100 books and December book report

I can't believe another month has passed.  My book stack has moved, but here it is:

This sits in the hallway just outside my bedroom door.  It's not ideal, but there are a LOT of windows, so wall space is at a premium!

(And yes, for those of you looking closely...the wallpapers do sorta coordinate.  Someone went wacko nuts in this house and every room has different country blue and tan wallpaper.  Someday it's ALL coming down!)

While sweeping the area (I usually vaccuum) in preparation for their new home, I churned up a lot of dust bunnies.  I found that stabbing them with my broom was the best way to keep them under control.  (Next time I'll vaccuum first!)  I must have looked a little foolish...

But I also thought to put a sticky note on the wall marking the top of the stack.  So next month I'll have a better reference.  (I should have though of this way back in July, though.)

Anyways, it's definitely getting shorter.  Even with being sidetracked with the second two Twilight books.  (For those of you who know about them, I started Eclipse Tuesday and finished Thursday.  I started Breaking Dawn Friday and I'm halfway through it already!)

And since we're on the topic of books, I thought I'd share my version of the 100 books list Lisa put out there a few weeks back.  Funny that a couple of these were in the original book stack above.  They've been read, so they count on the list below now!

The deal:
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.



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

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 The 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 Niffenberger

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 The 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 - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The DaVinci 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 Inferno - Dante

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 - E.B. 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

I've read 31!  And only 4 that I've started and not finished.  So maybe I'll explain those...

Harry Potter...when they found a cat wrapped around a lamp post by it's tail dripping blood from it's mouth I was D-O-N-E.  I've been told the cat wasn't dead, but I don't care.  That was uncalled for JK Rowling.  I'll never read another word of anything you write.  And I'll never recommend anything you've written to anyone. 

Moby Dick...I slogged through about half of it and then realized they were just barely getting out to sea.  Noone had seen the whale.  Heck, there was barely even mention of whaling or Moby Dick up to that point.  So Mr. Mellville, you'd better learn to get to your point sooner or you're going to lose your audience. 

Oliver Twist...when, I believe it was a landlord?, kicked a dog, I was DONE.  Sorry, you don't need to show us how mean and evil a person is by telling us they harm defenseless animals.  Simply telling me he was an evil person would have been enough.

Madame Bovary...not sure why I quit reading it, but I had it at one point.  Can't find it now.  One day I'll find it and read it.

But do you see a theme here?  Animal cruelty turns me OFF!  (I actually had one book I THREW AWAY because they did something horrible to some dogs.  That's about like throwing away fabric!)

So I should probably mention a few of my favorites off this list.  To balance things a little.

Unexpectedly, I loved Dune.  I kept wondering what was going to happen to the characters, though I didn't have any dreams of riding sand worms.  (That might have been fun!)

Tess of D'Ubervilles was also very enjoyable.  Another one I thought I might have to slog my way through just to be able to say I'd finished it.  (And yes, for those of you who have read it, there was a horse injured and killed, but not because some evil person premeditated the act, so I was okay with that one, even if I did cringe a little.)

The Grapes of Wrath was also great.  I love Steinbeck, though.  Travels with Charley was also good.  Different from Grapes, but I enjoyed it.  Maybe because he CARED about his dog.

And I did a book "report" on The Inferno in high school.  I made Postcards from Hell.  I decided to turn Hell into a tourist attraction, complete with postcards.  For each of the 7 circles Dante depicts, I had a guy sending postcards to his buddy back home that had drawings of the things he saw.  (Mind you, this was before the internet and downloadable clip art existed!)  Cerberus, the three-headed dog was a tough one (I can't draw well), but my mom helped a little.  (I know some might consider that cheating, but the concept was entirely my own, as well as almost all of the artwork, but if you can't tell it's supposed to be a three-headed dog, what's the point?!)  My teacher loved it!

Finally, a word about some of the more recent books on the list.  The DaVinci Code, The Kite Runner, etc...  They've recieved recent popularity, which is most of the reason I've read them.  I went "meh" to most of them.  They were good, but I kinda want to ask the writer of this list "what gives?"...they just aren't on the same level as the classics!  (The one exception is Memoirs of a Giesha, but I've told you before I liked that one.)

So this list gave me a starting point for the book sale next July.  6 months to go on that stack!  (And I think reporting it here keeps me going way more than just having a stack staring at me would, so thanks for playing along!)

Off to a family Christmas party.  We have to take a $10 girl (or guy, for the hubby) gift for a gift exchange.  I'm taking a scrapbooking "stack" of papers.  The hubby is taking a box of bungee cords.  I never seem to get anything as awesome back, but we'll see.  Maybe I'll blog about it...

Happy quilting,

Katie