Considering myself an avid reader...

...when I ran across this list I found it interesting. Take a look at the list if you wish and let me know what you've read, what you liked and what you think should have been included.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen – Yes (um, my cat's name is Mr. Darcy)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – No
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – All of it? No.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – No
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - No (I've never heard of this book...)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens – No
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller –– Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - No
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes (this book began my love of reading)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – No
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks – No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger – No (but I have it in queue)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- No
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell – Yes
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy – No
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - No
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh – No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Yes
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - No
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - No
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes
36 Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand – No (where are her other books?!? The Fountainhead? Anthem?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No (but also in queue)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - No
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - YES
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery – Yes
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood – No (but I'm reading The Blind Assassin right now and I have to say, I'm not in love with it...)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - No
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No (but the movie was ah-mazing)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - No
52 Dune - Frank Herbert- No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen – Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon – YES
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov – No
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt – No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding – Yes... (is this an accomplishment?)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – Yes (uh...)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - No
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses - James Joyce – No
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray – No
80 Possession - AS Byatt- No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - No
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker – Yes
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro – No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert – Yes
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry – No
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe – No
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks – No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - No
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – No
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo – No

Time to revoke your old notions of librarians...

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers is emerging. ;)

Reading, a Harry situation...

Does the Harry Potter series deserve as much credit for motivating young readers as has been given?

According to this NYT article, no.

Studies have shown that interest in reading peaks with every new installment of HP and then reverses back to the previous interest level. Meaning that children don't pick up other books while waiting for the next HP. Is reading one book every two or so years enough?

One researcher at Stamford said that we put too much interest on reading for pleasure. He says children should read for information in preparation for what they will need to survive the real world. He poses the question, when will reading literature be a necessary skill/pass time?

What do you think?

Should children be encouraged to read for pleasure? Is reading a fundamental skill that should be developed? Or, as the one researcher suggests, should reading for information be the skill that is developed in school?

The Virgin Suicides

I just finished reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and it will be far too hard for me to convey to you how much I loved this book.

Loved, loved, loved.

Eugenides' combines the common elements of humor and grief into something beautiful and rare.

I definitely recommend this book.

Here are some quotes that I found particularly captivating:

"All wisdom ends in a paradox." (p. 246)

"They had killed themselves over the dying forests; over the manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws." (p. 245)

"The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind." (p. 248)

"What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time." (p. 175)

Writing about prostate self exams: "And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us." (p. 170)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them." (p. 44)

Browsing around Border's

And I saw some interesting books I thought I would share.


Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson)

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts. Publisher's Weekly

Rebecca's Tale (Sally Beauman)

April 1951. It has been twenty years since the death of Rebecca, the hauntingly beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter, and twenty years since Manderley, the de Winter family's estate, was destroyed by fire. But Rebecca's tale is just beginning.

Colonel Julyan, an old family friend, receives an anonymous package concerning Rebecca. An inquisitive young scholar named Terence Gray appears and stirs up the quiet seaside hamlet with questions about the past and the close ties he soon forges with the Colonel and his eligible daughter, Ellie. Amid bitter gossip and murky intrigue, the trio begins a search for the real Rebecca and the truth behind her mysterious death. Book Description.

For those of us who have read and loved Rebecca, this looks like the book for us!