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 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
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger *
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
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
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
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 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
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 X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan X
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 X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
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
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 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 Burnett X+
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath X
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
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 Alborn
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

67 – what can I say, I love to read!

This is a very odd list … almost like they pulled 50 random classics and 50 contemporary quasi-respectable works of fiction out of a hat. Still fun, though.

My score was higher than Craig’s and Tony’s put together … obviously I need to get a life! %-) I’m tagging some fellow readers so hopefully I won’t feel like such a freak for long…

This week’s topic is things I want to do in 2009. I like this better than the New Year’s Resolutions … ’cause they’re more specific, and they can just be for fun (which most of mine are).

1. Be a good coach – I got conned into coaching BOTH kids’ basketball teams this year! I have pretty low expectations performance-wise – only one kid on each team has ever played basketball before. My goal is to teach them to love the game, and hopefully make sure they know which goal is theirs! In all seriousness, my kids have played enough sports that I’ve seen a lot of coaches – some great, some absolutely awful. Even if I can’t be great, I hope I always am able to find something positive to say to each kid after the game, and to make sure they have fun, regardless of outcome.

2. Cosmo challenge – this one is for Craig, he knows what it means!

3. Watch either Kentucky or Vanderbilt win the NCAA championship – based on pre-conference play, this one doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, but you gotta dream! In the case of Kentucky, a follow-up to this one is that I’d like to watch a press conference where the UK athletics director fires Billy Gillespie.

4. Go on another sisters weekend with my sisters – girls, we’ve been talking about this for TWO YEARS, we gotta get our acts together and just do it!

5. Enjoy celebrating my 10th wedding anniversary

6. Join (or start) a book club – again, this is something I’ve talked to several people about, and just need to get my act together and do!

7. Be better about keeping the web page/blog updated – Facebook is great, and I have been doing more of that, but I know some of you want more details!

8. Go somewhere I’ve never been – that’s on my list every year!

9. Submit at least 5 papers for publication, and two grant proposals – need to kick my work up into a higher gear, and now’s the time.

10. Have a Passover seder or Rosh Hashanah dinner at my house – we have gotten out of the habit of entertaining, but I really like having people over, and holidays are an easy way to get back into that groove.

Will try to check back in over the course of the year to see how well I do!

Literally thousands of reviews have been written of this book, the vast majority of them positive, so I won’t try to re-review here, especially 30 years after the fact. But I did think it was awesome, and the analogies to motorcycle maintenance were brilliant. As for the philosophy itself … well, you know. It’s a great novel.

I can’t believe I had never read it before. I had heard so much about it, I had a lot of preconceived notions, most of which were wrong. I think reading it here made it especially meaningful to me. I will also be using excerpts from it in my classes, I think, in particular the parts on scientific method.

In the end, still glad I am a scientist, though.

1. The Madeline L’Engle “Time Set” – A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters
2. The original Carolyn Keene Nancy Drew mysteries
3. The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
5. Somewhat later, Forever, also by Judy Blume
6. Go Ask Alice
7. All of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books
8. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
9. The Pigman, by Paul Zindel
10. The Emily Novels, by L.M. Montgomery – interestingly, I did not care for the Ann of Green Gables series
11. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
12. The Outsiders, and basically every other book by S.E. Hinton
13. The Love Comes Softly series by Janette Oak
14. Deenie – more Judy Blume
15. Tiger Eyes – yes, still more Judy Blume
16. The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom