Classic Books

This was on my friend Kelly's blog. The ones that are bold and in purple are ones that I know I have read. I don't remember all of them very well, so I am thinking of re-reading some of them soon. According to Kelly (who read it elsewhere), the average American has read 6 of the 100 books on this list. I have read 41 of them. What can I say? I've always been a bookworm.



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 Traveler’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 Pweauaion- Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoris 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 Meany - 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
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

Not A Good Day.

It's been a hard day. It started out OK, but went downhill from there.

First, I realized that my rental movie was not only overdue, but I had not watched it yet and therefore it would either be another day overdue or I'd have to return it without watching it. I told Jon to just return it, but I just looked over there and it's still here. I'm going to pop it in when I get offline.

Then, I had to work today. That's not horrible, I just wasn't feeling it today. Yesterday was rough because not enough people were scheduled. Today was the exact same way. It's getting old.

While at work, I banged into a corner, bruising my left arm, and, about an hour later, bumped a piece of the hot fryer, burning my right arm. I now have a bright red burn in the shape of a 7.

I get home and it's raining, but we have to put the recycling out tonight because they come at around 7:30 am, which is well before my wake-up time. So I got rained on.

Then, I get online and check my email to find that I've been cut out of my brother-in-law's wedding party. Perfect. Just top off my day, why don't you? I'm not really upset about it (after all, it saves me $200 for a dress), but I am disappointed and a little hurt.

Tomorrow can only be better, right?

Close Call!

Last night on my way home from work, I had a close call with one of nature's creatures. I don't like to hit any animals with my car, and I especially did not want to hit this one. Luckily, I saw it walking down the middle of my lane just in time and swerved around it.

Planning for Christmas

Yep, I'm already planning. I have to - we're on a very tight budget and I am sick to death of giving people IOUs at Christmastime (especially since it seems that there are times that we are unable to go back and actually give that person a gift). So I'm already in the planning stage.

Most people are getting handmade gifts. I prefer it that way, and the bonus is that (usually) it's cheaper as well. Only a few people are getting purchased items.

I got this far through the post and was about to make a list of what I've got figured out so far, when I realized that there is a very slim chance that one of my recipients may read my blog! So much for the list on the blog idea...

Automotive Issues

These cars are driving me up the wall. I so wish that Jon would get hired somewhere so that we can get a new car - maybe even two!

The starter went out on his car about two weeks ago. It just won't start. At this point, it's more of an inconvenience than anything else, because he's not working so it's not as if he has to go anywhere. If he really needs a car, all he has to do is take me to work and he can use mine.

Then mine decided to act up. First, it suddenly got extremely loud, as if the exhaust system is falling apart (it's not impossible). Then, the latch mechanism on the driver's side decided to break. At this exact moment, the door will not open AT ALL. I bought a new latch mechanism today, but I won't be able to get it into the car if we can't get the door open.
Additionally, the passenger's side door handle has been broken since late August. For a short time, both door handles were broken (it's a lousy design, but was all the rage in the late 80s and early 90s because it looks "cool" - yeah, it's real cool to have broken door handles every year or so). We fixed the driver's side door handle not long after I got out of the hospital, because once I started driving again, I had to be able to easily get in and out of my car.
We had to shimmy the passenger door open with a coat hanger to get into the car this morning. It was not fun, and caused a lot of what I call "quiet yelling" at each other. We were snippy and probably would have been yelling, but our landlord was here trimming the bushes out front, so we didn't want her to overhear us arguing. It was not fun, and I did too much straining trying to help Jon get the door open. I've been sore ever since, and I haven't been this sore in a couple of weeks. I actually took a Vicodin earlier.

This evening, I'm going to my uncle's house to have him help me with my car. He likes working on cars and has tricks for things now and then. Hopefully, he'll have a trick for this door latch thing.

An Unwanted Anniversary

Today is the sixth anniversary of us trying to have a baby. We have not been hard-core trying for this entire time, but it is still our 6th anniversary of starting the TTC journey.

It's an anniversary I could easily have done without.