Bookish Links and Delightful Miscellany

Thank a Writer

This is a great project. Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl started a site called Go Mighty so that people could post and share their lists of life goals. Goals cover just about anything you can think of—from redecorating a room to learning the trapeze to writing a thank you note to your favorite author(s).

. . . Closing the book, I felt overcome. I set it on my chest and felt the weight of it while I breathed.

I chase that feeling when I read. The one that makes me want to find the author, pour them a drink, and leave them to bask in the glow of their efforts. Damn.

(via MightyGirl)

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#fridayreads

My #fridayreads this week is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. I love her books! One of the highlights of my life was the conversation I had with her (ok, we tweeted, but that still counts, right?).

What are you reading?

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Famous Authors as Teens

Flavorwire gives us Fascinating Photos of Famous Authors as Teenagers.

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National Library Week is April 14-20

 

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What Books Made You Cry?

GalleyCat started a list of books that make people cry. Books make me cry all the time. In fact, I'm much more likely to cry while reading a book than while watching TV or a movie. One book that really made the tears flow is The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg. I read Berg's book way back before Nooks and Kindles and iPads. Back then I used to read on my Palm Treo, and no one sat around coffee houses reading on their Treos. Except me. It must have looked like I had gotten a really sad email or text. 

 

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How Many of These Books Have You Read?

This has been around for a long time, but it's always fun. Add yours in the comments area.

Instructions: Copy list

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Add <3 to your faves (I added this).

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte <3 
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee <3 
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte <3 
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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger <3 
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
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck <3 
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Caroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis <3 
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 – A.A. 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 <3 
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 <3 
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 <3 
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
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 – E.B. 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 (In French)
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

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How to Treat a Book

 

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Comments

[Amy]

I once sat through an entire green light crying over The Time Traveler’s Wife. No worries, the line of cars honking behind me in no way interrupted my weeping!

[Jana]

Oh, yes. The Time Traveler's Wife. Totally cried at that one. My niece wants me to read The Fault in Our Stars but a review mentioned a lot of crying and I'm not sure I'm up for that.

[Brian]

Brave New World has been one of my favorite books since college. I know lots of people read it in high school, but I thought college was the perfect time for me. It was also nice to see some Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Kerouac. The list sure could use some Hemingway though. Now for the real question. How many of these books have you read on a Kindle or E-reader? I'd be interested to see the response there.