I am suspicious of some of these (Bridget Jones’ Diary?) but it seems the BBC thinks I’ve only read 6 of these. Suck it, BBC, I’m a well read motherfucker.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

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

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 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 Mitchel
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

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Next in the series: “Little Bridget and the Smelly Man with a Puppy!”

I could browse antique stores all day. It’s crazy little gems like this that just make me happy. Yesterday Pete and I found what I have dubbed The Lil’ Molesty Child Endangerment Series.

If Flicka, Ricka, and Dick are not about to be lured with candy into an abandoned warehouse by their New Friend, who will then ritually murder them, then I just don’t know what.

last page: “…and all they ever found was one red shoe!”

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It’s about to get all Tweed Serious up in here.

Below please find a seriously nerdy/feminist/international relations discussion as pertains to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One. Yes, I can. Watch me. And Jenn and Amanda. Discussions culled from Facebook and email threads, as noted.

FACEBOOK POST:
“Why is it that female fantasies are such a source of derision and fear? The male species is allowed all manner of violent, creepy, ludicrous and degrading movie tropes, and while we may not embrace them as high art, no one questions them seriously as entertainment…”

comments:
Jenn Bealer
hmmm….she has some points, but she doesn’t get to why i find the books/movies troubling. it’s actually not Bella’s pregnancy that bugged me, and i am all about women having dark/violent fantasies….i really liked the one you posted about why the only acceptable option for our young women is the “buffy” one – that gave me more to contemplate with than this one, actually…but i think that since i have actually heard girls/teens saying they want a boyfriend who sneaks into their room to watch them sleep or won’t let them talk to other boys – that’s what bothers me. because it’s not just “fantasy” they are saying this is how to know a boy loves you in real life. and my 12 years of teaching self-defense sounds an alarm and screams NO! this is a sign of an abusive relationship….still not sure how to reconcile that.

Jenn Bealer p.s. i also don’t think that male violent fantasies are high art or give them a free pass and i do question them as entertainment. so, there’s that. i am an equal opportunity buzzkiller :)

Traci Olsen Yeah, Jenn, I liked that one, too. But I find it hard to believe (having been a delusional teenager myself) that most girls grow up wanting a stalker boyfriend because of Twilight. It’s not like girls have grown up with a healthy self esteem and Twilight ruins it all. I am not saying that it’s not problematic, it’s just that the scorn that is heaped upon it is disproportionate.

Continue reading

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It just gets worse/better from here.

Audrey had her first book-related crying jag last night. Pete was reading her Little Town on the Prairie and they got to the part where the cat kills the mice and she straight up SOBBED.
This from the girl who shrugs when you tell her chicken comes from those cute fluffy things and bacon from teeny little piglets. From the girl who knows all about vampires, including Countess Bathory and all the heads on pikes.
Something about the mice getting eaten just freaked her shit out (perhaps because her pet rat recently died? Yeah maybe that.)

I think I was seven when I got a hold of a Big Little Book of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart and subsequently did not sleep for an entire week, so she is right on track to follow in my hyper-emotional attachment to books.

Sorry/You’re Welcome, kid.

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From The Lancet

Studies of me show that if I really really want a cheeseburger for lunch, but instead remember I want to lose weight so I should have a salad, I will then adorn that salad with lots and lots of croutons and too much feta cheese. The study also shows that I don’t do weight loss very well.

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