How many top 100 books have you read?

I saw this on Jill's blog and thought it would be interesting. Just scanning the list I can tell I still have a ton to read.

The Big Read is a 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.

Here’s what you are supposed to do:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE .Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.


Here's what I did: I just bolded the ones I've read, the rest is too much of a hassle for me today.

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 Meany - 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 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
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


13 is not that many. I better start reading. Hopefully by the end of the yaer my number will look a little better.

How many have you guys read?

Sometimes I feel like I live on a farm... (Part 7)

THE FARM

I blog a lot about what I can from the garden, so I am finally showing the garden itself. It is not our garden. We just put blood, sweat, and tears into it. It belongs to the man upstairs. He plans it all out, instructs our planting of planned areas, forces us into slave labor for the whole summer and part of fall, then allows us to partake of it. It's actually not bad at all. I love having it so much and I really enjoy working in the garden, except for weeding. Paul (the man upstairs) ha been gardening forever. I think his parents gardened while he was growing up so he knows a lot about gardening. I can tell he knows a lot and is really good at it because all the stuff is so good and turns out wonderfully. I love learning about gardening. I am very grateful that we live here and have access to such a wonderful garden, even if it is overwhelming. Now without further ado, the garden........

The first two pics are views from the deck and the third and forth are from inside the garden.

(The empty area is where we used to have 6 rows of corn.)

The next pictures are of my favorite thing in the garden-raspberries. They are so good. Paul planted a ton more this year so we have a lot. The yellow looking ones are golden raspberries and are so tasty. They have a sweeter taste and are huge!

There are 2 apple trees and we hope we get as many as we got last year.


There are 2 main grapes- there are some on the back fence that borders the neighbors, but I have no idea what they are. I'm not sure what the green ones are, but they are seedless. The purple are concord grapes and have seeds. I should really pick some and make grape jelly.



We planted 9 rows of corn this year (or 12. I can't really remember). The last bunch is almost done and so close to being picked.

Have you ever heard of lemon cucumbers? I hadn't until I moved here. They look kind of like lemons but are cucumbers. You eat them with the skin on and they are really good. We have regular cucumbers, but I didn't see any while I was out there.



Paul grows regular and purple cabbage. I'm not a fan of it, but it sure looks pretty.


We planted tons of peppers this year. We planted red, green, and yellow bell peppers. We also planted banana peppers, green chilies, jalapenos, and I'm sure some more that I forgot. We have 5 or 6 jalapeno plants that produce massive amounts of peppers. Not quite sure what to do with all of them.





The big thing in the garden are the 40 tomato plants. They are massive and out of control. They are so yummy though. I believe we planted 5 types of tomatoes. For some reason they taste better than they did last year. Maybe it's because I missed them so much.

These are Mexican tomatoes and most of them come out as
big as my hand.

Pear tomatoes. Never seem them until we moved here. So good!

My favorite tomatoes are these little grape tomatoes. They are
the yummiest things I've ever tasted. I wish they were year round.

I completely forgot about eggplant. I love their color and think they are so pretty to look at. I think it helps that they taste good.

Besides tomatoes, we plant tons and tons of squash. I'm not a huge squash fan, but luckily PAul is and uses most of it. I never knew there were so many varieties of squash.

Hubbard

Pumpkin (at least I think)

Yellow squash

Zucchini and yellow squash plants

More Pumpkins

Spaghetti Squash (They actually featured this on Rachel Ray
yesterday. Here is the recipe.)

Hubbard

Pumpkin- This is Katya's

Cali's pumpkin

Banana Squash

I think this is Acorn

Buttercup

More Butternut

More Spaghetti

We also have pretty wild green onions and chives. We water them and they keep growing every year.



If the garden doesn't make me feel enough like I live on a farm, I just listen and then I really do think I live on one. There are 2 geese that make sure we remember that they are there. I am very much afraid of them. When they are out in the yard I rarely go outside because they are not a big fan of people. There are also about 20 chickens who give us wonderful eggs. Now if we only had a cow, I would never need to go to the grocery store.



I just love it here and I'm so grateful for the opportunity of learning from a gardener so that maybe someday I can grow wonderful things also. I hope that I can learn many more lessons about gardening and how to keep everything alove for the whole summer (because Paul knows that we almost killed everything off when he was gone. Who knew that we needed to water that much. No wonder nothing was growing. Lesson learned.)