The Twinkies

I saw this over on Our Own Creation and thought I’d take a shot at it.

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE - mine are in red
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

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
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 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 ~ I did read about half of it.
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 I had to read this book when I was teaching because some idiot decided that every kid in the school had to read it one year and every English teacher had to teach it. What a horrible fucking excuse for a book.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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

I don’t believe In Search of Lost Time isn’t on this list.

How ’bout you?

At first I though, go leave a comment on his blog. Then I thought, just send the man an email. Then I decided to be truly tasteless and do the blog equivalent of telling the waitress at a chain restaurant that caters to children that it is your birthday.

Congratulations on your article in Twins Magazine.

No, everyone, go and harass him by leaving twin mother type comments on his blog to embarrass him in front of his poker buddies.

I’ve added some comments I got via email and reopened the crazy twin comments page for a while. Share the wacky things people say to you about your kids.

Amy tagged me with the 7 random facts meme. As it so subtly suggests in the name I guess it means that we have to reveal 7 facts about ourselves before passing the fun onto someone else. I don’t usually do memes just because I am usually too busy but I am trying to catch up on blog reading - there were over 500 messages in my reader - so this one happened to hit at just the right time.

The rules are:

1. Link to the person who tagged you
2. Post the rules here
3. Share 7 random or weird facts about yourself
4. Tag 7 random people at the end of the post, linking to them
5. Leave a comment on their blog so that they know they’ve been tagged (not anonymously!!)

So…

1. I have a spinning wheel and a loom though I haven’t used either in over 2 years. That whole “having twins” thing has made me put those hobbies on the back shelf.
2. I think most teachers are dreadful and have no business being in the classroom. There is some truth to that old adage about “Those that can’t, teach.”
3. The state of Kansas doesn’t think I am qualified to teach Latin because my graduate degree was awarded in Canada. As we all know, the training offered by the Canadian university system, especially the Centre for Medieval Studies’ Latin program*, is totally inadequate to meet the educational needs of the Latin 1 students of Kansas.
4. I am seriously thinking about just quitting the online teaching job because the hassle of getting these reciprocal certifications isn’t worth it.
5. I want to learn to crochet but have no time. Maybe this summer sitting in the park I can figure it out.
6. I have a CD that is lullaby versions of Cure songs.
7. I managed to resist buying F a pink seersucker Ralph Lauren dress I found in Marshalls but I really wanted it. She has more clothes than I do.

And I am tagging Option Adoption, This Examined Life, Our Ladybug, Images by Jeri, Sarah and Jordan Updates, Poking and Peaking and Bits of Myself.

* Anyone who has made it through that program knows how rigorous it is.

A step-by-step guide to changing twins at the ass-crack of dawn