I Like Books.

Good day, friends. Well, I've seen these lists going around on blogs and Facebook for years now, and finally decided to face my feelings of inadequacy and take the plunge. This is actually the most comprehensive version I've seen floating around, so I'm posting it more as a prompt to remind myself of the books I need to read/finish.

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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: Underline those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or have only read an excerpt, and mark with an asterisk those of which you've seen a film production.

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 (all)
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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams *
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
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 – C.S. Lewis *
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. 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
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 *

21 out of 100. Ouch.

Good Dreams

I have been pondering lately if I am strong enough to love with no expectation of love returned.

Can I give myself to another, in order to benefit them alone, and not out of selfish pursuit of gain and affirmation? Could I love someone unlovely because the centre of their being is worth it?

I pray that when I find you, I will have the courage to do it. I pray that I will know, and you will know, and we will find so much joy in the knowing. You will smile at me and I'll echo it back to you, and we will revel in loving each other. We will spend a day on the couch in the living room, your head in my lap, and I will touch your hair as we talk about dreams and technology and Fleet Foxes. I will love the sum of you as you pursue the core of me. And when all of the chasing is through, we will be content to be still together, to sit side-by-side and breathe the same air.

Your love will be joy to me, and I pray that my love will inspire and encourage you, strengthen your heart and even greater still, remind you that I am not enough. I pray that my love will show you that love from our Father springs forth eternal, and it's His love that leaves us all breathless.

The Owl and the Tanager

Foolish I pinned

My hopes on you

Foolishly they remain

Sight unseen, I'm placing bets

Waging my funds on your heart

Before our hands touched

Can I know

Before knowing you?

Can I love before sitting shoulder-to-shoulder

tense as we feel the current running through the thin cloth of our sweaters?

Can I place my heart before you to accept

Before our eyes meet, lips met?

Your Hands Are Cold As They Find My Neck

"For truly we have attacked ourselves in ways far worse than that in which we were attacked!"

I am the liar.