I got this list from Unmitigated.
The BBC believes that most people will only have read, on average, 6 of these 100 books. Let's see how I stack up, shall we?
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (all Jane Austen books are on my to be read list)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I will totally admit that I tried to read this book and I just couldn't do it)
3. Jane Eyre - Charolotte Bronte (again it's on the list to be read)
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (in fact, James is going to be reading this one this year, he just doesn't know it yet)
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights (on the list to read)
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (I've read all of her Little Women and Little Men books)
12. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy (Never heard of it before)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (never heard of it)
14. Complete works of William Shakespeare (Partially, and honestly they are plays and are meant to be seen performed, not read straight through)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (never heard of it)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk (never heard of it)
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (on my list)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (on my list)
20. Middlemarch - George Elliot (never heard of it)
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (and the sequel Scarlet)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (on my list)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (thought of it, it's a bit of an intimidating read)
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (heard of it in passing, not enough to be interested thoug)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Ugh, that just SOUNDS like work to read)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (and East of Eden)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (and Through the Looking Glass)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (thought of it)
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 (wouldn't this count as one of the Chronicles of Narnia?)
36B. Because of the repeat, I'm substituting The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (never heard of it)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Aurthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (I went through an Orwell phase just before freshman year of high school, I was a geek, I spent a chunk of my summer reading classic books)
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
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 (I know this is a popular in high school and I'm not sure how I ever got around it and I'm pretty glad that I did)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martell
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (Never had the desire, but Jason has read the entire series)
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 (good book on getting an inside look from the perspective an Asperger's mind)
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (on my list)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (it's on my list)
66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (in all my reading of classics I never had the desire to pick this one up)
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 - Aruthur 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 - Kuzua Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohnton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White (along with The Trumpt of the Swan and Stuart Little)
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom (along with For One More Day and Tuesdays with Morrie is on my list to read)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthor 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 Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've seen it performed, does that count, and isn't this part of the complete works of Shakespeare?)
98B Due to duplication, I'm substiuting my own The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (and the follow up Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and James and the Giant Peach. I also have a collection of his short stories meant for adults)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
How many of those books have you read? How many do you think should be on the list? Have you even heard of all of them?
Prayers and blessings everyone. I hope you are able to work on your own reading lists this week.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Izzy
The past 4 years have been a rollar coaster with Izzy. From the moment of his impending birth and the fact that it took 3 days for that to happen all the way through to this moment now at 1:08 in the morning when he is wide awake and standing next to me it has been an interesting ride.
He has definately done things the hard way as it's said. Maybe he just needed to do them in a way that would definately be memorable. Whatever it was, it will definately not be forgotten any time soon.
Spending almost his entire first year hopped up on drugs left him agreeable and happy. It also made figuring out what was going on with him later more difficult because everyone would always point back at that first year and say "Oh, it's just a carry over from that, he'll catch up soon enough".
I know his pediatrician mentioned in passing once at least a year ago, if not more, the possibility of autism, and if I thought that might be the case. I was firm in my statement that no, that couldn't be it. I was familiar with autism after all, simply because of all that James has gone through (Asperger's and ASD are both parts of the same spectrum of disorders) and Izzy just wasn't anything like James in behavior.
It wasn't until this past May that I actually considered the validity of the "Autism Question" as I'll call it. Jayden's therapist, who spent a grand total of MAYBE 10 minutes a week with Izzy said that she felt he was autistic and that he may benefit from a special local autism program. I didn't like the woman anyway, so as is my way, I told her off in a barely veiled "polite" manner.
What she said stuck with me. It just wouldn't let go no matter how much I told it to go to hell and that it couldn't possibly be the case. Then I did what I usually do and went looking for answers. The thing about answers is that when you get them, they may not always be what you want out of them. What I was finding was that what was going on with Izzy very well could be autism.
Now that I knew about the possibility I went to the pediatrician and asked what to do next. So she told me. I put in the request for an evaluation through the local agency that handles that stuff county wide. I met with them for the original appointment in June. The evaluation was scheduled for the end of August. A very long wait for a final answer, and a very frustrating one at that.
At that first appointment the woman told that based solely on what I said there that it seems like Izzy is autistic and that he would qualify for the program. From that point on, I told people that he most likely had autism. We didn't know for sure, but we were looking for the answers and waiting for that day at the end of August that would hopefully yield them.
