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