I love to read...

I don't know where this came from. It is all over the place that it is some list from the BBC but I can't find it on their website. There is another list of 100 books voted as best by their audience, but it is not this list and nowhere does it say they think most people have only read 6. Nonetheless it is an interesting list. Friends have told me they wish they had time to read as much as I do. I read fast. So I think what they mean is that they want to read that many books. They are in no way insinuating that I have more time than they do. One friend said she only finds time to read when she is in the bathroom. I told her to eat more fiber and drink more water. Nonetheless, here are the books from the list that I have read.

Instructions:1) Look at the list and put an 'x' next to those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.(Seeing the movies doesn't count!)

1. ( X) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. (X) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. (X) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. (X) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. (X ) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. (X The Bible
7. (X) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. (X ) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. ( ) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. (x) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. (x) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. ( ) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. ( ) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. () Complete Works of Shakespeare
16. (X) 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
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. (X ) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. (X ) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. (X ) Emma - Jane Austen
35. (X ) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. (X ) 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. (X) 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. (X ) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. (X) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. ( ) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. ( ) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. (x ) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. ( ) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. (X ) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. ( ) Dune - Frank Herbert
53. ( ) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - I will be soon though. It is this months pick for book club.
54. (X) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. ( ) A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. ( ) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. (x ) 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. (X) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. ( ) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. ( ) The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. ( ) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. (x ) 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. (x ) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. ( ) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. ( ) Ulysses - James Joyce
76. (X) 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. (x ) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. ( ) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. (X ) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. ( ) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. (X) 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. (X ) 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. (X) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. ( ) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. (X ) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

33! I guess I do read a lot. But all this does is add to the list of books I would like to read.

College app

Thank you all for letting me know it is worth it to keep blogging. Things are busy for me as they are for everyone, and I don't know how often I will get to do this, but it was so self gratifying to get encouragement from my bloggy friends. It was also a bit narcissistic and self-absorbed, but it was so validating of this use of my time. I do it for you.

I want to finish my college degree. I have an associates, which means I lived through my general ed. but it is a very old degree, which I hope does not necessarily mean that I am a very old person. Especially since I didn't even start college until 22. But at this point it is quite reasonable, according to the admissions department, that my degree will not be recognized. In which case, I don't know if I have it in me to start all over.

But all that is nothing. I started the application process. It was pretty easy. Until....the essay. I was kind of hoping that transfer students would not have to go through that ordeal, but alas, they do. Now I am trying to come up with a creative way of meeting the requirement of expressing my leadership and service qualities in a creative way and under 500 words that will wow my collegiate audience and win me the privilege paying a fortune for an education I hope I never have to use in the professional sense. I really like to be a stay-at-home mom and would love to continue in that role even when the kids are grown and out of the house. I want to do stuff, I just don't want to have to get a job and give up all my creative flexibility, but the reality is, someday, I will probably have to.

What's your major? A major dilemma. Should I go practical so that I can insure a better job that I hope I never have to get, or should I follow my passion? Being narcissistic, self-absorbed, not so practical and sort of free spirited, I am leaning towards an Art History degree, with maybe a minor in English, which qualifies me to do a whole lot of nothing. Honestly, I would love to work in a museum, which really would require a masters in Museum studies, but at this point I just hope I get accepted and my degree is recognized. I can change my mind later right? I mean, this is only the 5th major I have declared at this point and all I have to show for it is an associates. Liberal arts, English, Humanities, Home Economics, and Fashion Design. Hmm. Looks like Art History would make 6. Nothings set in stone right?

Maybe I will test out my 500 word essay on you all in the next week or so, and you can proofread, edit and revise. We can make getting me an expensive, possibly useless education a group project. What do you think?

I'm thinking of coming back....

I am thinking of coming back to blogging occasionally because I like to write stuff and it is fun to get comments, but I think maybe nobody even looks anymore because I haven't written in so long and it probably shouldn't matter, because really I just write for myself all journal-like but my friend did a class on blogging at church last night which reminded me that it was kind of fun, so I think maybe I'll try it again and see what happens. Anybody still out there?