I don't put too much importance in reading books that everybody reads, but nevertheless, I saw this list on my girlfriend's blog, and I find it interesting to know what ones other people have read, so it's only fair to post my own as well. The BBC says that the average person has read six of these books. I have boldened the ones I have read.
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 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 HitchHiker’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 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Stand - Stephen King
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs 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 Cider House Rules - 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 - 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
Monday, February 23, 2009
Kelvin
I could probably handle a goldfish. That’s what I told my girlfriend, Rachel, when she asked me if I have ever considered getting myself a pet. That was probably two months ago when I said that, so it came to me as a total surprise when she gave me a fish for Valentine’s Day.
I have never had any kind of pet whatsoever. My parents were completely against the concept for most of my life and, to be perfectly honest, I never felt like I was missing very much, if anything at all. My sister had an evil, black dog named Junior once. That man-eating fiend shared my backyard, and that’s the closest I ever got to the strange world of animal ownership. I never really understood what it was all about. Why would a person want to deal with that kind of responsibility?
Nevertheless, I found myself strangely pleased with this gift of aquatic life, this blue, and red, and maybe green King Betta in it’s very own fishbowl complete with shiny, blue rocks, and a tiny castle. I was instantly attached to the little bastard, and a little bit terrified at my sudden obligation to keep him alive. After all, I can barely take care of myself sometimes, but I’m not the kind of person who takes lightly the duties that come with possessing a living creature.
Then Rachel proceeded to harass me all weekend long about what name I might give to the thing. I was paralyzed beneath the heavy weight of assigning a word to describe the poor creature for the duration of it’s worldly consignment. After all, who knows how long he might be forced to carry around that proper noun?
But, as I drove home in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, with my fish riding shotgun beside me, I finally decided that this new companion of mine should be named Kelvin. There is an incredibly deep and esoteric reasoning behind that name, but I’m not going to tell it to you here. There’s no time for that. And besides, I’m quite certain you don’t need to know, and I’d be willing to bet you don’t even care. And that is part of the reason for the name. I’ve given away too much now.
Who knows what mysteries are born in the early mornings of South Salt Lake? Kelvin and I know the answer to that question, and because of that we speak to no one. That’s good enough for now.
I have never had any kind of pet whatsoever. My parents were completely against the concept for most of my life and, to be perfectly honest, I never felt like I was missing very much, if anything at all. My sister had an evil, black dog named Junior once. That man-eating fiend shared my backyard, and that’s the closest I ever got to the strange world of animal ownership. I never really understood what it was all about. Why would a person want to deal with that kind of responsibility?
Nevertheless, I found myself strangely pleased with this gift of aquatic life, this blue, and red, and maybe green King Betta in it’s very own fishbowl complete with shiny, blue rocks, and a tiny castle. I was instantly attached to the little bastard, and a little bit terrified at my sudden obligation to keep him alive. After all, I can barely take care of myself sometimes, but I’m not the kind of person who takes lightly the duties that come with possessing a living creature.
Then Rachel proceeded to harass me all weekend long about what name I might give to the thing. I was paralyzed beneath the heavy weight of assigning a word to describe the poor creature for the duration of it’s worldly consignment. After all, who knows how long he might be forced to carry around that proper noun?
But, as I drove home in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, with my fish riding shotgun beside me, I finally decided that this new companion of mine should be named Kelvin. There is an incredibly deep and esoteric reasoning behind that name, but I’m not going to tell it to you here. There’s no time for that. And besides, I’m quite certain you don’t need to know, and I’d be willing to bet you don’t even care. And that is part of the reason for the name. I’ve given away too much now.
Who knows what mysteries are born in the early mornings of South Salt Lake? Kelvin and I know the answer to that question, and because of that we speak to no one. That’s good enough for now.
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