Meme

100 Notable Books of 2006 Meme

Here’s a link to the NY Times list so you can find authors and brief descriptions if you need them.  Play the normal way – bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you are sure you will never read (I rarely cross any out).  (my italicized books are either already on my reserve list or have been on my reserve list and returned to the library unread – because I ran out of time.) 

FICTION & POETRY

ABSURDISTAN

AFTER THIS

AGAINST THE DAY

ALENTEJO BLUE

ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN

APEX HIDES THE HURT.

ARTHUR AND GEORGE

AVERNO

BEASTS OF NO NATION

BLACK SWAN GREEN

BROOKLAND

COLLECTED POEMS, 1947-1997. By Allen Ginsberg

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL

THE DEAD FISH MUSEUM

DIGGING TO AMERICA

THE DISSIDENT

THE DREAM LIFE OF SUKHANOV

EAT THE DOCUMENT

THE ECHO MAKER

THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN

EVERYMAN

FORGETFULNESS

GALLATIN CANYON: Stories. By Thomas McGuane

GATE OF THE SUN

GOLDEN COUNTRY

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

HIGH LONESOME: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006. By Joyce Carol Oates

THE INHABITED WORLD

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

INTUITION

THE KEEP

LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH

THE LAY OF THE LAND

LISEY’S STORY

NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1964-2006. By Ishmael Reed

OLD FILTH

ONE GOOD TURN

ONLY REVOLUTIONS

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND

THE ROAD

SKINNER’S DRIFT

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS

THE STORIES OF MARY GORDON

STRONG IS YOUR HOLD

SUITE FRANÇAISE

TERRORIST

THE TRANSLATOR

TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES.

THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT

A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM

NONFICTION

THE AFTERLIFE

AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy

ANDREW CARNEGIE

AT CANAAN’S EDGE: America in the King Years, 1965-68

AVA GARDNER: "Love Is Nothing."

THE BLIND SIDE: Evolution of a Game

BLOOD AND THUNDER: An Epic of the American West

BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime

CLEMENTE: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER: And Other Essays

THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

THE DISCOMFORT ZONE: A Personal History

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Memoir

FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

FLAUBERT: A Biography

FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic

THE GHOST MAP: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

THE GREAT DELUGE: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina

HAPPINESS: A History

HEAT: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

IRAN AWAKENING: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

JANE GOODALL: The Woman Who Redefined Man

KATE: The Woman Who Was Hepburn

LEE MILLER: A Life

THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

THE LOST: A Search for Six of Six Million

MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals

ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN

PRISONERS: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide

PROGRAMMING THE UNIVERSE: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos

QUEEN OF FASHION: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

READING LIKE A WRITER: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

REDEMPTION: The Last Battle of the Civil War

SELF-MADE MAN: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again

STATE OF DENIAL

STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE

SWEET AND LOW: A Family Story

TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW: A Memoir

UNCOMMON CARRIERS

THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA: How We Became a Gourmet Nation

THE WAR OF THE WORLD: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

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Another List

Adrienne is blogging again and she blogged another list.  What the heck, I’ll play.


1. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding

6. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma – Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

11. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott

26. The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

33. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

36. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
39. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence

43. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
45. Ulysses – James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial – Franz Kafka

50. Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis – Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
53. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

54. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
55. USA – John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford

58. The Plague – Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
60. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
63. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White

64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
67. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

70. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
75. Herzog – Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

80. The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River – V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark – Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
88. The BFG – Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
90. Money – Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda – Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories – Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential – James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement – Ian McEwan (I tried but it made me sleepy so I quit)
98. Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald

OK I’m in at just under 60%.  Hmmmm, interesting list.

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Summer Reading Challenge

Src4Amanda is running a Summer Reading Challenge and it’s interesting. I’m not sure what such a challenge would be, for me. 28 books is not all that many, probably about what I’d read when it wasn’t summer, ya know? The other problem is that while some people have more time to read in the summer, I tend to have less. Maybe what I should do is create a list of a certain type of book? That doesn’t seem like it would work well either though because of how I choose books in general – and because almost all of my books come from the library so my reading is based on the speed at which others return books that I’ve reserved.

Updated on May 23rd: I’ve decided what my challenge is – only 20 19 books but these will definitely be a challenge for me since I’ll also be trying to keep up with the “normal” reading we’ll be doing aka keeping up with TW’s normal reading:

Updated June 26: Only 2 down, I’ll never make it!

Updated July 2: Cloud Atlas, Crucible and the Mark Twain – done!

Updated July 15: Kindred, The Ancient Child – 7 finished, just 7! Ack!

Updated: July 21: Vanity Fair – DONE! Taking a break for something GOOD! Heh.

Updated July 23: The Shadow of the Wind – Done! From the “meme section”. 10 down and starting the scarey stuff now…

Updated August 2: Kristin Lavransdatter – finished. 10 down, more scarey stuff on tap!

Updated August 6: 2 more finished, 175 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow but I’ve given up, for now. I might make it after all… maybe… 12 0f 19 finished.

