A Book Meme

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.

48.5 out of 100. Or maybe only 47.5 out of 100 (obviously Heller didn't make a huge impression on me)

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 (some of it anyway, the talking points)
7 Wuthering Heights - E. 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 (reading right now)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (or did I read Something Happened?)
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 (also reading right now)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this part of #33?)
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
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
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

Lake Pictures

I spent Sunday and Monday of the holiday weekend up at my parents' house, in the Land of Lobster. Mom and I went for a couple of long walks and poked around the grounds of the summer camp that's up the road. Yes, technically trespassing, but everyone had gone home for the season! Visited with my grandparents and got loaded up with more fresh veggies to bring back to NH. Had a fantastic dinner on Sunday night with Mom and Dad - lobster, steamers, and fresh corn on the cob.

My cousin Jen and her husband Josh were up from NC and I got to visit with them for a while too. I went to their wedding a couple of summers ago, but had an allergic reaction to one of the appetizers at the cocktail hour, so wound up in the ER instead of at the reception. Not so much fun, and since it happened before the wedding party arrived, I never actually got to meet Josh! So it was great to finally catch up with them and hear about their lives and their new place.

I haven't taken any lake pictures since my parents moved into their new house - partially due to sulking about losing the cabin (!) but mostly due to not really having an easy way to get down to the water. They've started clearing out some of the underbrush this summer though, so it's a little better. At least you can see the water from the house this summer!

They don't have as good of a view straight up the lake as they used to, but this is kind-of-up, kind-of-across to the far side of the lake.
Straight across to the point. The sun was really bright on Monday afternoon - not a cloud in the sky - so with the glare and shadows you can't even see the cottage over there.

What I've Been Cooking This Week

Pizza on the grill. Last week was way too hot to turn on the oven, so I picked up a bag of dough from the grocery store, and some fresh mozzarella, and stole some basil out of my neighbors' garden. The results have turned out pretty well, though I'm still trying to figure out how to get the cheese more melted without burning the bottom of the crust. Guess I'll have to keep trying - at least I get to eat the tests!

Pizza Margherita. Crushed tomato base, fresh mozz, and fresh basil.

Bacon cheeseburger pizza. Tomato base, fresh mozz, bacon, and hamburg.

YUMMY!

Pi Day Pies

Mmmmmm, pie!On the right: Banana cream pie. On the left: Black-bottomed pie. (Chocolate pudding layer, then rum custard-merange layer) Not pictured: Boston cream pie. (Yes, not really a pie, but still yummy)

The Pi Day party was pretty successful, although there were only 6 of us as several people have been fighting off the death flu. There wasn't much pie left!