The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs


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 -- well, some…
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 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 - 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 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 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 – My goal is to read it in French
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'm proud to say I've read 21 on the list instead of the average six. Thank you to Brenda Gill who showed me this on her blog. Oh btw, I couldn't figure out a way to underline. I tried doing this first in Microsoft Word and it didn't copy over correctly. The Bible should be underlined as well as Chronicles of Narnia, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.

prayer requests

Please lift up my family in prayer. My son is sick with a 101.4 temp and a runny/stuffy nose. He doesn't seem to have any other symptoms. He can't go to school again until 24 hours after his fever goes away. Please, please pray that the fever goes away and that he's fully well by tomorrow morning.

Also since I got my job I've been getting head aches almost every work day. They get pretty bad, but most of them couldn't be considered a migrane I'm sure. I have some dental work that desparately needs to be done, and I need glasses. These things could be causing the headaches. Please pray that the headaches will go away and that I'll be able to save the money for the work needed.

movie

We went and saw Kung Fu Panda today. Malachi did really well. He got a bit antsy at the end, but over all we were very proud of him.

I went to a baby shower for a friend who is due in 5 weeks, and who I haven't seen in over a year because her and her husband have been serving on the mission field in Austria. It was so great to see her, and we had a good time catching up.

Off to dinner. I just wanted to let y'all know he did a great job at the movie. Oh and Kung Fu Panda was really funny.

Almost a month

So I really haven't felt like blogging in the last month. I don't know what it was about the thought of blogging, but I just didn't want to do it. So much has happened to. Here's a synopsis.

Malachi went to MN for a week. We missed him terribly and he had a great time.

The day after he left John and I had a great day to ourselves.
- We both played WoW at the same time at 9:00 in the morning
- We had brunch
- We saw a movie (Indiana Jones) in the best theatre ever (Inwood Cinema) Where we had the best surprise of the day with the Living Room Theatre. Click on the link and then scroll down to the Living Room Theatre and click on the link for pictures. It's the best theatre ever!
- Checked into hotel
- Went to dinner at Melting Pot
- Went to Latin Jazz contert
- Back to hotel where I kicked his butt at King's in the Corner

It was a great day/night it was like we didn't have a child. Sometimes it's nice to have a break.

The week that Malachi was gone I started my job. I had orientation on Monday then Tuesday and Wednesday me and Michelle (the head teacher in the room), set up the room, Thursday I worked the Pre-School table at registration for the summer semester, I got an extra 4 hours that day which was great because the next day I worked it only until 10:30 because my baby was home and I couldn't stand the thought of him being a short walk away and me sitting at that stupid registration table reading my book because we got so few students to come to our table.

We had a great reunion that day. It was so much easier then the one we had last September after a 17 day separation.

We've had students in our room for two full weeks now. At first they didn't know what to do with me because they expected their old teacher. I think they've gotten used to me now, and we're all starting to get a long a little better. Who knew that four year olds had so much attitude and charatcer? I didn't! It certainly has been a challenge, but I like my job.

I got my first pay check yesterday. I haven't been paid for working in over 2.5 years, it felt great. It was more than expected too, that's always awesome.

Life is really busy. My house is a wreck because I don't feel like cleaning anymore. I do the laundry when I need to, and I do the dishes about every other day instead of every, and don't get me started on my shower/tub. But I think I'm happier. It's great to get out of the house every day. I feel like I'm contributing to the family. Malachi LOVES going to school. He'd be in school every day if we'd let him. Last Saturday he was so sad that we weren't going to school. His liking it so much has made it an easier transition on all of us. And he comes home singing cute Bible songs.

Tomorrow we're going to see a movie all of us together for the first time. I hope he sits through it, and I think he will. He's really excited to go see the movie on the really big screen :)


I was supposed to be going to bed now, so I'll leave with that. We'll see how often I blog now.