According to the BBC

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.

Mommy, Just Read the Freekin' Book

"How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

"How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly he spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!"

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The version that we are reading is illustrated by S. Michelle Wiggins. I don't know if it's abridged or not. I'm assuming so considering it IS a child's book, but I could be wrong. We've made it to "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale" which is the 3rd chapter in this version. Now, please let me know if I'm wrong, but where is the Jabberwockie poem? Is that in "Wonderland" or is that in "Through the Looking Glass"?

The title of this post? That is what Jayden said to me, word for word, when I started laughing at the above poem. That poem is one of my fav's of all time. It's absolutely HILARIOUS to me!

To try to espouse the values of reading, and the learning of how, I am currently reading "Alice" to Jayden on a nightly basis. We get through a chapter or two and then it's time to quit. I'm hoping that she understands that by learning to read, she can read all kinds of great books like "Alice". Knowing my daughter, however, she'll just think she can have ME read to her all of those great books.

Jayden frustrates me to no end. She is a smart smart girl. She just doesn't have the drive, the desire to learn. It's not in her. She fights it tooth and nail. I don't know how to light that fire in her. I'm at a loss. I keep pushing her to do the work. She is able, she just doesn't want to. So she stalls and cries and fusses and stalls some more. It was her strategy at "regular" school and why her teacher thought she didn't know nearly what she does.

James is a different story. While he doesn't like the work, he will do it, and does really well doing it on his own. I do need to start working with both of them in more hands on kind of way. Doing other subjects and projects and that kind thing with them. I've been slacking in that area, relying pretty heavily on their workbooks. While I am going to keep using them, I want to start branching out. I'd like to have them learn at least the names of all 50 states by the summer, with James possibly knowing the capitals as well, along with finding them on a map. I also need to start figuring out science stuff.

Prayers and blessings everyone. Enjoy your reading, and sharing the joy of it with others. Kiss your librarian, or at least make sure to tell them a big thank you!