Books for 2011

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

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 (all)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights
8. 1984– George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May 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 Travellers 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 Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim 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 - Gabrial Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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 Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martell
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
74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylivia 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 - Charles Mitchell
83. The Colour 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 & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

 My goal for the new year is to read this list. Join me?

Loser, loser.

Never in all my days have I come across a person who enjoys losing but I seem to like it less than most. When it is something I know I am good at and know I can win, defeat seeps in through every crevice and rots all inside me. To not hear my name called is the tightening of imaginary fingers around my throat. Slowly, I try to force a smile to myself for the person better than me but the tears are stinging from where I refuse to let them fall. My bestest, I feel him watching me, trying to catch my eye and I avoid it. He's too good to witness something so pathetic. Certain people, I catch flashes of disbelief on their faces and their thoughts reach out, touch me, but it's not enough. It's not enough. I was close to being the best. But close is not the winner. Close is left out and rejected and abandoned and all these viruses that are infecting my heart.

Sometimes is never quite enough.

If you're flawless, then you'll win my love.

Don't forget to win first place.

Don't forget to keep that smile on your face.

Be a good boy.

Try a little harder.

You've got to measure up

And make me prouder.

 

How long before you screw it up?

How many times do I have to tell you to hurry up?

With everything I do for you,

The least you can do is keep quiet.

Be a good girl.

You've gotta try a little harder.

That simply wasn't good enough

To make us proud.

I'll live through you.

I'll make you what I never was.

If you're the best, then maybe so am I,

Compared to him compared to her.

I'm doing this for your own damn good!

You'll make up for what I blew.

What's the problem?

Why are you crying?

Be a good boy.

Push a little farther now.

That wasn't fast enough

To make us happy.

We'll love you just the way you are

If you're perfect.

Alanis Morissette

I would write myself but my spirit has sunken a tad too low to even attempt. However, this song matches the words in my soul quite well. All my life, I've done more than my fair share to be loved. And somehow it never seems enough.

Why so blue?

My heart belongs to a boy,
a boy who doesn't know of love.
Something inside me yearns to teach
but I fear not I have the patience.

Waves of affection crash upon me
and inside my soul begins to drown.
He speaks so softly and always stoic
so that he appears emotionless.

Most believe he is an empty room
with no light reflecting against plain walls.
But like a scream from underwater,
he reaches out in his own way.

Our fingers, they brush one another
and I dart my eyes to avoid the truth.
The electricity I taste from that touch
sparks no fire against a stone.

If possible, I would bury myself
six feet under in those sorrel eyes.
For then I would be the twinkle there
shining, dancing when his laugh resounds.

He knows not of this adoration
nor will my lips ever tell him of such.
Till time comes and my folly is shattered,
I dream of Arctic kisses and Neverland love.