books.

one of my favorite things to do with avery is read books.  luckily thanks to the very large collection that we inherited from my parents we have a huge amount of books to choose from.  i'm loving the board books right now because avery loves to grab things and chew on them and the board books can stand up to much more than the regular ones.  her favorite books right now are the ones with the 'peek-a-boo' flaps.  we read this one book every day called where is your nose? which goes through the different parts of your face.  avery knows exactly where each flap is and folds them down as we read through the book.  the last page is a mirror and she always smushes her face against it as soon as we get to that page.  i hope that the more we read during these early days, the more she'll want to read as she grows older.  charlie's not big with books and i'd love to have a good excuse to ready the harry potter and little house on the prairie series again.      

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 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

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

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

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 - 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 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 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

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

i did a lot worse than i was hoping for. for a self-proclaimed book nerd i'm more than a little disappointed. at least i did much better on this 100 book list than the other one floating around, where i think i had read about 3 books total. although i blame faulkner for that one. that guy is seriously weird. you win this round, abs.

book love.

i love lauren's blog over at the little things we do ...

sort of sounds like a weekly post that i do.

anyway, every friday she does a "friday fill-in the blanks" and this week her theme was about books.

my love of books ranks up there with my husband and dogs, so i figured i'd give this one a shot. even if it's always hard to pick just one book ....

1. My favorite book growing up was: hmm, too freaking hard. I suppose either Casey Jones rides Vanity Fair or Fly By Night. Both are about horses, because I was a huge horse nut as a kid. Both are super old and out of print. But both are books my mom hunted down for me and I re-read every year. Still.

2. The funniest book I ever read was: I think can you keep a secret? by Sophie Kinsella. definitely laughed out loud during that one ...

3. The one book that has truly changed my life: i don't know that i've ever experienced a "life changing" after finishing a book.

4. If you're looking for a "tear-jerker" you should probably read: for me this is anything with animals. i've cried from reading more books than i really care to admit. in fact, i was once in the middle of a book about horses, crying so loudly that my dad came running downstairs because he thought i was physically hurt.

5. If I could meet any author living or dead I'd want to meet: someone really weird like hemingway or faulkner or herman wouk.

6. The next book on my "to read" list is: i'm in the middle of a few right now. but, i'd put them all down for emily giffin's new one, heart of the matter.

7. If I were snowed into a remote cabin in the woods and could only choose three books to bring with me I'd bring: can you keep a secret?, the winds of war, and chesapeake