100 BOOKS

I am forever looking for new books to read. The following is the list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime compiled by the Amazon Book Editors. 

I've read many of them but have many more to go (I've marked the ones that I've read). I have a number of the others waiting in a pile of "books to be read" on my bookshelf, so hopefully I can knock some more off the list soon. 

Which of the books listed are your favorites? Are there any of your favorites that are missing? Any listed that you disagree with? 

1. 1984 by George Orwell 
2. A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawkings
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers 
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
5. A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition by Lemony Snicket
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle 
7. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
8. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
9. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
10. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt 
11. Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume 
12. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 
13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
14. Born To Run – A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 
18. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White 
19. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney
22. Dune by Frank Herbert
23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
25. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
26. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown 
27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 
28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
30. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 
31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 
32. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
33. Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
34. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain 
35. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
36. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder 
37. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
38. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
39. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
40. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
41. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris 
42. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 
43. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
44. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
45. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham 
46. On the Road by Jack Kerouac 
47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
48. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
49. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
50. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen 
51. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
52. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
53. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
54. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley 
57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 
58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
59. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 
60. The Color of Water by James McBride 
61. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 
62. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
63. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
64. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
65. The Giver by Lois Lowry
66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
67. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
68. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
69. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
70. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
72. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
73. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
74. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
75. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
77. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
79. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan 
80. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
81. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver 
82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
83. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
86. The Shining by Stephen King
87. The Stranger by Albert Camus 
88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
89. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle 
91. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 
92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
93. The World According to Garp by John Irving 
94. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
95. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 
97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
98. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann 
99. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein 
100. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak 

source

Right Now

Right now I am...

• Packing and packing and packing: Last weekend we had a big moving sale and sold most of our furniture and now I'm packing all of our remaining possessions and making Goodwill runs on a nearly daily basis. By the way, isn't it amazing how much extra stuff we accumulate? I'm going to try to live a more simple life once we get settled and buy only what I need/love.

• Reading: The Bone People by Keri Hulme. So far it seems beautifully written and I'm really liking it, but I'm only about a hundred pages in. It won the Booker Prize, though, and I am usually a big fan of books that win that award. Another digression: I think I need to make subcategories to my Book Recommendations page to differentiate between books that I absolutely love and those that were just pretty good. I'll get on that one of these days.  (Follow-up on this book: I wholeheartedly DO NOT recommend this book. I liked the stylistic writing, but did not care for the content at all). 

• Looking forward to: Warmth! And non-terrifying driving conditions! Noah has his first ever snow day today. We had a big ice/snow storm yesterday and, even before that, we've spent the last week slipping and sliding along the roads. Poor Isaiah has been telling a story about how we were "sliding and sliding and sliding down the hill (by our house) and a nice lady stopped to help us" to anyone who will listen. He keeps saying how the roads make him "a little bit nervous" and he wants to go to California. A boy after my own heart :-) 

• Considering: We're thinking of buying a truck. We have a U-haul truck reserved to move our remaining belongings and haul our car, but we may buy a truck instead and haul a trailer out. I am a huge Craigslist addict, so it may be useful for us when we get out to Cali too because then we'll be able to haul my furniture finds back to the new house. I am in love with vintage trucks and have dreamed of buying one for years, so this may be my chance to get a little bit close to that dream :-) 

• Planning: I've been checking out my Pinterest pages for decorating ideas for the new house. We could tell pretty early on that this was not going to be our long-term home so we really never settled in. In fact, we never really fully unpacked or decorated. I want our new home to feel like "home" and so I am going to put in a real effort to decorate and get settled this time.

Right Now

Right now I am…

·         Reading: I just finished The House at Tynedford by Natasha Solomons. I’d never heard of this book before and just picked it up on a whim from the library. I ended up loving it. It’s the story of a young Austrian Jewish woman who moves to England just before WWII to work as a maid (and escape the impending war). Really good!

·         Watching: I watched What to Expect When You’re Expecting the other day and the Elizabeth Banks character cracked me up. Like me, her character is a complete hot mess during pregnancy and seeing her melt-down made me feel a little less crazed.

·         Looking forward to: There are almost no words that can describe how excited I am for Season 4 of Arrested Development. They start airing on Netflix on May 25^th and I can barely contain myself!!

·         Regretting: I forgot my camera on Mother’s Day, so I don’t have a single picture from our day. My parents hosted a lunch for me and the boys (Shawn was in California). Hope you had a great one Mom!

·         Envying: My friend Stephanie and her boyfriend Edwin recently dropped everything to hike the Pacific Coast Trail from Mexico to Canada. You can follow along with their adventure on her blog, And Everywhere in Between.

·         Craving: Cantaloupe.