This might explain a few things...

I've seen this meme wandering around the blogosphere (here and here and here) and just couldn't resist joining in, because frankly, I think it explains a lot about me. Also because I like that it contains a nice mix of classic and contemporary books.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here." (**okay, try as I might, I couldn't find the direct quote for this anywhere. If anyone knows where this originally came from - or if it's simply a bit of blogger/Facebook lore - I'd love to know.)

Instructions:

•Copy this list.
•Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
•Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
•Highlight in red the ones that you have but haven't read.

Simple enough, right? Here we go!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien  (heck to the YES!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (oh my, swoon!)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (anyone out there that hasn't yet??)
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 most of his plays - not all - and hardly any poetry. Kudos to anyone who checks this one off their list.)
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 (I NEED to read this one. It calls to me)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (this is shameful. I think I have to turn in my southerner card now or something)
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (all because of my hubby)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (favorite book in HS - I was a weird kid)
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 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (best Austen ever!)
36 The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
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 (folks you are seriously missing out on some crazy humor if you haven't picked up these gems recently.)
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - 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 The 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 - Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt (saw the movie... but that doesn't really count)
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 Alborn
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 (in the original French no less! -- Okay, even I know that's pretty nerdy)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adam
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 


Total Books Read: 51

Well, my fellow book nerds, after going through this list all I have to say is...yup. I'm a book geek. And proud of it. But really BBC! Do you honestly think most people have only read less than 6 of these titles? How depressing..

To me, the biggest surprise was discovering that even though I did read many of these while in school - either for college or HS classes - a large percentage are actually ones I picked up on my own in the last couple of years for pleasure reading. So yes, you could say this exercise amply proves that I am a bit of a geek. And very happy that way.

How well read are you?

The Basic Book Meme

Holly here!

Since I (as of yet) don’t have a book blog of my own, I couldn’t resist filling out a book meme for the first time. I found this meme at Dovegreyreader Scribbles awhile back and just loved it.


The book that’s been on your shelves the longest.

I don’t know. j/k I’ll have to ask my mom about that one.

A book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time).

This is hard, because there are so many. First Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey because I read them for the first time while I lived in London. I’ll never forget grabbing my bag and iPod, passing Waitrose grocery and government housing, and finally reaching the small but quaint Fulham City Library. That was one joyful errand. I also have to mention The Time Traveler’s Wife. DH and I had been trying to conceive for over a year and I had just had what may have been an early miscarriage. I balled and balled and balled in the car, in my bedroom, in the kitchen - wherever I could sneak in a few pages. In fact I don’t think a day will go by where I will not think of that book. And wait, Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire. I read the English version while riding in a rented van from London to Scotland, Dramamine and all.

A book you acquired in some interesting way.

I don’t own enough books to answer this question properly. It would have to be Orem Public Library’s former copy of Cecilia by Fanny Burney. After a week-long houseboat trip of careful handling on Lake Powell it fell out of the back of the car while luggage was being rearranged and straight into a dirty puddle. What’s worse than water damage? Black water damage.

The book that’s been with you to the most places.

Again, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London, Edinburough, Paris, New York, and finally Utah.

Your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next.

Current: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
Last: The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge
Next: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Gracia and Margaret Stahl

The most recent addition to your shelves.

Wake by Lisa McMann

BBAW Meme

Book Blogger Appreciation Week is in full swing and they have so many wonderful things going on. Today they have asked bloggers to think about how you read books. Mostly what are your habits and quirks - in five words or less.

* Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?
POPCORN!! mmmmhhmm

* Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I'm sorta weird, and it's probably due to HS and college required reading: I mark in books I consider to be 'classics' and wouldn't dream of writing in anything else. I know, OCD much?

* How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
bookmark, even though it's usually something odd like a napkin, debit card or receipt

* Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
both - I feel like I need to be improving my mind from time to time

* Hard copy or audiobooks?
hard, but I like to have something to listen to in the car

* Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
I am so bad at this, I HAVE to get to some sort of break/end of chapter before I can put down a book.

