How Many Have You Read?

How Many of These Books Have You Read?

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. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. Please comment on what you have read. Feel free to post on your blog, just please link back.

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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Caroll
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 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 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

Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts

Dr. Mark Albright, Beverly Hills vet to the star's pets, finds after the passing of his father documents that show he was adopted. He goes to Declare, OK looking for his birth mother only to find out that she was murdered when he was a few months old and he disappeared at the time and was presumed to be dead also. His return to Declare causes all kinds of emotions that were repressed for over 25 years in the town to come back to the surface. Meanwhile, he is trying to find out who killed his mother and who his birth father is and starts to fall in love.


The mystery wasn't really a mystery to me, the love story was nonexistent, but I couldn't help but love this book. The town, the characters, I fell in love with all of it. Great book to lose yourself in without requiring much thought; just sit back and enjoy.

4 stars

Mr. Monster by Dan Wells

John Wayne Cleaver is back. After fighting off the demon that was terrorizing his hometown in Wells' first book, I Am Not A Serial Killer (freaking awesome book by the way), sixteen year old John is trying to ignore his sociopathic tendencies and try to live a "normal" life. He still lives with his mom above the family mortuary, still goes to high school with his best friend (if a sociopath can have a best friend) Max, and is trying to work through the strange feelings he is having for his longtime neighbor and fellow classmate, Brooke. When bodies start turning up in the town again, John starts to become obsessed once again. No organs are missing from these bodies, but there are obvious signs of torture, burn marks, cuts that were made with screwdrivers, scissors, knives, etc. While John is trying to keep his excitement over this turn of events to himself, he comes to realize that the bodies seem to be showing up to draw his attention to them. It's kind of like someone is saying "I know what you did, I know what you are, come and get me". John must try to figure out who the perpetrator is while trying to protect his family and Brooke, and trying to keep Mr. Monster inside and not let him out. Because he is there, and lurking, and this time he may not be able to force him down deep because his urges are getting stronger, and sometimes it's easier just to give in.

Not as good as the first one. I liked it, and will be reading the third in the series when it comes out, but I didn't enjoy this one as much. Maybe because there wasn't that initial surprise when you find out about the demons. That was completely unexpected in the first one, but in the this installment it is just taken for granted. This also bothered me a lot more than the first one. It seemed a lot more graphic, and the details about embalming bodies and the killer's "toys" and how he tortures them was almost too much for me at times. All in all, worth the read though. Ends with a lead in that makes you have to read the third and final installment. I just hope Wells' doesn't take this too far and loose me because I really like John.

4 stars

Follow Friday

It's time for Follow Friday, a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee.com. Today's question is what is your book budget?

Well, I don't really have one. I get most of my books at yard sales, flea markets, and garage sales where they are $.50 at the most, so I never spend that much money on a book. The only time I pay full price is if it is something I have been waiting for and must have. I have a rule when I go into those big chain bookstores, you know which ones I mean, that I will not pay full price for a book unless it is of considerable length. I cannot justify paying $20 and upwards on a book that is a couple of hundred pages.

What about you?

A Scattered Life by Karen McQuestion

Free spirit Skyla Plinka is enjoying her normal day to day life with her husband Thomas and daughter Nora, a stark contrast from her childhood which she spent moving from place to place with her dad after her mother died. A new family moves on to their block, and Skyla becomes instant friends with the mother, Roxanne. They get together daily, much to her husband's chagrin, and it is the first true friendship Skyla has ever had. When a tragedy strikes Roxanne's family, Skyla must chose to finally open herself up and let others in.

I don't really know what else to say about this book. This review is terrible, along with the previous one, I guess because the books were completely pointless to me. It kept me reading, which is why it gets on star higher than The Friday Night Knitting Club, but I kept waiting for something to happen that never did.

2 stars

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

A group of women from different backgrounds and different professions in New York City gather every Friday night to knit and talk about their lives. When something unexpected happens, they will all have to come together to get through it.

Boring. Basically Steel Magnolia's in NYC. Not my kind of thing, I flipped to the end just to see what ended up happening so I could move on to something else. Only good thing I got from it is I may start knitting.

1 star

Top 5 Sunday's = Favorite TV Shows That Got Cancelled

Hosted by Larissa's Bookish Life; I just had to participate in this one becuase every time I fall in love with a show it gets cancelled :-(

My First Follow Friday!!!

It's Follow Friday, my first, hosted by Parajunkee.com. Please leave a note if you stop by!!

Waiting on Wednesday

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by @BreakingtheSpine about what book you are eagerly awaiting the release of this week.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Release Date: November 9, 2010

A letter posted in 1941 finally reaches its destination in 1992 with powerful repercussions for Edie Burchill, a London book editor, in this enthralling romantic thriller from Australian author Morton (The Forgotten Garden). At crumbling Milderhurst Castle live elderly twins Persephone and Seraphina and their younger half-sister, Juniper, the three eccentric spinster daughters of the late Raymond Blythe, author of The True History of the Mud Man, a children's classic Edie adores. Juniper addressed the letter to Meredith, Edie's mother, then a young teen evacuated to Milderhurst during the Blitz. Edie, who's later invited to write an introduction to a reprint of Raymond's masterpiece, visits the seedily alluring castle in search of answers. Why was her mother so shattered by the contents of a letter sent 51 years earlier? And what happened to soldier Thomas Cavill, Juniper's long-missing fiancé and Meredith's former teacher? Despite the many competing narratives, the answers will stun readers.

Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Books That Made You Cry!

This is my first time participating in this. I am trying to blog more often and get some more followers. Don't know if I will be able to come up with 10, but lets see what happens:

Top Ten Books That Made You Cry

1. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

2. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

3. Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson

4. Plantation by Dorothea Benton Frank

5. The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder

6. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

7. The Book Thief by Makus Zusak

8. Shelter Dogs by Traer Scott

9. The Histroy of Love by Nicole Krauss

10. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

15 year old Kafka Tamura runs away from home to become "the toughest 15 year old on the planet. Whether he is trying to leave behind the oedipal prophesy his father constantly told him about or to start a new life he isn't sure. Taking a journey on his own is Nakata, a man in his 60's who suffered a wartime affliction that left him "dumb". Nakata embarks on a trip to find the entrance stone and open it, and is drawn toward Kafka without knowing why. A mind bending story where fish and leeches fall from the sky, cats can talk, and spirits float between this world and the next to make love or kill.

I can't really summarize this any better without giving anything away and I have been thinking about it since last night. Very surreal, its like an acid trip most of the time, but I loved it. The story is so bizarre I couldn't stop reading it. Although much of what happened I did not understand at all, I think if I read it again I might understand more. Nakata is one of the most lovable characters I have ever read, I just wanted to give him a hug. I wouldn't say this is for everybody, but it was not what I expected and I was very surprised in a good way.

4 stars