How Many Have You Read?

"The BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here... which is pretty darn sad!

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Tag the friends you want to fill this out (including the person who tagged you.)
- - - - -
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 - JK Rowling 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 X+
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot*
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 *
25 The Hitchhiker’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 X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame *
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
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 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*
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 *
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 *
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
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 X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+
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 X
80 Possession - AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle *
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo *

Have read: 41
Will read: at least 27

So what about you? How many have you read?

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Sometimes I forget how great it is to be an American. Lately though, there have been a couple things that have made me remember: President Obama's innagural address and this book. I loved Obama's speech because he has so much conviction and so much hope for our country. But at the same time he didn't sugarcoat the fact that we as Americans have a lot to do to make our country great.

This book though, made me grateful for a whole other reason. I can't imagine growing up or living in a country where I can't wear makeup, nail polish, or bright colors because of a fear that I might be thrown into jail for being too suggestive. I can't imagine being told that I could not spend any time unaccompanied with a man who is not my husband or a relative. Yet that's reality for so many women in the world. It really does make me grateful to realize all the things I can do because of where I grew up. I'm currently a senior in college and I have realistic dreams about getting a Masters in Library Science and working in a library one day. I'm getting to a man who I love and who loves me. I'm able to travel where I want and when I want (as time and money permit). I have so few restrictions compared to so many women in the world today.

But this book is about so much more than one woman in Iran. It's about the power of literature in our lives. It's a great essay on why we need to read things that make us uncomfortable. We actually talked a lot about this in class today. Mormon culture especially is so afraid of anything that may challenge our faith. There are so many student protestations against books because they contain something kind of racy. Yes I know that there are some books that are purely designed to stimulate our sexual appetites (harlequin romance novels) and have no literary value(the entire Twilight series), but there is so much out there that has good literary value and will leave you with a more concrete determination to do better, and to be better yourself. You just have to have the guts to read it.

I have a Love/Hate relationship with Edith Wharton...

... and most other early 20th century authors. They write such amazingly compelling literature that I can't help but want to scream at their treatment of women. I mean really? Saying that you can't wait to guide your new bride through your carefully selected library of appropriate books just seems ridiculous to me.

However, it's this anger that fuels the world to change, and really how much can we say it's changed in modern culture. Especially at BYU. I don't know many times I've heard (from both guys and girls) that they wish girls wouldn't apply to certain programs that are rather competitive here at BYU just because "they're just going to get married and stay at home with kids." Or how many times have we had Sunday School/Relief Society lessons on how girls need to dress more conservatively and watch how they behave around men because they could inadvertantly be "walking pornography." Basically, how many times do we as women hear in our day-to-day lives something that is really quite sexist?