Friday, June 22, 2012

Summer Reading List

I was always that kid who loved, as in absolutely loved getting the summer reading list. I'd go to the library on the first day of summer and I'd leave with a stack of books taller than I was. For a while the librarians would seriously doubt that I, in all my 9 year old glory was actually reading the books. That was until I gave a librarian a passionate account of why Wuthering Heights was utterly ridiculous. I also explained that there was no way at all I'd marry a one armed blind man who locked his last wife in the attic, but that's a story for another day.  So in the spirit of my nine year old self here's my summer reading list.

Okay folks, we're doing this in phases. I've got 7 weeks of summer left so here's my plan:


Phase 1:
1.      What The Living Do – Marie Howe
2.      The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
3.      Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
4.      One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5.      A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
6.      Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
7.      Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
8.      A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
9.      As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
10.  The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews - Peter Duffy

Phase 2:
1.      Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women - Elizabeth Wurtzel
2.      A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
3.      The Crucible - Arthur Miller
4.      The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood - Rebecca Wells
5.      Finnegan’s Wake - James Joyce
6.      Lady Chatterleys’ Lover - D. H. Lawrence
7.      Out of Africa - Isac Dineson
8.      Rosemary’s Baby- - Ira Levin
9.      The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
10.  Oh, The Places You'll Go - Dr. Seuss

Phase 3:
1.      The Napping House - Audrey Wood
2.      The Paper Bag Princess - Robert N. Munsch
3.      Ramona Quimby, Age 8 - Beverly Cleary
4.      The Sign of the Beaver - Elizabeth George Speare
5.      The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
6.      Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
7.      Emma - Jane Austen
8.      Dune - Frank Herbert
9.      The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
10.  Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas



Phase 4:
1.      On The Road - Jack Kerouac
2.      Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
3.      A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
4.      Autobiography of a Face - Lucy Grealy
5.      The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
6.      Cousin Bette - Honor’e de Balzac
7.      Don Quijote – Cervantes
8.      Eloise - Kay Thompson
9.      The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
10.  The Little Match Girl - Hans Christian Andersen

Phase 5:
1.      The Miracle Worker - William Gibson
2.      Peyton Place - Grace Metalious
3.      The Trial - Franz Kafka
4.      Stellaluna - Janell Cannon
5.      Jumanji - Chris Van Allsburg
6.      Hatchet - Gary Paulsen
7.      The Trumpet of the Swan - E. B. White
8.      Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
9.      Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10.  A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

Phase 6:
1.      The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
2.      Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
3.      The Secret History - Donna Tartt
4.      The Color Purple - Alice Walker
5.      Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
6.      The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
7.      Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
8.      Carrie - Stephen King
9.      Daughter of Fortune - Isabel Allende
10.  Fahrenheit 9/11 - Michael Moore

Phase 7:
1.      Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
2.      Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3.      The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
4.      Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
5.      The Children’s Hour - Lillian Hellman
6.      The Gospel According to Judy Bloom
7.      A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
8.      The Nanny Diaries - Emma McLaughlin
9.      A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
10.  The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Paterson













Plan

1. Get a library card.


2. Go to the library
3. Borrow up to 10 books - more or less depending on content, weekly schedule.My average last summer was 15 books a week (I'm a very fast reader, I read every single word on the SAT, finished with 20 minutes to spare on each section & got a near perfect score...also I've been reading since I was 3 #pridealert) 
4. Read books




Welcome!!

Books Books Books!!

So I've had this blog sitting around for a few years now and I've used it a bit for class but never anything else. Now I'm setting out to change that.

My Summer plans pretty much fell through so now instead of being a youth counselor at my not so local Jesus Camp my Summer is pretty much open. I've decided to do to things this Summer.

1. Have fun!!!
2. Make some headway on my "Books I HAVE to read before I die" list*


*head over to the "Books" page to see my list & comment/add more

I'm going to use this blog to do both of those things.