World War Z

Ok, continuing on with the book theme, this is my newest read...well, along with the six other books I'm reading. It's a library book though so it's jumped to the top of the reading list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did not make it onto The Big Read's top 100 list. However, 40 pages in, I have to say it's a good read. If you like pandemics. And zombies.

The book is written as a collection of oral histories from survivors of a world wide zombie epidemic. It's not presented as a Dawn of the Dead type typical zombie story, but as an epidemic caused by a communicable pathogen that causes zombie-like symptoms. The interviews are done with people from all walks of life and from all over the world and the path of the disease is followed through their stories. As I said, I'm only 40 pages in, but so far I love it.

After all of the excitement this morning... sorry, yesterday over the 100 Books list, I'm thinking of doing my own list. Not necessarily of books I think you should read, but more of books that I've read and loved and why. I love book lists, but they always tend towards classics or the English Lit version of what you should read. Let me rephrase that. They tend towards, IF YOU DIDN'T READ THIS THEN YOU'RE AN ILLITERATE FOOL AND PROBABLY INBRED. Who needs that? Yes, there are books that you should read. Not because if you don't you'll be a lesser person for it, but because there are some books that touch on so many other works you have read and you may not even realize it until you do. And not only other books, but movies, TV, plays, cartoons, you name it. When you go the whole, READ THIS DAMMIT route you turn it into homework. Maybe you can get a person to start reading one of those books, but are they going to enjoy it? Or are they just going to push through it to say that they've read it, or worse, give up.

I'm not saying The Big Read list is one of those, really, I just went off on a tangent. And now I'm sitting in front of my computer looking at the time and wondering what the hell I was getting at and how do I wrap this up because there's a big warm bed (with a small warm person in it) and a stack of books beside it that I'd like to go read. Ok, here's the thing. I read a lot of other peoples lists today and I heard many people, both bloggers and commentors, making excuses for not having read the list. The list is a suggestion. The National Endowment For The Arts isn't telling you you're dumb because you haven't read these books. It's saying that these are some amazing books and we think you would really enjoy them. But you also have lives, jobs, CHILDREN, and that is a pretty steep list. If you have only read a couple, or even none, so what. You're not dead yet, you still have time. And hey, maybe you didn't like anything that was on that list. Maybe you only like science-fiction. Or Danielle Steele. So what. In the end, I think all that really matters is that you do read. And if you have children, go read to them. Because that is even more important.

*Are you wondering how you got here from a review of book about zombies? Me too.

100 Books

I found this on Unmitigated this morning and I love books so I had to do it. I've read 32 of the 100 books and have seen quite a few of the others as movies. One thing I find interesting in these lists is what gets left out. I found that this list seemed to favour books that have been adapted to film. And Jane Austen. Whatever, lists are always biased to whoever makes them up, regardless of whether it was done by a single person or a group.

"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."

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 (and from the 10th grade I wanted to name a daughter Scout until that bitch Demi Moore screwed it up for me)
6 The Bible (Um, I read the first half. Do I get a half point? I have read the Koran and recommend it to anyone, just to glimpse the other side of the fence, so to speak. And it's really short)
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 (many versions of the movie, thanks wifey!)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete? No, but a lot)
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 (movie a million times, thanks mom! Oh, and mom can totally recite the first paragraph. Possibly more. She's got skills)
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 (don't think I've actually read an Austen book but dear GOD the movies! I joke, but I have a man crush on Colin Firth so it's all good)
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 (his earlier books were much better, where are they? The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, I mean, just the name!)
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 Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (no, but the Gables are actually in my country)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (no, but a lot of other 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 (I defy you to find a better closing line, the best)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (still on my shelf unfinished)
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 (seriously? That's it? This man is a genuis)
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 (good, but where's A Short History of Nearly Everything?)
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 (started it...)
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 (There are some amazing Japanese writers out there, how about some whose books weren't turned into movies?)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (was read TO me, does that count?)
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 (no, but I did read Wind, Sand & Stars)
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

Oops, forgot to underline favs. My children are tired of being ignored though so there's no going back. Maybe I'll make my OWN list. Oooooo!

PS. If you do this and copy my list for your own blog, don't be a loser like me and forget to take out some of the comments like I did with Middle Aged Woman's list. Hopefully I got them all before you've read this.