A Literary Meme with a Twist

I have had this post saved as a draft for sometime.  I cannot remember the blog from which it originated.  My apology should this make it's way back to you.

I'm not familiar with many of the titles so I have a lot of strike throughs for books I know nothing about.  At least I'm above "The Big Read" average statistic, which is that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.

If you'd  like to participate, just copy and paste this list of books into your own blog, and follow the instructions below, or add up the books you’ve read.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog. (This list in no way represents the top 100 books according to "The Big Read. It’s missing the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. For shame.)

1  Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2  The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3  Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4  The 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 (read several, not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 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 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

Random Flashback - A Young Teen's Take on "Tommy"

Some years ago, my daughter was ill and camped out on the couch in our living room watching television when the 1970s movie  "Tommy" was being shown.  Afterward, she passed some time writing a post about "Tommy" for her Xanga (I think that's what it was called).   I didn't know she'd written anything about the movie until I happened upon her post.  I got such a laugh out of it I kept a copy. 

While searching for something on my computer today I found the old movie "review" and it still made me laugh.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I home schooled my daughter k-12.  As she begins her sophomore year of college this week, I've been waxing nostalgic quite a lot.  I'm getting off track here... I'll just paste what she wrote,  re-read it, remember that time in life, and laugh.  Again.  :) 

Well, while I was sick on the couch this weekend I broadened my cultural knowledge by watching the 70s rock-opera “Tommy.” It was quite the educational experience – I’d never before realized just how disturbed people were in the 70s….

Unless you have a great love for 70s culture or rock music, there is no need to bother with this movie. If you’re curious what it’s about, I can pretty much outline it for you: Tommy becomes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his stepfather murder his father (who was supposed to already be dead.) His mother and stepfather try many bizarre methods of curing him; including taking him to a group that wears masks and dances around a statue of Marilyn Monroe. He is abused by relatives. One night he wanders out his home and into a junkyard, where he happens across a pinball machine that is miraculously functioning despite the lack of electricity in the junkyard. Some mysterious strobe lights appear at this point too… I really don’t know how the junkyard could afford it all…. Anyway, it is discovered that the boy is a “pinball wizard” and makes millions for his family. Elton John appears at this point, wearing boots that are larger than he is. However, all the millions are no comfort to his mother because he is still deaf and blind. Thus, overcome with her grief, she shoves Tommy through a mirrored glass window, and he plummets into a pool below. He flounders as he sinks through the water, but suddenly he sees light above him! He is cured! (Note that he can now speak perfectly well, despite the fact that several years have passed since he had sight, hearing and speech) He and his family spend their millions to teach people about the life-changing power of pinball. But the people rebel and an angry mob begins smashing and burning the pinball machines (I thought my dad was going to begin weeping at this point. Ok, not really, but he commented on the waste of nice pinball machines. For those who don’t know, we have 3 in our basement) But the mob won’t stop until they’ve killed both of Tommy’s parents. Tommy himself escapes, and after placing his parent’s bodies together, he climbs a mountain and watches the sun rise, and the final “The End” screen pops up.

That, my friends is the movie in a nutshell. So if someday you’re bored and have a couple hours and several hundred brain cells to waste…. Well…. I’d still pick something else.