BBC Top 100 Books

The last two days’ NaBloPoMo blog prompts haven’t sparked any interesting thoughts in my tired brain, so I wasn’t going to post until sometime this weekend or early on Monday. But as I was perusing through my reader, I came across my girl Amy aka The Bookworm Wife’s entry about the BBC’s top 100 Books list. To my surprise, I’ve read more than a few books on the list, most of which I loved with a few that were really hard to get through, but manadatory through required reading in my high school/college days. On another note, checking this list made me want to read some of my childhood favorites. It’s so easy for great books to fade in our memories when it’s been years without re-reading it as a refresher. Enough blabbing, the books I’ve read (46) are bolded:

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 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

Which books have you read??

My Last Meal

NaBloPoMo’s prompt for today is: if you knew whatever you ate next was your last meal, what would you want it to be?

I think that I love food too much to narrow down one meal. So I’d request a five course meal. :) First, would be a caprese salad with the freshest buffalo mozzarella and balsamic vinegar, second course would be a lobster bisque, the third course would be mac and cheese with hot dog and kim bap (Korean Sushi), the main entree would grilled halibut and bulgogi (Korean BBQ), and the dessert would definitely be a pairing of the finest cheeses/grapes and creme brulee with a glass of the most decadent port wine.

:) NOMNOMNOM I’M SO HUNGRY.

An Ode to Writing

Inspired by my lovely gal pal, Kelly, I decided I would move on from October Photo Challenge to November’s NaBloPoMo. I can guarantee that I won’t succeed every day, but I’m definitely inspired to write in depth and more frequently.

Today’s prompt is: What is your favorite thing about writing?

I’ve been an avid reader ever since childhood. My parents were small-business owners which made for little to no family vacation time. Every weeklong vacation from school was spent reading tens of books borrowed from the local library. With the love of reading, I embarked on a liberal arts degree in History which called for endless amounts of term papers and essays. This helped me develop my writing skills and my passion for it. Even my job is centered around business proposal writing. I write nearly every day of my life.

You’d think I’d be sick of it, no? But, ironically, blogging has been an outlet for me to write about things I WANT to write about, instead of things I HAVE to write about at work or for grad school. It’s an outlet for me to voice my personal opinions, ramblings about marriage and furbabies, and describing my weaksauce photo-taking skills.

I fell in love with reading because it took me to places and times that I could only dream about experiencing and my love for writing derived off the same arena of thought. Writing enables me to capture the everyday moments of life. but also allows me to creative in my proactive thoughts of the never ending pursuit of happiness we call life.

The next phase of the Dubs’ journey is TTC (trying to conceive) babies! As I progress further along with NaBloPoMo and more in depth with sharing my life, this will be a major part of my blog’s direction.