* If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?
usually, but sometimes I'm lazy and I don't want to

* What are you currently reading?
Long Live the Queen by Ellen Emerson White

* What is the last book you bought?
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

* Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?
I try to only do one at a time, mostly cause I read too fast

* Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?
during my little guy's nap time - that is my precious 'me' time

* Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?
series, mostly because that means I'll have an automatic next read - I like no-brainers

* How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)
by genre, then by size, then by if I've already read them or not - not very logical, I know, but it works for me

If my life had books titles

I've seen this meme at a few different sites and I sorta took the questions I liked best.

Using only books you have read this year (2009), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. It’s a lot harder than you think!

*Describe Yourself: Magic to the Bone by Ilona Andrews

*How do you feel: Savvy by Ingrid Law

*Describe where you currently live: Under the Rose by Diana Peterfreund

*If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Hollow Kingdom by Clare B. Dunkle

*Your favorite form of transportation: Street Magic by Caitlin Kittredge

*Your best friend is: The Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

*You and your friends are: Valiant by Holly Black

*What’s the weather like: Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston

*Favorite time of day : The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong

*What is life like to you: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

*Your fear: Blue Diablo by Ann Aguirre

*Thought for the Day: On the Bright Side, I'm now the Girlfriend of a Sex God by Louise Rennison

*How I would like to die: Fade by Lisa McMann

*My soul’s present condition: Wanderlust by Ann Aguirre

Myself in Books

1. What author do you own the most books by?
Terry Brooks. I think I have almost all of his Shannara series from when I was in HS. My brother got me hooked and I still love them.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
To be honest I don't think I own more than one copy of any book... I dunno, that almost seems sad.

3. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Bridget Jones. The Hubby gets tired of me trying to read him passages which I can't finish becuase I'm laughing too hard.

4. What book have you read more than any other?
Winnie the Pooh or the House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne. Every few years or so the Hubby and I read these aloud to each other and just crack up.

5. What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old?
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth Speare. My copy is literally falling apart. Whenever someone asks me one place I want to travel to I still say the Barbados because I want to swim in that blue ocean Kit so lovingly describes.

6. What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Ruby by Francesca Lia Block. Just weird.

7. What is the best book you've read in the past year?
You want what??! Well, I really liked A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson (I just love her name), The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Lots more. Lots.

8. If you could tell everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Actually, just read anything by Steinbeck and your life will be better.

9. What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Beloved by Toni Morrison. I didn't understand the half of it cause I was a naive teenager.

10. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
RUSSIANS! How anyone can create such beauty out of such misery is always fascinating.

11. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Definitely Shakespeare.

12. Austen or Eliot?
Austen. Austen. Austen. All I have to say is: Austen.

13. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Probably poetry. Also, this is sad but the Odyssey and the Illiad. I know.

14. What is your favorite novel?
To name JUST a few: Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

15. What is your favorite play?
Much Ado About Nothing. What I wouldn't give to be able to come up with one-liners like Beatrice.

16. What is your favorite poem?
Eek. I think this is my most embarrassing gap. I do like some Elizabeth Barrett Browning though...

17. What is your favorite essay?
Ain't I a Woman? By Sojourner Truth

18. What is your favorite short story?
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

19. What is your favorite non-fiction?
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

20. What is your favorite graphic novel?
Haven't really picked up on this genre.

21. What is your favorite science fiction?
I like a lot of the doomsday type books: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, 1984 by George Orwell. If it's dystopian, I'll probally love it.

22. Who is your favorite writer?
Ooohh. I really don't have a favorite but I'll read anything by Robin McKinley or Jane Austen

23. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I'll probably get kicked for it but I'll go with Stephen King

24. What are you reading right now?
A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce. Even though I know it's a Rumpelstiltskin retelling, I'm on the edge of my seat.

25. Best memoir?
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

26. Best history?
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

27. Best mystery or noir?
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Classicly wonderful.

And you? What books best describe you?