Failed literary scholar

Reading Laura's blog left me wondering where I stood in terms of what I've read compared to what I probably should've read by this point in my life...and I really haven't read much. Maybe one day I'll make some headway in this list.

 

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper LeeThe Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Listened to this on tape when I refused to read it for school)
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (My daddy read this one to me when I was a kid)
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 

Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Did I read this, or just watch the movie?!)

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Silly old bear)
Animal Farm - George Orwell (I read the script and worked on the play, but didn't read the book itself)
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (Don't remember this book at all, but I know I read it!)
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan (Again, I can't remember if I read it or just saw the movie)

Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Great book!)

 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (One of my favorites)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold  (Again, I can't remember if I read it or just saw the movie)

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville 

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola (Did a project on him, but never read his shizz)
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker 

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I'm pretty sure at some point I read some of these)
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In English AND French)
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've read almost every other Shakespeare play - save for the majority of the histories - but not Hamlet!)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Did I ever read this, or just saw the play/movie? Hmm...)

Hiatus...

I know I've been gone for a while, a lot is still going on - and I currently don't have internet at my new house unless my dad tethers his phone, which isn't ideal.

I promise I will fill you in.

Miss you....

It's just surreal.

Look. I was going to post something profound last week. I was going to post about my trip to Florida and to Atlanta. I had big dreams for a post today, but honestly...I just can't find it in me right now.

 Half of my house burnt down yesterday. My parents and I are physically alright. My house is not. Yes, I plan on sharing the story with all of the details because it's something that while I don't want to remember, it's something I will never forget. So for right now, I smell like a barbecue pit, a good portion of my family's belongings are not salvageable, I'm living in a hotel for the next 10 days until the insurance company finds us a temporary apartment for the next 6-12 months while my house remains "unlivable" and I still haven't accepted that this is real life.  

But it is...
 

This is what is left of my kitchen. The laundry room and third floor bathroom look about the same

And what the first floor bathroom and most of the other rooms look like

I will have more pictures in my next post. Right now, I'm just trying to stave off the random outbursts of tears that remind me that this is real.

Hey there, it's been a while

And it will continue to be a little while longer. I'm trying to process some information that I just got. It's a doozy.