Reading List

I stole the following from a friend's blog, because I found it really interesting. I'd love to see people's reaction to this list. I've read 47 of the following, but need to read more..

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six (can you believe that?). I've bolded the ones I've read...

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
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 -
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 (OK, only part due to language)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot-
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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'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 - 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
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Death of Me

Jon-Jon will be the death of me today. I heard noise in the garage and discovered that he finally figured out how to undo the deadbolt and was in the garage playing. He had taken an old broomstick and was using it to push the button on the garage door opener. *sigh*

I was making dinner this afternoon, when I noticed him outside playing by himself. I looked out and noticed that he was playing with a live wasp, picking it up and putting in underneath a soccer cone. I got him away and inside and got rid of the wasp to find him with the huge knife that I had left on the counter when I noticed the wasp-playing. He was stabbing the new loaf of bread that just came out of the oven. Miracle of miracles, he has walked away unscathed. Mom, however, needs to be admitted to the cardiac unit.. I swear I've had multiple heart attacks.

Funny School Spirit Ideas

Today is "wear your hair like an exotic bird" day at school. We came up with the following:

Adam's Wisdom

Adam has started speaking so much more fluently lately. I have to record two of my favorite sayings.

1. I was trying to get him to come from the neighbors house with promise of being my helper at the grocery (which normally works, by the way). His response was, "I not a helper, I a gentleman."

2. We were leaving Braden's soccer game and Adam was trying to carry a camp chair by himself. I asked if I could help him and got this in reply. " I can do it myself. You not strong enough."

So cute.

Lake Tahoe Trip - a sample of many pictures

Emma Baptism pictures

My final opinion

Much to my dismay, I really disliked Breaking Dawn. Enough said.

Returning from the dead

Wow. Well to say that the last couple of months have been hectic would be an understatement. The summer went by so quickly.

May/June -

We went to Idaho, then drove down to Lake Tahoe. The week we got back, Eric had a business conference. The week after that, Eric went to Helaman's camp with the scouts as assistant cook. He came home and we celebrated Emma's 8th birthday and Eric was off to Yearbook Camp in Logan for a week.

July -

We celebrated the 4th of July with my family, who had come into town for Emma's baptism, which was on the 5th. Adam's birthday was the 7th. On the 7th, I packed up and left for Girl's Camp. I came home from Girl's Camp and spent the weekend at a variety of medical facilities trying to figure out what the horrible pain in my stomach was. Unfortunately, it was never figured out in spite of thousands of dollars in tests. We had a week or two at home to finish up the month. I geared up for the new school year with my PTA responsibilties and School Registration.

August-

The first week of the month I had Youth Conference. We went to Idaho to for Braden and my birthdays. We came home after about a week and a half, for Eric to start school again. Tada!

So you have had the fast version of our summer. I was released from the Young Women's program and put into the Primary Presidency, where I am reviving a Cub Scout program and the Nursery class. Yes. I am exhausted. I will post some pictures of our summer later.

The other great news is that Adam started Transitional Kindergarten at Art City. I'm excited about this for two reasons. One is that he will be at the same school with Braden and Emma. The second reason is that I LOVE the support staff for TK at Art City. I really struggled with the people at Adam's last school, but I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Miss Joan and her staff.

Well, I need to get going.