100 Books I have to read ...
Revisiting my 100 books list. I have been making progress. I have read far more books than the list implies, because this list is merely a guideline. I am inclined to make another, which shows all the other books that have caught my interest since making this list two years ago. It has been a great way to find some new favourites. Wally Lamb and Margaret Atwood spring to mind as two authors I had not really broached, but now read avidly. The Bookfest is coming up soon, and that always is a great spree!
For my 100th post celebration I have decided to branch out a little from the traditional '100 things about me' posts. Instead I have been working on a list of books I really want to read. This is not a finite list, obviously, and there are other books that I will be reading simply because I have them! The list is composed of books that I have always wanted to read, and books that have been recommended to me from various sources. Some of them are already sitting on my shelves (lucky me!), and I will mark them with an *.
1. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
2. Candide - Voltaire
3. White Oleander - Janet Fitch
4. I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb*
5. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood*
6. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John LeCarre
8. She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb
9. The Inferno - Dante
10. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
11. Paradise Lost - John Milton
12. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery
13. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Thomas Hardy
14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James*
15. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
16. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald*
17. Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence *
18. The Power and the Glory - Grahame Greene
19. Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
20. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
21. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*
22. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
23. Madame Bovary - Gustaye Flaubert *
24. The Plague - Albert Camus
25. Middlemarch - George Elliot*
26. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
28. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
29. Beloved - Toni Morrison*
30. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
31. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
32. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
33. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery*
34. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
35. Swallows And Amazons - Arthur Ransome
36. Ulysses - James Joyce
37. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
38. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
39. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemmingway
40. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
41. The Epic of Gilgamesh - Maureen Gallery Kovacs
42. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf*
43. Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
44. The Pilot's Wife - Anita Shreve*
45. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
46. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
47. Walden - Henry David Thoreau*
48. Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
49. Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde*
50. Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Dafoe *
51. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
52. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
53. Hornblower - C. S. Forester*
54. The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy *
55. The Warden - Anthony Trollope
56. Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
57. Like Water For Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
58. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
59. Feast - Nigella Lawson
60. How to be a Domestic Goddess - Nigella Lawson*
61. Cook With Jamie - Jamie Oliver*
62. The Writer's Book of Hope: Getting from Frustration to Publication - Ralph Keyes
63. The Secret River - Kate Grenville*
64. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
65. Everyday - Bill Granger
66. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
67. The Sixth Wife - Suzannah Dunn
68. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver*
69. A Perfect Day - Richard Evans
70. The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings - Amy Tan
71. The Sacrifice - Beverly Lewis
72. The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud
73. Birdsong - Sebastion Faulks
74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
75. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graham (read years ago, but want to reread)
76. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
77. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
78. The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
79. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
80. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus - Margaret Atwood*
81. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
82. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
83. In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson
84. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling - Henry Fielding*
85. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
86. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
87. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
88. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
89. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
90. Aspects of the Novel - E. M. Forster
91. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide For People who love Books and for those who want to write them - Francine Prose*
92. On Becoming a Novelist - John Gardiner
93. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
94. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
95. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
96. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
97. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
98. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
99. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
100. Oscar and Lucinde - Peter Carey
Here I am, a whole day after I started this post. I have read more book reviews than I thought possible and perused more top 100 lists than I dreamed of. I love books with a passion, but found this list a struggle, because I was avoiding books that I have already read, and trying not to list books that I just wasn't interested in.
If you're one of those people who is obligated to buy me a gift from time to time this would be a brilliant place to start ;)
We have really been out and about this month, in spite of the sweltering heat. Last weekend we spent a few days in the bush, only an hour or so down the road from our place. We enjoyed the opportunity to explore a little further than a day trip allows.
We paddled in creeks filled with guppies and water skaters. Josh was disappointed to discover that this version of paddling did not involve canoes. It was so hot, and our car airconditioner is once more on strike, so any accesible creeks were considered fair game to cool ourselves off.
My favourite spot was Natural Bridge, a fascinating arch and cave caused by a creek eroding the sand stone. There are glow worms, but they are not visible during daylight hours. 
Outside looking into the cave.
