I should just warn you now; I’m obsessed with lists.
Seriously. I buy notebooks dedicated solely to list-making.
Mostly, I love to-do lists: Groceries to buy, chores to complete, movies to watch, places to visit, music to purchase, assignments to finish, piano pieces to learn, and books to read. Especially books to read.
I have this dream of becoming a truly cultured person, the sort of person who has read everything, been everywhere, seen every major film; someone who knows high culture and low culture, who can talk to anyone about anything; the sort of person who speaks foreign languages fluently and has traveled the world.
I make lists about these dreams.
So far, I’ve been exceptionally blessed, with family and circumstances that have helped me toward accomplishing my goals. I’ve completed my public education and earned a bachelor’s degree, which requires at least a decent cultural introduction. I’ve lived in two foreign countries and have learned a smattering of Spanish and good amount of French, even though I'm discovering it’s freaking hard to learn a language. I probably watch four movies a week (maybe I shouldn’t admit that), and I try to choose high-quality ones, especially ones on the American Film Institute’s 100 best list.
More than anything, though, I’m a reader. Thanks to my mom and some great English teachers in middle school and high school, I love, love, love books. With that in mind, I present to my blog the first of many lists:
100 Books to Read Before you Die
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (I’ve read the New Testament a few times, but for some reason I’ve always felt intimidated by the Old Testament)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete Works? Although I’ve been to many plays and read at least five, I definitely haven’t read the complete works)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
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 (I got within 50 pages of finishing this recently, but I just couldn’t get into it)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
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 X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
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 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
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
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
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
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 X
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 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
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 X
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 (I’ve read big chunks of this in my French classes, and I want to see if I can get through the whole thing in French)
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
Thirty out of one hundred – that’s not too bad for a 22-year-old, is it? This summer I want to take a decent chunk out of the list, though, so here’s my summer reading plan:
1 The Three Musketeers (I’ll be honest, I downloaded this, and I’ll be listening to it during car rides this summer)
2 The Wind in the Willows
3 Dracula
4 Charlotte’s Web
5 Memoirs of a Geisha
6 The Old Testament (I think I can, I think I can, I think I can)
7 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (I just have to grit my teeth and finish it)
I’ll also be reading:
8 The Bronze Bow – Elizabeth George Speare (Absolutely my favorite author for young adults. If I can ever write a book like hers, my life will be complete)
9 Pegasus – Robin McKinley (My next favorite writer for young adults. She writes great Fantasy)
10 A Householder’s Guide to the Universe – Harriet Fasenfest
11 Streams to the River, River to the Sea – Scott O’Dell
12 Eragon – Christopher Paolini
13 Eldest – Christopher Paolini
14 Brisingr – Christopher Paolini (These three are all re-reads in preparation for the fourth book coming out in the fall. I need a refresher since I remember absolutely nothing about the third book)
15 The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown
16 Le château de ma mère – Maurice Pagnol (I’m so close to finishing this book entirely in French!)
17 Some Lewis and Clark nonfiction book that I haven’t read yet
These, plus Robin McKinley’s Deerskin, which I read last week, should make for at least eighteen books in one summer.
Oh! And I’ll be going to Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, bringing me two plays closer to completing all of his works. I figure plays are meant to be seen rather than read, so attending a performance totally counts, right?
Maybe I’m being too ambitious.