Updated August 13: 16 of 19 finished (plus 1/3 of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I’ve given up on in favor of another Pynchon novel…)

Updated August 19: 17 down, finished The Crying of Lot 49 which I substituted for Gravity’s Rainbow. I have Possession on audio and am ordering Odd Women now, hopefully it will arrive quickly and I can finish before the end of the month. I’m almost impressed with myself!

Updated August 31: Yea! I’m done, I did it! Well, sort of. I am listening to the last book right now, on audio. I’m on cassette 5 (there are 16 cassettes). So I won’t really finish by midnight tonight but I will finish it in a week or so. I’m pretty pleased that I managed to complete this challenge. It was much harder than I thought it would be, too.

Read 1 book I own but haven’t read – 5 (thanks Sassymonkey) Here are the 5: The Girls, The Land of Women, Midwives, Mrs Shakespeare, The Effect of Living Backwards Done 8/13/6

Read The doggone Moonstone – Done 6/6/6

Read The doggone Dragonriders of Pern – Done 6/20/6


Read a classic that I haven’t read before 5. Here are the 5 I’m going to read (thanks to Jules and Sassymonkey for assisting in the creation of this list!) : Odd Women
, Vanity Fair, The Diaries of Adam & Eve, The Crucible, Kindred –Done 8/30/6


Read the books on this meme that I haven’t read
(3) (2) (1)- problem, it appears I have read all three of the books in His Dark Materials. I reserved the one I don’t own/thought I hadn’t read and it turns out, I have read it after all!

Read books from the Teachers First’s Lifetime Reading List that I have not read 5 (the list: Possession, The Woman Warrior, The Ancient Child, Gravity’s Rainbow (substituted The Crying of Lot 49, Kristin Lavrandsdatter)

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Booking Through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday

  1. Do you plan ahead for your reading? Work off of a to-be-read pile? A reading list? Or do you wing it, chooe whatever you’re in the mood for? I planned ahead for the summer and I’ve really not enjoyed it – at all. Other than that, I only plan ahead if my to be read stack is huge and the deadline for library returns is looming.
  2. If you do plan ahead, how far ahead? Do you have two or three books waiting in queue? Or are you backed up by dozens of volumes waiting their turn? I generally pick up 10 books a week from the library, sometimes more if TW is on a serious role. I’m always behind, so there are 30 or so for me to choose from.
  3. If you do not plan ahead . . . well, never? What about if you’re reading a series? Or someone gives you a book for a present? I don’t understand how you can never do SOME planning. If you didn’t somehow plan, wouldn’t you run out of books and find yourself re-reading something or roaming around aimlessly because you don’t have a book to read?

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Your bookshelves

A couple of weeks ago, some photos appeared on the Flickr Bookshelf Project Pool feed that have stuck with me all this time. Someone’s books were arranged by color. Intriguing. Today, another photo of books arranged by color appeared on Ed’s Superpatron – Friends of the Library blog and I’ve decided this is the way to go.



A couple of years ago, Michelle attempted to use the little bar scanner to enter all of our books into a database and arranged books by author (fiction) and type (non-fiction). The attempt, while admirable, was not a huge success. We don’t have enough shelves and things got moved around really quickly. And of course, we can never remember author names. We need a new system and I think color is the way to go.


We can often remember the cover of a book. If it’s a classic, there’s a good chance it’s a Penguin which means orange. This color thing is really making sense to me.


How are your books arranged? Do you think the color system is a good idea? Or am I just nuts?


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Booking Through Thursday

Finally! One I wanted to do!


Booking Through Thursday

  1. What are the last five books that you finished reading? Odd Girl Speaks Out (Rachel Simmons) The Egg & I (Betty McDonald), Rose of No Man’s Land (Michelle Tea), Pitching My Tent (Anita Diamont), Carolina Isle (Jude Deveraux)
  2. How long did it take you to read them? 8 days worth of reading
  3. Did you enjoy reading these books? Why or why not? Odd Girl Speaks Out and Carolina Isle, not so much. The Egg & I was ok. Pitching My Tent I could recommend. Loved Rose of No Man’s Land. Why? Why not? Scroll through the blog and find out!




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I am not ashamed

I’m participating in yet another list thingy, you know the routine – bold the books you’ve read, italicize those you might read, cross out the
ones you won’t, put an asterisk beside the ones on your bookshelves,
and place brackets around the ones you’ve never even heard of , only because I felt badly for M MV and you all know how I feel about her.  She thinks she’s the only book blogger who has read and is not ashamed of reading The DaVinci Code.  Well she’s not alone.  I read it.  I’m not ashamed.  I actually enjoyed it.  I know there are more of us lurking – come out of the closet and admit you’ve read it.  And if you’re really brave, you might even admit you sort of enjoyed it.  A little.  (And admit to having read Angels & Demons too)

The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
* The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
* The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
* To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)
The Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
* Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (George Orwell)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
* The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
* Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
* Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
* 1984 (George Orwell)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
*Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
* Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
* Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
* Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)

[The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)]
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
* The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
* The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
* Sula (Toni Morrison)
* Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)

The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)

* White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
* The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

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