The List

Having lots of free time as a teacher (Sometimes I wish there was a sarcasm font) I used a tiny portion of that time to go through that list of books and compile, in an organized fashion, all of the ones that I had NOT YET read.

You may notice that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is absent from this list.  I have not read that book, but I refuse to read it.  When my students read it, it influences their writing in a way that is the opposite of what I am trying to teach them.  They write essays and answer reading comprehension questions as if they are writing a comic.  I recognize the value in it, in getting struggling readers to read, and I know there are many people who will disagree with me, which I can respect.  However, I am still going to abstain from reading it.  So, here is the list sans Wimpy Kid.

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
6. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
7. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
8. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
9. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
10. Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret by Judy Blume
11. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
12. Beloved by Toni Morrison
13. Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
18. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
19. Dune by Frank Herbert
20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
21. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
22. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
23. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
26. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
27. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
28. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
30. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
31. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
32. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
33. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
34. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
35. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
36. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
37. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
38. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
39. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
40. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
41. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
44. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
45. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
46. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
47. The Color of Water by James McBride
48. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
49. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
50. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
51. The Giver by Lois Lowry
52. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
53. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
54. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
55. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
56. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
57. The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
58. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
59. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
60. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
61. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
62. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
63. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
64. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
65. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
66. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
67. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
68. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
69. The Stranger by Albert Camus
70. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
71. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
72. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
73. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
74. The World According to Garp by John Irving
75. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
76. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
77.. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

The Pre-Task

Prior to setting out on the task of reading all of Amazon's Top 100 Books, I had to read the list of Amazon's Top 100 Books.  This was a trial in itself.. going through all these great works and attempting to recall whether or not I read them in American Lit X in high school or not.  For example, I know for a fact that I read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.  I also know for a fact that I read Charlotte's Web, both as a child, and a little over a year ago to run a book club for my nine-year old students.
I can also confidently state that I have read Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Where the Wild Things Are.  Not only was Goodnight Moon a favorite of mine as a four-year old but I have the good fortune of having three beautiful nieces and an adorable nephew.  These books are all fresh in my memory, thanks to having read them to the kiddos in at least the past two years.

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein is another one that I have (believe it or not) also read recently.  We do a poetry unit in my 4th grade classroom in which all Shel Silverstein books feature prominently.  The Book Thief, I would love to say I read because of my classroom, but I owe that one to my librarian mother.  I read it long ago, before it became a movie and suddenly everyone knew what it was.
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snickett, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the brilliant Roald Dahl, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling (all of the Harry Potters if we're being frank,) The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkein (and The Hobbit even though it's not on the list,) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee I can also confidently cross off the list.

I wanted to reserve special mention for Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.  Hillenbrand is above and beyond one of my favorite authors of all time, if not my favorite.  She has a brilliant way of taking a completely nonfiction story and making it read like a novel.  I first read Seabiscuit many years ago because of my love for horses.  Even as a teenager, who struggled to follow some of the more dense parts of nonfiction writing, still found myself enthralled by her work.  If you have not read either or both of these books they need to go to the top of your list immediately.

Another special mention had to go to The Shining by Stephen King.  The movie does not even remotely do this book justice.  I read it while staying at my parents house and was too terrified to go down into their basement, where the boiler was, for the duration of my stay.  If you have the tolerance for a good scary story (I don't just mean scary, I mean bone-chilling terrifying) you must read The Shining.
Now that I've crossed off all the books I've read... I guess I have to get reading :)

The Task

I have always considered myself a fairly well-read person.  In high school and college, I was never the person who shirked my reading responsiblities for class in favor of spark notes or a descriptive summary from a reliable friend.  I actually read the books (imagine that!)

In addition, my mother is a librarian and has been forcing books on me since the day I was born.  I have never been without a stack of at least four books (and now my kindle) on my night stand.  She is a reading purist, however, which means, in spite of my kindle, she still buys me the actual flesh and blood books.  Or I guess I should say, paper and ink books...  Whether I wanted to or not, I was going to be a reader.

(My nightstand as it looks currently.  There's also a National Geographic in case, God forbid, I should run out of books.)

In addition to being a reader I like to fancy myself as a writer.  I have about four in progress books saved on my computer at the moment and someday I plan to finish at least one of them.  I am also a free lance writer for a local magazine called Denver Life.  Not to mention, I took four years of college Latin, which has turned me into (as my students so lovingly call me) The Grammar Police.

What I have lacked as a writer is the follow-through to actually complete a long term work.  Sure, I can make up excuses (too busy with grad school, too busy with work, too busy attending to my kitten) but they are all just excuses.  I stumbled upon a link the other day (literally I was on the website StumbleUpon) on how to make you a better writer.  One of the words of wisdom was to "find your muse."  Here is the link:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-better-than-you-normally-do/

Conveniently, Amazon also released their list of 100 books to read in a lifetime.  So I combined the two and have started my journey to find my muse.... by reading Amazon's 100 books to read in a lifetime.  In case you are so inclined to do the same, here is the link to their list:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_629030_112574320_pe_row1_ptr/?node=8192263011 

Maybe this is just another excuse.  But by starting this blog, I am already writing.  And at the end of it, at the very least, I will have completed a blog (to potentially be read by friends and family and hopefully a few others) and I will be DAMN well read.