Top Ten Books on my Spring To-Be-Read list

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for my Top Ten Books on my Spring To-Be-Read list. I’m on a United We Read (UWR) committee and we meet once a month from March to June, so many of my Spring reads are from that committee. I’m so excited about many of the books, but that’s how they made the list.

1) The Submission by Amy Waldman - (UWR)

2) A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines - (UWR)

3) Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo - (UWR)

4) Chocolat by Joanne Harris (UWR)

5) When She Woke by Hillary Jordan - (UWR)

6) Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson – Do any of you read Lawson’s blog? She is hilarious! So I was excited to find out I’ll be getting an ARC copy of her memoir in the mail sometime soon. Here’s a link to one of my favorite of her posts.

7) Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes – An ARC copy that’s shamelessly never made it to the top of the TBR stack.

8) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen – In the next two months I’m throwing a bachelorette party, planning a 60th birthday surprise for my Dad, attending my 10 year high school reunion, I’m a bridesmaid in my brother’s wedding, planning a trip to Tennessee, Wisconsin and Montana and about 2 dozen other fun things. It will be a very busy spring and I have a feeling I’m going to need a comfort reread of some Austen.

9) Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss – It’s been on my list forever.

10) The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin – I’ve heard about this author for years and have yet to read anything by her. That must be remedied.

Do you guys highly recommend any of these? Should I bump them up the queue?

Image from here.

BBC Book List

So I've been seeing this list everywhere, like at Wicked Wonderful Words and Chasing Bawa and I love lists, so I couldn't resist.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How incredibly depressing is that?

Put an 'x' after those you have read. Unless I counted wrong, I've read 71.75 (I'm counting the 3/4 of Shakespeare's complete works that I've read).
 
*UPDATED 1/5/16
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [X]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [X]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [X]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [X]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [X]
6 The Bible [X]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [X]
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [X]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [X]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [X]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott [X]
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [X]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller [X]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [about 3/4]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [X]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien [X]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk [X]
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [X]
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [X]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot [X]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [X]
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald [X]
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens [X]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [X]
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [X]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [X]
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [X]
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [X]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [X]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame [X]
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [X]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [X]
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 [X]
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [X]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [X]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [X]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell [X]
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [X]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [X]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving [X]
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins [X]
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery [X]
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy [ ]
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [X]
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding [X]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan [X]
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [X]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert [ ]
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [X]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen [X]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth [ ]
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos RuIz Zafon [X]
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [X]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [X]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon [X]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [ ]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck [X]
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [X]
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt [X]
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [X]
65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas [X]
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [X]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy [X]
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [X]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [ ]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [X]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [X]
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker [X]
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnet [X]
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson [X]
75 Ulysses - James Joyce [ ]
76 The Inferno – Dante [X]
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome [X]
78 Germinal - Emile Zola []
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [X]
80 Possession - AS Byat [X]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [X]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell [X]
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker [X]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro [X]
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [X]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry [ ]
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White [X]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [X]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [X]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [ ]
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [X]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery [X]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks [ ]
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams [X]
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole [X]
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [ ]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [X]
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [X]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [X]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [X]

Photo by moi.

What’s on your nightstand?

Yay for nightstands and the towering stacks of books they tend to hold. Whenever I reach November I get a bit anxious as I look at the many books I meant to read during the year that I haven’t gotten to yet. I always seem to have at least twenty that I want to read before the new year begins and hitting November reminds me that there’s no way I’ll get to all of them.

I know there’s always next year, but there’s always more books too. This year I really wanted to read Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and a few others. I made it through some wonderful books so far in 2010, but I haven’t quite hit everything I wanted to.

I’ve found that book blogging adds to the problem, in a good way. I’m always reading about more great books that I want to read and the list continues to grow. My poor nightstand is going to crumble under the weight of the books I pile on it. It’s reassuring to know I won’t run out of reading material anytime soon, but it’s also daunting. I once heard someone say, you haven’t hit middle-age until you realize you won’t be able to read all the books you want to in your lifetime. At 26, I’m definitely not there yet, but I’m dreading the day when I come to that conclusion. Did you guys get through the books you wanted to read this year?

Book List: 3 Books that have been on your TBR List the longest

This week's list from Lost in Books is 3 Books that have been on your To Be Read (TBR) List the longest. There are many classics that would make this list, but here are the first few books that come to mind. These are all books that I put on my "TBR this year" shelf every year and somehow haven't gotten to them yet.

1) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: People have recommended this book to me for years, but it's never seemed to be the right time to read it.


2) The Rabbit series by John Updike: This series seems to be the definition of "critical darling." Critics say it's wonderful, but I've never had an actual person recommend it to me, I just see it on every TBR list.


3) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: This one is obvious. I haven't picked it up because it's huge and I know it's going to take all of my attention to read it. I know I'll get to it eventually.

Have you all read any of these? Should I pick them up immediately?

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I'm a sucker for lists like the one in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. While I realize I'm not going to love every book in there, it's helped me discover quite a few that might have flown under my radar otherwise. Also, if someone recommends a book that's on this list, I'm more likely to pick it up.

I don't tend to choose books because they are on the list, but I love keeping track of ones that I have read from it. At the beginning of every year I sit down with the book (and a good movie) and I go through every page and highlight the titles of books I read the previous year and add a red check mark. It's oddly satisfying for a list maker like me.


I've read 126 books from the list (approximately, I haven't updated my list since January), so I obviously have a long way to go. The completist in me certainly wants to finish the list one day, but I certainly read many, many books that aren't on this list.

How about you guys? How do you feel about TBR lists created by someone else?

If you've never seen the complete list, here it is.

Photos by moi.