I am borrowing another post today... Like I did yesterday. It's just that the blog world keeps me so fascinated, ya know?? So yesterday was a shout-out to my brother Steven's "Fear Post", and today I am borrowing from my friend Melanie (who, incidentally, borrowed from her friend, who borrowed from her friend... so it's kinda a tag... KINDA.)

So this is a list of 100 popular/classic books. I agree with many of the choices on here, but have issue with a few... But who can REALLY post a definitive list, ya know? So based on this list, you are supposed to highlight the ones you have read in BLUE and the ones you want to read someday in GREEN. (And I added ♥ to the ones I particularly cherish...)

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. How many have you read?

Being an English major/teacher, and overall lifelong bookworm, I am going to do much better than that.... But I am still a bit chagrined at some of the titles on here that I should have read and never did. Maybe someday, right?

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 (parts of it?!)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - 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 Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
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
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I got halfway through...)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( I think East of Eden, my favorite book of his, should be on here)
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 (I really tried, but BLAH. Boo.)
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 (started it)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And there you have it.... 30 on this list. Though TECHNICALLY, I could count Harry Potter as SEVEN books, bringing my count to 36. And the Chronicles of Narnia also have seven, though one is listed separately, still giving me five more to add-- so I say I have 41 total. But it's splitting hairs.

And since we're talking about books, here are my top five of all time:

1. East of Eden~ John Steinbeck
2. The Education of Little Tree~ Forest Carter
3. Harry Potters 1-7~ J.K. Rowling
4. Expecting Adam~ Martha Beck
5. Simple Abundance~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

...though there are so many more that I cherish. Ahhh.... books. I love them.

Your turn!

Fears: Another "Dark Corner"

My brother wrote a fascinating post on his blog exploring all of my siblings' past fears/phobias, then analyzing them and ranking them. It was entertaining, insightful, and really amusing at times...
If my family and childhood fears sound at ALL interesting to you, click:
What Are You Afraid Of?

but even if you DON'T read his, ask yourself-- what were YOUR big childhood fears, rational or irrational? How do you feel about them now?

Mine was fires and tornadoes. I was terrified of house fires all through the autumn and winter, and as soon as March would hit, it would switch completely over to tornadoes. I blame the elementary school and it's endless fire and tornado drills, along with VIDEO and FILM of how to stay safe. It all just provided fuel to my fear. I was DEADLY afraid. I would even cry on the school bus trip home, because halfway home it would hit me-- "I'm almost home and my house could catch on FIRE and we'd all lose our stuff and maybe even die and I don't want to climb out of a second-story window and......" on and on. Like I said, it was heart-grippingly bad. And it felt never-ending.

But then I remember being a young teenager, several years later, and one day thinking, "I used to be so afraid. I'm not anymore. When did that happen?" I remember that epiphany and feeling deeply grateful that the fear was finally gone.

Anyway... random little post... but post a comment: What was YOUR fear? How do you feel now?