The Actual 100 Books List of 2007

Here are the books I've actually read so far this year, in my quest to read 100 books. (It's actually really doable, you just have to read at least 8 books a month.)

December 2006
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Naked Republicans by Shelley Lynch
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
My Secret by Frank Warren
The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner

January 2007
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs
Dance Upon the Air by Nora Roberts
Heaven and Earth by Nora Roberts
Face the Fire by Nora Roberts
Smitten by Janet Evanovich
Full Bloom by Janet Evanovich
A Loving Scoundrel by Johanna Lindsey

February 2007
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
The Pursuit by Johanna Lindsey
Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich
Bittersweet by Nevada Barr
The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts
Elvis and Me by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

March 2007
The President’s Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud
All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve
Light on Snow by Anita Shreve
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Red Lily by Nora Roberts

Hey, I never claimed they were all works of literary genius.

Currently reading: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Next up: About a Boy by Nick Hornby and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I stole this from Christy.

It's a list of 100 books. You bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read and leave the ones you're not interested in plain.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) - I totally have this book and have never cracked it.
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) - This is actually on my bedside table, waiting for me to finish my Nick Hornby binge.
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

So, that's 45 from that list that I've read, and I want to read 22 more. Not bad.

I've Read Some Things: Part 3 of 3

The other book I read this week was Anita Shreve's Light on Snow.

This one, I really, really liked. The ending was again, too quick, and the size of the print on the page really made me realize how short a book it was: it was almost like a novella to me. I'm OK with that, though, because it was on the clearance rack at Half-Price Books, and I got it for $1. You can't beat that. (Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I paid for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I'm reading next, out of sheer and immutable curiosity.)

Without diving too deeply into it, Light on Snow is written in the voice of 12-year-old Nicky, who lost her mother and little sister in a car crash two years ago and was forced by her grieving father to move out in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. One day, while taking a walk, father and daughter discover a baby, abandoned in the snow. They scoop the baby up and take her to the hospital. The paper writes a story about it and the baby's mother reads it and ends up visiting their home. She gets stuck there because of a snowstorm and it goes from there.

I thought it was one of the most genuine books I've read in awhile. Shreve captured the voice of a twelve-year-old very believably. She showed the struggle of the child to understand this horrible thing she has seen - and then the struggle to place the baby's mom in the whole puzzle, when she really just wants the baby's mom to love her and become part of the family.

There's an amazing optimism to the character of Nicky. She is the total opposite of her father - a person who, when something horrible happens to him in the loss of his wife and daughter, shuts himself off from everyone and everything. Nicky just wants to reach out and live, and it's an amazing dichotomy.

Anyway, highly recommended, that one.

Now, to talk about my kids...

I've Read Some Things: Part 2 of 3

So, next I read All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve.

While I think I liked the book (I'm strangely undecided about most of what I've read of Shreve's work), I struggled with the male voice of the protagonist because it's stereotypical. Then I start thinking about it and, for the time in which the book was set (1900s), it's understandable that the male voice would be stereotypical, and an effort to break free from that stereotype could be seen as not genuine to the time period. So it's a struggle for me, and I think I may be looking at it very narrowly.

The other problem I had was that it wrapped up SO quickly! All of these tangled webs, and the resolution was happened so fast! And while I sort of understood the impetus for the big throwdown at the end, it seems sort of a weak reason for all of the waves it caused, if that makes sense.

All in all, I think it was a solid book. Maybe I should read it again.