That day was August 26. I took Izzy at 9 in the morning to the school where we met with the team. There were 4 people on the team. For just over 2 hours they took turns playing with Izzy and talking with me. Getting as much info as they could through observation and from what I had to say. They left for 10 minutes. When they came back they had the answer. I had been told that they may need to do a home visit or two, and I was expecting that, but they told me that they wouldn't need to, that they knew then what was going on.
Izzy is autistic. He'll be attending the special program 5 days a week for 1/2 days, most likely in the afternoon. This is a year round program. It is run by the county wide agency, not the school district. He is going to remain in this program until they decide to "mainstream" (I really hate that concept, but I won't get started on that now) him and then he'll come home to be schooled. At that point, we'll keep extra services, if they are needed, going.
I know a lot of parents would be absolutely devestated with this diagnosis. I was expecting it. I am relieved to finally have it because now things can move forward with meeting his needs in the best possible way.
Prayers and blessings everyone. Don't despair if you get news that isn't usually seen as the best. Take it and know that with that knowledge you can do what is best and turn it around for the better. I know, that's so glass is half full all we need is love hippy stuff, but I honestly believe that.
All pictures are copyrighted by JD Rhodes Photography in the year of 2010. Please don't take them or use them for anything. That's just not a nice thing to do and you could get in some big trouble for it. Thanks.
He has definately done things the hard way as it's said. Maybe he just needed to do them in a way that would definately be memorable. Whatever it was, it will definately not be forgotten any time soon.
Spending almost his entire first year hopped up on drugs left him agreeable and happy. It also made figuring out what was going on with him later more difficult because everyone would always point back at that first year and say "Oh, it's just a carry over from that, he'll catch up soon enough".
I know his pediatrician mentioned in passing once at least a year ago, if not more, the possibility of autism, and if I thought that might be the case. I was firm in my statement that no, that couldn't be it. I was familiar with autism after all, simply because of all that James has gone through (Asperger's and ASD are both parts of the same spectrum of disorders) and Izzy just wasn't anything like James in behavior.
It wasn't until this past May that I actually considered the validity of the "Autism Question" as I'll call it. Jayden's therapist, who spent a grand total of MAYBE 10 minutes a week with Izzy said that she felt he was autistic and that he may benefit from a special local autism program. I didn't like the woman anyway, so as is my way, I told her off in a barely veiled "polite" manner.
What she said stuck with me. It just wouldn't let go no matter how much I told it to go to hell and that it couldn't possibly be the case. Then I did what I usually do and went looking for answers. The thing about answers is that when you get them, they may not always be what you want out of them. What I was finding was that what was going on with Izzy very well could be autism.
Now that I knew about the possibility I went to the pediatrician and asked what to do next. So she told me. I put in the request for an evaluation through the local agency that handles that stuff county wide. I met with them for the original appointment in June. The evaluation was scheduled for the end of August. A very long wait for a final answer, and a very frustrating one at that.
At that first appointment the woman told that based solely on what I said there that it seems like Izzy is autistic and that he would qualify for the program. From that point on, I told people that he most likely had autism. We didn't know for sure, but we were looking for the answers and waiting for that day at the end of August that would hopefully yield them.
That day was August 26. I took Izzy at 9 in the morning to the school where we met with the team. There were 4 people on the team. For just over 2 hours they took turns playing with Izzy and talking with me. Getting as much info as they could through observation and from what I had to say. They left for 10 minutes. When they came back they had the answer. I had been told that they may need to do a home visit or two, and I was expecting that, but they told me that they wouldn't need to, that they knew then what was going on.
Izzy is autistic. He'll be attending the special program 5 days a week for 1/2 days, most likely in the afternoon. This is a year round program. It is run by the county wide agency, not the school district. He is going to remain in this program until they decide to "mainstream" (I really hate that concept, but I won't get started on that now) him and then he'll come home to be schooled. At that point, we'll keep extra services, if they are needed, going.
I know a lot of parents would be absolutely devestated with this diagnosis. I was expecting it. I am relieved to finally have it because now things can move forward with meeting his needs in the best possible way.
Prayers and blessings everyone. Don't despair if you get news that isn't usually seen as the best. Take it and know that with that knowledge you can do what is best and turn it around for the better. I know, that's so glass is half full all we need is love hippy stuff, but I honestly believe that.
All pictures are copyrighted by JD Rhodes Photography in the year of 2010. Please don't take them or use them for anything. That's just not a nice thing to do and you could get in some big trouble for it. Thanks.
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