Read, Read, Read!!

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

I got this from Jenny-in-law and I am almost embarrassed to re-post this. See, I've only read 18 of these and Jenny could be a librarian with the number of these she's read! But see how many I have italicized? I INTEND to read many of these :-) I may read even more than that because I admit, some of them I've never even heard of. Apparently the average American has only read 6 from this list so I won't be embarrassed; at least I'm above average ;-)

By the way, it's never too early to start reading to kids. Abi already picks up a book and crawls into my lap and she's only 10 1/2 months. She loves to turn the pages and sometimes we have to reread the book over and over and over :-) I'm glad she's already getting a love of reading.

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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - I read the first 3 chapters and quit
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 -- well, some…
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
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 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'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 – My goal is to read it 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Happy Birthday, Love!

To an incredible husband and father: Happy Birthday!! You're my hero, honey and you always will be :) XOXO ~ your love!

Oh and by the way, Jon shares a birthday with Melody Buse (the famous beauty), Paula Abdul, Kathleen Turner, Phylicia Rashad (Claire Huxtable from "The Cosby Show"), Lou Gehrig, Guy Lombardo, Moe Howard (One of the Three Stooges), and Blaise Pascal!

To find who shares your birthday, visit this website! http://www.famousbirthdays.com/

An Eagle Scout is always Prepared

My brother was interviewed by KELO (the CBS affiliate in Sioux Falls, SD) on Saturday morning about the Boyscouts' emergency readiness and first aid requirements. It was in response to the tornado that ripped through a Boyscout camp in Iowa last week, killing 4 and injuring many more. Please be in prayer for these families; many are still in the hospital.

NEW Adventures in the Life of Brenda #9: The Fife and the Spider

Once upon a time, in the land of Chanhassen, a young lad felt a song in his heart for a young lass. "How can I tell her my love for her? She is not only fair, but strange. Just as I am fair but strange!" He picked up his Irish fife from atop the ancient buffet of international knick-knacks to play a tune. "This will certainly convey her beauty. But what of her weirdness? Maybe it will come to me as I play..." So the young lad played a few lovely notes. The young lass swooned. Then, on a sudden, a spider flew from the end of the fife and landed inches away from the lass's nose! She screamed or laughed or both, threw her hands into the air, and ran away. The lad gagged upon seeing the spider, threw down the fife, and ran after the lass. After catching her, they laughed together, a good hearty laugh where they almost peed their pants. "You're so strange," the young lass gazed adoringly into the lad's eyes. "My thoughts exactly," he replied, and kissed her. And they made many beautiful and strange babies.

The End.