gratitude journal

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this and paste into a new entry. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other "Book Nerds."

I went with the standards of the person who posted this before me: I am a purist, so if I hadn't read the whole book it didn't count. But this only applied to Catch 22, the Bible and Moby Dick.

It will surprise no one who knows me that I have read 64 of these books. (Or if it does surprise you, then you don't know me that well.) So definitely I'm a Book Nerd.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (You must have read them ALL!) x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x

Total: 9

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 5

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x

Total: 7

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 6

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
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 x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x

Total: 6

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth x
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 6

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
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 x
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 5

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
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 x

Total: 4

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry x
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 8

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks x
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x

Total: 8

Grand Total: 64

Amazing things about last weekend:

• Went to New York, stayed with one of my best friends, my college roommate
• Bought three lovely pairs of earring at a young designers market in Nolita
• Had a yummy dinner at a trendy new spot with Portugese/Chinese food from Macau
• Tried to go salsa dancing, although the place closed in 20 minutes.  But got to watch a few good dancers!
• Woke up early and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge
  
• Tasty brunch in Brooklyn with another good friend, her baby, and my best friend M
• Started reading my book birthday present
  
• Opened some early birthday presents:  funky gold hoop earrings, a trendy black and tan strapless dress, a book about caring for your spirit and chakras
  

• Catching up with my college friend who is 4 months preggers, had a lovely lunch
• Going to the beach for a few hours with my friend visiting from Belgium
• Finding a lovely hidden restaurant in a 3 century old house on the North Shore.... eating lovely seafood with yummy Australian wine
• One more perfect conversation with another good friend from college, at a coffee house in Cambridge... before she takes off for the summer
• A weekend with my parents and uncle, eating yummy Szechaun food (uncle's latest obsession) and doing the family thing
• some more dreaming and planning for the week and the year ahead
  

Summer is finally here!!!!!  It has been winter for a long time and suddenly summer came to Boston, all in one excited rush.  I spent a lot of today at the geekiest thing I've been to in a while, a programming conference at MIT.  When I could not handle the hordes and hordes of (almost all male) programmers any more, I fled to the roof of this gorgeous Gehry-designed building where the conference was being held.  Here it is.

Stata Center - MIT

Sleeping Beauty - Boston Ballet