A Meme

Apparently, the Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list. I went on the Web site and tried to find this list (and the NEA's thing about the average adult only having read six), but I couldn't find it. Nonetheless, it's a fun list! I've read 58 of them.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished. Has anyone I know ever finished Ulysses? Please speak up so I can bow at your feet ...)
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

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, I've read all the major plays and sonnets though
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 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 Meany - 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 (Read in the 4th grade)
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
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 (I read the unabridged version in the 8th grade)

Postpartum Visit

First, if there is anyone who missed the post about the private blog with pics of J, email me to get on the Approved list. And if you slip me $5, maybe I'll get you a table by the door...





Thank you Brianne at Gibson Twins for this fantabulous award. Of course we need to pass it on, so...

To Cathy, who is often the first to comment on my posts, and whose twin wrangling always reminds me that even when J fusses for 4 hours every evening, I do not even have it one-eighth as bad as her.

To Dawn , who helped me while away the boring last month of my pregnancy with IM chats, and whose little guy is just a couple months older than mine.

To Searching, who can commiserate with the hell and the joy that is hospital nursing, who I hope gets the chance to spoil her own little monkeys someday.

That said, I'll update by saying I saw the midwife for my 6 week visit yesterday, and got the all-clear to resume normal activities. I also got a script for Season@le, and 6 free months of samples. I asked her when it would be ideal to TTC again, considering I had surgery, and was told 2 years. Um, not really going to happen, I said. It took nearly 2 years last time, and my husband, though youthful in appearance, is 40. So 12 months minimum. I do have quite a bit of weight to lose, and I know it can take a year, so that is OK. But all bets are off next summer. I'm hoping the ovaries behave next time. And I'm hoping that if I start off at a good weight, I'll have fewer cardiac symptoms, which, since the 30 pounds of fluid disappeared, have bid sayonara themselves.

Weird Japanese Treats

Rose flavored gum, a bean paste treat, and something flavored like a pickled plum.


Beauty Magazine candy? Must be for the tween set...

A part of the assortment my sister sent, including a hamburger-shaped something that did not taste like hamburger...

My favorite when I was in Japan, Pocky sticks! You can get them at Kroger now...

Odd flavored KitKats, including banana, green tea, strawberry, and a black and white bar that my simple Japanese reading skills calls Kabuki.

Pancake candy that smelled like pancake with syrup, and tasted like sugar wafers.

Cherry-shaped bean paste treat that tasted like dried up ass.

My addiction- Kirin Milk tea. I drank a liter of this a day in Japan.

Asparagus Biscuits? WTF? Fortunately this was just a sesame cracker that was quite good. Don't ask me where the name came from.