The 100 Books

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. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

 

 

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

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

 

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I've only finished a handful from this list, but at least more than BBC's expectation? :)

 

Broken Into

I suppose getting burgled is not very interesting in the whole scheme of things. If anything, I am just another part of the statistic, some obscure news that, while unfortunate, isn't particulary surprising. People get robbed everyday on the streets and inside their homes.

But, man. Being part of the statistic doesn't make it easier. One would think the whole misery-loves-company thing would be in play somewhere, but no. I would never wish this on anyone for sheer number. Nor would I dismiss any burglary as offhandedly as I have done before.

It was a violation, not only of physical property, but of my whole concept of believing in the goodness of others. And, needless to say, it has infected the way I feel about people because it's harder to trust. There was at least one person who observed our routine, went to our door, forced it open, took our valuables. He rummaged through our closet, touched our things, even zipped open our Bible cases, and looked for anything with worth. He was there - where we slept, where we ate, where we LIVED.

For now, paranoia reigns supreme. But I do hope it wears off because it's too effing exhausting to be distrustful.

Once in a while, I catch myself wincing lately, but not out of pain. At least, not physically. More often, it's because I have let my thoughts wander back through the losses and some random memory of my mother wearing her diamond ring, some random file I can never access anymore from my stolen hard drives goes through my head.

The heaviest loss would understandably be my parents' valuables. So I'm going to steer clear of that for now because I don't want to have a breakdown.

Losing my laptop and external hard disk drive took some time to sink in. Both were very important to me but they were initially eclipsed by the enormity of losing the mementos of my parents. Days later after the robbery, it began to dawn on me that there were hundreds of drafts of writing that I will not be able to recover. Years worth of stories, journal entries - materials that I have been working on. I actually have been finishing a one-act play and was excited to send it to friends for review. I wish I already have sent it or uploaded it somewhere. Some lessons are so painful to learn. A thing about inspiration - it doesn't hang around waiting for you to create it (and back it up).

And all my pictures. Sigh. All the files from my old point-and-shoot until my DSLR. I don't often buy souvenirs when I travel because I always think that I take enough pictures to remember the places. And while I won't ever see my image library again, the only consolation I have is that I upload a few selection to Facebook or Multiply to share.

After it happened, I space out more often trying to find the reason why it had happened. Weeks before, I have contemplated on giving away my laptop to someone who needed it more. I was being nagged by the idea that if it didn't hurt when I give, then I was not giving at all. And it would be a hard sacrifice to give up my laptop because I was so attached and reliant to it. Now, I unbelievably regret that I did not heed that urge. And I resolve never to ignore it when it comes to me again.

While it is not likely that the robber held any Robinhood-like beliefs and it's not far-fetched that all the spoils went to drugs or booze, I hope that whatever amount he gained from the burglary, even a small part of it, was used to help someone in one way or another.

I'd like to take the rest of this space to thank all my family and friends who expressed their concern when they found out about what happened. Those text messages, emails, calls at 2 am, and offers of help in various forms are ALL very much appreciated beyond articulation. It is very assuring that your care is burglary-proof. Maraming salamat!