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I saw this on a blog I follow and thought it was fun considering our recent discussion about women, books, and reading….play along in the comments if you like.

The Big Read is a NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. I have highlighted the titles that I have 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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 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 (to be fair not sure I actually read it or only the cliff’s notes but I’m gonna count it-lol)
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
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

who else?  I know some of you are either close to finished or are already finished.  So, I guess we should start discussing or rather, continue discussing.  I am on page 33 currently and it’s GREAT!  The guy definitely has a way with words plus it’s about Cleveland, plus I’m a sucker for stories about death (what is that?), plus it has already talked about many places I”m curious to explore, plus so many people I know and love are also enjoying it.  Anyhow, nice easy read but I am still finding it hard to find time to actually read.  damn kids.

Ok, I got it from the library.

First and Last Seasons: A Father, Son, and Sunday Afternoon Football.” by Dan McGraw

It looks good.  Who’s ready?

http://www.amazon.com/First-Last-Seasons-Afternoon-Football/dp/0385498330/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220406609&sr=1-1

I surrendered to my children and returned Love Medicine to the library.  I hadn’t made progress on reading it in 1 1/2 weeks so maybe one day I’ll get it back out from the library.  Personally I would still like to participate in this group and do it like a “traditional” book club where the book is chosen and we have an allotted amount of time to read it.  I feel like a month is long enough although I failed at it this past month.  Anyhow, I”m moving on, having enjoyed the conversation so far.  I will pick up the next read suggested by John and get going.  Thanks all!

Ok, I’m hoping to make some big progess on this book this week.  So far I have made it through two more chapters since my last post…Lee has started as well.

Also, I am going to try to update this with a recap of the last week’s comments….will do that tomorrow.  Happy reading…

Ok, here we are in week #2 of our first selection.  I think the discussion is going well so far.  Anyone else want to weigh in on the love scene between Marie and Kashpaw?

I am debating whether to copy and paste the comments up here but I think I will not and just let us go back to those if needed.

So, comment on this post from here forward….thank you.

Ok, today begins our book club.  This will be the thread for commenting so far.  The rules are simple:

1. buy or borrow book

2. read book

3. comment here on book

I have invited my friends Mary and Amanda (hope they join us).  I’m excited about this fun club.  Also, if this thread gets pushed down you can find it with the tags for bookclub.

*update* Image from John below(use adobe 8 to read)

family-tree

ok, we have one suggestion from Shirley

“Love Medicine: a novel” by Louise Erdrich

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Medicine-Novel-Louise-Erdrich/dp/0060786469

any objections?  any other suggestions?

Shirley, Alli, Johnny, who else is in on this virtual book club.  I say we give a deadline for reading, then I will post a topic on that date and we can start discussing in the comments section.

p.s. ANORRIS is Allison Norris, mom :)  lol.