My niece Sarah had this posted under her "Notes" on Facebook. I couldn't figure out how to put anything under Notes on my Facebook page, (not tech-saavy today I guess) so I'm pasting it here. I've placed an X next to ones I've read.
Go ahead and check your own reading against this list. The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.
I have more reading to do!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -X
6 The Bible -X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller –X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll- X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame- X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma-Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - does 1/2 way count?
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -X
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-X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-x
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 -x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon- x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -X
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 -X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens- x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante-X
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 - X
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 - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton-
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - x
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-X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo-
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
It's been a long time
I see it's been weeks since I posted on my blog. Guess that means I've been busy, busy working, true, but mostly busy enjoying summer. I love being outdoors in warm weather, picking blueberries, relaxing in the pool with friends, or just curling up with a cup of coffee while I read on the porch. Everything feels better outdoors in warm weather.
Summer brings its own outdoor culture, and I've enjoyed some of that. We went to an Orioles game with Katie and Kyle, saw Paul McCartney (heart be still) with Kathy, saw Elton and Billy with Katie (Elton is good but Billy is awesome, even when he's sick) , and saw Mike's new apartment and workplace in Sanford Florida. In there somewhere, I took a bus trip to Washington with my church to watch our pastor's graduation, and we hosted a couple of parties. We have two more parties to go to round out the summer.
Yep, it's been wonderful, despite the rainy weather and the cooler-than-average temps. I've even taken some time to sit and think about my story, a rare commodity to be sure. Some days, I write like a woman possessed, and other days I barely come up with a new phrase. I'm on about page 170 now, and I figure it'll be somewhere around 270 when I'm done with this first draft. I had hoped to be done with the first draft by the end of August which now doesn't seem realistic, but hey, you never know. It's summer. Anything can happen.
Summer brings its own outdoor culture, and I've enjoyed some of that. We went to an Orioles game with Katie and Kyle, saw Paul McCartney (heart be still) with Kathy, saw Elton and Billy with Katie (Elton is good but Billy is awesome, even when he's sick) , and saw Mike's new apartment and workplace in Sanford Florida. In there somewhere, I took a bus trip to Washington with my church to watch our pastor's graduation, and we hosted a couple of parties. We have two more parties to go to round out the summer.
Yep, it's been wonderful, despite the rainy weather and the cooler-than-average temps. I've even taken some time to sit and think about my story, a rare commodity to be sure. Some days, I write like a woman possessed, and other days I barely come up with a new phrase. I'm on about page 170 now, and I figure it'll be somewhere around 270 when I'm done with this first draft. I had hoped to be done with the first draft by the end of August which now doesn't seem realistic, but hey, you never know. It's summer. Anything can happen.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Being a rebel
The History channel ran a show last weekend about the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The show described what they were up against: breaking ties with their mother country, saying they wanted to govern themselves (and do it in a way no one had done before), and doing it all in full knowledge that they would be guilty of treason against the king if they were caught, punishable by hanging. Somewhere, somehow, they got the courage to sign their names and send it off to King George. It was a gamble, and we reap the benefits.
Personally, I love the idea that I live in a country founded by rebels against the status quo.
Personally, I love the idea that I live in a country founded by rebels against the status quo.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Cut and paste vs. delete
I've been writing 15-20+ hours each week for the last couple of weeks, most of which is new material. It's more than I usually write, and even as I'm writing it, I know that some of it is crap. In the last week, I've killed off a character then decided he couldn't die, given another one polio then decided she couldn't have it, and decided that an invisible character needs to remain invisible, like Carlton the doorman from Rhoda. Sometimes I cut and paste the scene into a "deleted scenes" file on my computer. Sometimes I just highlight the whole thing and delete it. Gone forever.
I'm just plugging away, getting my ideas and revisions down on paper (or my more accurately, on my computer) while I have the time.
I just printed out 30 pages of new text and now I'll edit. I actually love this part, because this is where my story stops being crap and starts evolving into the story it wants to be. I'll need to revise it, change the sequence of events, improve the dialogue, describe the setting better, etc.
I'm just plugging away, getting my ideas and revisions down on paper (or my more accurately, on my computer) while I have the time.
I just printed out 30 pages of new text and now I'll edit. I actually love this part, because this is where my story stops being crap and starts evolving into the story it wants to be. I'll need to revise it, change the sequence of events, improve the dialogue, describe the setting better, etc.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Trusting for the rest
Writing this book has been quite a creative stretch for me.
My background in PT is heavy in sciences and child development, so I am used to information organized and presented sequentially and logically. When I've written non-fiction materials for the PT or child development literature, I've created a plan in the form of an outline and written my manuscript according to the plan.
So, I tried to write fiction that way. The result was too formal and contrived. I got frustrated with it and gave up.
In reading a 'how to' book on writing fiction, I found some help. One author compared writing fiction to driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights will allow, usually only until the next turn. But that's okay. It's far enough, and you just have to learn to trust for the rest. I decided to give that a try.
So, I created characters and put them in a time and place. Then I gave one a problem and let the characters go. Sometimes I feel like a spectator recording the action, and I haven't got a fully developed plan as to what will happen next or whether it will end how I originally hoped.
I still struggle with a feeling of being out of control of my story. Hopefully, I can continue to trust what I see, one little stretch of road at a time.
My background in PT is heavy in sciences and child development, so I am used to information organized and presented sequentially and logically. When I've written non-fiction materials for the PT or child development literature, I've created a plan in the form of an outline and written my manuscript according to the plan.
So, I tried to write fiction that way. The result was too formal and contrived. I got frustrated with it and gave up.
In reading a 'how to' book on writing fiction, I found some help. One author compared writing fiction to driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights will allow, usually only until the next turn. But that's okay. It's far enough, and you just have to learn to trust for the rest. I decided to give that a try.
So, I created characters and put them in a time and place. Then I gave one a problem and let the characters go. Sometimes I feel like a spectator recording the action, and I haven't got a fully developed plan as to what will happen next or whether it will end how I originally hoped.
I still struggle with a feeling of being out of control of my story. Hopefully, I can continue to trust what I see, one little stretch of road at a time.
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