The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they’ve printed below.

01. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
02. Italicize those you intend to read
03. Underline the books you LOVE.

001 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
002 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
003 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
004 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
005 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
006 The Bible
007 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
008 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – I cried when I read this book because I think this is really the way the future could be, and that makes me very sad.
009 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
010 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
011 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
013 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
014 Complete Works of Shakespeare- I’ve read a few, most of the big ones
015 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
016 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
018 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
019 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch - George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
022 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
023 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
024 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
027 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
028 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
029 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
031 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
034 Emma - Jane Austen
035 Persuasion - Jane Austen
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
037 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
039 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - started it but..
040 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
041 Animal Farm - George Orwell
042 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
045 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
046 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
047 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
048 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
049 Lord of the Flies - William Golding – Sucks to your asmar
050 Atonement - Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
052 Dune - Frank Herbert
053 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
054 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
055 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
057 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
058 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
062 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
067 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
069 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
070 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
071 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
072 Dracula - Bram Stoker
073 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses - James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal - Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession - AS Byatt
081 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
083 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
084 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
085 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
086 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
091 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
092 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
093 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
094 Watership Down - Richard Adams
095 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
096 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
097 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
098 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve read 39.5. How many have you read? I think once (if) I get my Kindle I’ll get some of those classic books that I should read, but don’t want to have the paperback cluttering up my house. I want to get my total up to at least 50. If I was super awesome I’d get 100 but I’m not a masochist and some of these books I’ve started but found them so dry that I put them back down. Those I just left as if I hadn’t read them. What I’m wondering is why The DaVinci code is on there but not Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, or A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. And why Hamlet is apparently not covered by The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and why Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang aren’t listed. Hmm, I think I must follow this up with my own top 50 list. The top fifty books that I think people should read. But now… bed. Its 12:15 and I have to be up at 9:30. Goodnight!

I’ve been pondering this question a lot lately as I struggle to plan my own. And a struggle it has truly been. I have two and a half options. Option One - AKA “Love Love Tour!” Jeff and I get married in front of my parents and his parents and sister. That’s it. Then we have parties in Birmingham and Kentucky with our friends, his family, and my family. Thats one wedding, one Niles party, one friend party, one Flynn party and one Gross party. Option Two- “Et tu?” Invite 50-60 people to madison and get married, have a tea afterwards (probably in the back yard). Option Two and a Half- “Et tu? 2: Electric Boogaloo” Huntsville has a nice new theater, The Monaco, that has a bar, a restaurant, and a lit staircase, and is available for functions. 50-60 people yadda yadda. I call this a half plan because the price tag on the Monaco could very easily be more than I am willing to pay.

Option One- “Love Love Tour!”  Pros- Cheap wedding, cheap reception, less work by me.  Cons- None of my friends will be at the wedding, no one but immediate family will get to see me in my dress, no presents (I know that sounds greedy but Jeff and I don’t have a lot of money so we can’t buy a crock pot despite the fact that we could use one, and we have shitty shitty eating utensils, and the apartment plates belong to our roommate), gas being as much as it is driving from Birmingham to Kentucky could cost as much as just having the wedding.

Option Two- ” Et tu?” Pros- Get to show off the dress, presents (see justification and explanation above), friends and family are all there, its over with in one day.  Cons- From everything I’ve seen the only way you can get married is if you are willing to spend $10,000… or more, lots of planning, money, location?, oh and did I mention money?

To include Et Tu? 2: Electric Boogaloo Pros-Onsite coordinator would plan menus and help keep things running smoothly day of, lovely, and unique, location.  Cons- They haven’t given me a quote yet, but everything about the place makes me think that the cost would be astronomical.

While thinking about these options I’ve finally boiled my thought process down to one fundamental question. Why do people have weddings? Most of the bridal magazines and websites say that the bride should never forget that the wedding is all about her and her groom, and their love for each other. But the more I think about it, the more I disagree. If all that mattered was loving each other, everyone would get married at the court house and spend all that extra dough on a stellar honeymoon. Weddings aren’t about the couple, they’re about the family. That is why people have weddings, to invite people they care about to participate in what should be a one on one relationship. Its like a comfort thing. They are showing them that even though they have the love of their life they aren’t going to forget about you because look! they sent you a pretty embossed, hand-made paper invitation with real flower petals in it! They bill the wedding as the “Most Important Day Of Your Life” but is it really? I think that I’ve had days that mean more to me than the day when I wore a white dress and signed a piece of paper. I think the title “Most Important Day Of Your Life” was assigned to make those families and friends feel important. “Oh she just said that she loves that strange man whom I do not know more than life itself, which means more than me, but its okay because I know she cares because she invited me to partake in this day of days.” (On a side note I used day of days for a reason. D-day, when Allied forces invaded Normandy was called the day of days, planning a wedding is almost the same thing and nearly the same amount of work, the only difference is that less people die.) Even though I’m thinking about all this, rather cynically I might add, I am also thinking that I do love my family. A lot. And I’m not really sure if it would be fair of me to exclude them from being a part of, what to them is, my day of days. I can show Jeff how much I love him everyday for the rest of my life, but I really only get one chance to show our families how much I love him, and them.  If playing by their rules for one day makes them feel loved, what right do I have to say no?  And no matter how much I may gripe about them, and how little I feel I truly know them, they are my family and I do still love them.  All that thinking about this does for me is make my head hurt.  I’m no closer to an answer than I was before.  The realist in me votes option one, the sentimentalist in me votes option two.  The realist is uncaring towards the plight of others, the sentimentalist plays smarter and is trying to temper mercy with reality.  I still don’t know who will when.  And I’m aware that I have only nine months until March 15 meaning I need to make a decision soon.

Well I finally have some more things to update.  I just started back to work.  I am once again a Cashier at Target.  (Let me state quiet clearly, as per the guidelines set forth by the Target Employee Newsletter, that while I may work at Target my views are not that of the company, and while I may gripe about how much my feet hurt, I really do like my job there, and I continue to shop there.)  Boy howdy, I forgot how hard this is on my back and feet.  I’m closing every night I work this week, but next week I’m not closing once!  Yay!!  Today I got to work in Food Avenue for a half an hour.  I was terrible.  I kept apologizing to customers and telling that we were out of things rather than telling them that I’m an idiot and i don’t know how to prepare them.

What else have I been up to?  Hm, I’ve been reading a lot of manga on the internet.  (LOVE IT!) And I’ve been trying to create a contact sheet for all my highschool friends.  I’m still missing at least one persons info, but I’ve got everyone elses.  Now because I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m also trying to put together a newsletter to send out with it.  I figure that everyone wants to know what everyone else is up to.  The major changes, and the minor ones as well.  Everyone is going to get some space in the newsletter.  I am also trying to scrounge up pictures to go with them.  A picture is worth a thousand words (or so the elusive they claim.)

Okay bedtime.  I have two days off in a row and I am totally going to see Jeff with them.