Reading is fundamental...

Well it's another meme ans this one is all about books. The 100 books on this list are what some would deem as must reads and some are considered classics. I'm afraid to say that I have only read 16 out of 100 and one of those I never finished. I must note that # 4 is a total of 7 books and #36 is one book out of 7 so to be fair I have actually read 29 books.The funny thing is I love to read. I have two shelves full of books in our bookcase that I need to read. I suppose I like more contemporay writers. Anyway, I must give credit as I stole this from here and other than that you may see how you do with the list and have a look at how miserabley I've failed in my reading fundamentals.

Look at the list and bold those you have read.
Italicize those you read part of but never finished.
Underline the books you LOVE.
Strike though those you hope to never read again, and sometimes wish you could un-read.

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 (The Tempest, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night / What You Will, Henry IV, part 1, Henry V, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth,Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 - C.S. 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 DaVinci 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’ 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

You're too kind...

I truly appreciate all of the recent comments and I am taking them all on board so from now on you get what ever I've got to say; be it good, bad, ugly, pretty, angry, happy, optimistic or pessimistic, which ever it may be you can be guaranteed that I will be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God, Buddha, Allah, Shiva who ever..

Now I need to first follow through on a recent tagging, by this lovely man, that occurred back on June 4th. so I'm a little slow on the uptake. Unlike a lot of you I read every blog on my list. OK I'm kidding. :) Ok no I'm not, I actually I do read them all. I have way to much time on my hands. Anyway, here's how the meme works, although I must first notate that the rules were changed slightly from the originals but I'm doing as I'm told:

Step One – pull out a book on the book shelf.
Step Two – go to page 123.
Step Three – read and write out the 5th sentence.
Step Four – tag 5 more people.

1) My Book is "The Year of Living Biblically" A. J. Jacobs

2 & 3) " An ancient Israelite sect called the Essenes dressed in white, as do some kabbalists."

4) I'm not a tagger as I learned from last time I did such a thing so I won't be tagging a single sole. Now on the other hand if you want to try this then I say give it a go. Don't forget to let me know if you did try so I can have a sticky beak as to what you came up with. Enjoy...

Reading is fundamental

As winter sets in here in the land down under it seems to be the most logical time to get in some good reading time. It's a bit cold to go outside and nothing is nicer then curling up on the couch with a good book. I've always liked to read and sometimes I would read for days on end. Then other times I get easily distracted or maybe the book just isn't that great. Anyway, I thought I would share some of my most recent reads along with my current read and those to be read. So without further adieu, my current reading material is:

Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums

Recent reads have included:

• The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage
• Light Before Day by Christopher Rice
• Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs

Books still to be read include but not limited to:

• Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1) by Christopher Paolini
• Eldest (Inheritance, Book 2) by Christopher Paolini
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
• Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan
• The Amulet of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 1) by Jonathan Stroud
• The Golem's Eye (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 2) by Jonathan Stroud
• Ptolemy's Gate (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 3) by Jonathan Stroud
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin
• My First Five Husbands..And the Ones Who Got Away by Rue McClanahan
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson

So, there you have it, quite a menagerie of reading material but I like to keep it all over the shop. I like everything from pure fantasy, thought provoking things, just plain good reads and good old true stories. It also looks like I have a lot of books on my shelves So, I best get reading! What have you read lately, currently reading or plan on reading?

(I linked all of the books in case you might be interested in finding out more not because I think you should buy them from Amazon)