Am I a true book worm?

I'm a book addict. So when I ran across this post from the blog Mommy's Got Green, of course I had to participate!

So here's the basic idea:

"The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA estimates that the average adult has only read six book from the following list of 100. So let's see how you stack up."

• Bold the books that you have read


• Italicize those books which you intend to read


• Underline the books you love


• Pass the list on to others

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 Traveler'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 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

Score: 60/100


I'm happy to say that I did ten times better than the aerage person; however, I have to admit, I was thinking my score would be higher than that. Well, I guess this is a good list for me to work through reading! Other than the two that seemed repetitive (having both the Chronicles of Narnia and Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Hamlet as well as the Complete Works of Shakespeare), I personally felt it was a pretty good list of books to have read. So, that's a good incentive for me to try the ones I haven't.

Maybe in a year I'll check back and see how I've done!

A Laugh

I'm in pain. Serious pain. But for once it has nothing to do with food.

Nope, this time we went tubing for five hours down a river. And despite putting on multiple doses of sunscreen, I still managed to fry my legs really, really badly. Currently I can't bend my knees because the skin hurts too bad!

So I'm not doing a whole lot of anything currently (you know it's bad when I don't want to go out and get a newspaper for couponing just because I don't want to bend my knees!).

In the meantime, just for laughs, for all the crazy couponers out there, here's a post your husband (and you) will get a kick out of!

Dancing Decision

I made my decision several days ago, but I haven't posted about it because I wanted to let it sink in first. You know, settle into it, give my addled brain a chance to reject or approve of the idea.

The short of is that after prayer and planning and dreaming and scheduling, I could not get a peace about working at the studio. In some ways it felt like a dream come true, but in others, akin to opening myself up to a nightmare. (OK, maybe not quite that extreme but my literary side liked the imagery!)

Basically there were quite a few reasons against taking either or both positions (and after I made my decision and passed it along to the powers that be, I discovered it probably would have entailed taking BOTH positions as opposed to just one, at least initially). Some of them were as follows:

• I'm not doing my masters this year because Chris is going back to school and I've really felt like the Lord has been leading me to be a support to him in the next few years not focused on my own school, etc. And although he (Chris) kept telling me not to factor him into my decision, I realized that I had already factored him into my decision by the simple fact that I'm not doing school; therefore, why would I take up that time with yet another activity? And an activity that would take me out of the house a lot.
• All the "Pros" of taking either position (other than the fact that I would be dancing again) were based on which of the positions would be better - not pros in terms of how getting into this would be an improvement in our lives.
• Dancing again - I wouldn't be dancing. I would be administrating or teaching. I miss dancing. I don't miss a lot of other parts of that world - Christian or non-Christian.
• I'm struggling keeping up with 40 hours of work a week (case in point, I was so excited this week that I thought I was going to be able to have two full weeks without taking any sick time - first time in months I think. And then Wednesday hit) - why would I add another 20 or so?

There were other reasons beyond this. But I think one of the key elements for me is the fact that since I've made this decision I have had peace. I haven't had one moment of doubt concerning my decision.

Maybe this was just one of those moments when God wasn't going to "yay" or "nay" the decision and would have given me strength to go with either one. Obviously I'll never really know. But as things stand right now, I am confident in the decision I have made.