold doesn't show up very well, so the ones I've read are in light pink.)
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog (if you feel so inclined).


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 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
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 - 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Who knew?

Today Kevin, Cameron and I went to visit some friends here in the city who just had their first baby. Their little guy was born a week ago today, so we dropped by to take them food (take out gets old real quick), and meet the new little guy. Baby William was such a sweet little bundle. The thing that absolutely blew our minds was the fact that he was 7lbs, 12oz when he was born, and is nearly that now. He looked so tiny! Particularly held up next to our little Chunky Monkey, who started out 6lbs, 2oz and is now pushing 20lbs and eating solid food!

How is it possible that that was only 6 months ago? Everyone always said, "Oh, it goes so fast!" I can tell you right now, when you're a brand new mom who is only sleeping in 2 hour stretches at a time, showers about twice a week, and can hardly remember her own name, much less what day of the week it is, all you want to say to these people is, "Bull..." well, you know what I mean.

But then suddenly one day you look around and you are sleeping in rather long stretches at night, if not all night long. You shower daily, actually put on make-up and are potentially wearing clothes that are starting to resemble the things you wore before you gained (cough, cough) pounds. You have a little person who has gone from a bundle of nerves to a bundle of personality. And it has only been 6 months! I remember wondering if I would survive 6 weeks...6 months might as well have been the moon.

So, I tell my friend the new mom, "Oh, it goes so fast!" And I know exactly what she's thinking. And when I hold her sweet little 7lb, 12oz baby I think, "I wouldn't go back to being a first time mom with a 1 week old for a million dollars." Then Kevin and I leave with our little Mini, who isn't quite as mini as he used to be, and I think about how far we 3 have come in only 6 months. How different all 3 of us are. He is certainly not the Itty Bitty we brought home from the hospital half a year ago...and neither am I the same person that carried him out of the hospital that day.

I knew that babies changed so unbelievably, so dramatically in that first year of life. Who knew that Mommies and Daddies changed so much, too?