This is kinda hard

I normally avoid the ‘puter on weekends, since I am glued to it all week.  But the contest demands my daily attention, so here I am on a chilly fall Saturday trying to think of something to say besides OH MY GOD THE DOG FINALLY GOT TALL ENOUGH TO JUMP ONTO THE COUCH HOW ARE WE EVER GOING TO ESCAPE THE PUPPY JAWS OF DEATH, OR IF NOT DEATH AT LEAST OF PINCHED SKIN NIPS THAT REALLY FREAKING HURT.

So I’m cheating and stealing a meme that I saw not long ago.  Since I know none of you are going to read through this is painstakingly as I created it, I’ll give you the rundown.  I like Margaret Atwood and Jane Austen and usually read their works over and over (I’m reading The Blind Assassin again right now.)  I’ve never heard of most of the ones I didn’t underline or bold, except Tolstoy and who has time for that?  I feel like I ought to love Virginia Woolf, since I love her essays so much, but I just can’t get through any Woolf.  Ditto Faulkner.  Maybe when I’m older.  And I had a collection of childhood adventure classics, all bound identically, and read them all as a kid, and probably understood 50% of them.  The Count of Monte Cristo is still one of my favorite books of all time.  I still have a lot of books I want to read, more than just these of course (who made this list I wonder?  Is this supposed to be THE LIST that signals literary savvy?  If I’ve read all of these one day, will I be SMART?)Sometimes (does this sound awful) I hope that I’ll be put on bed rest for my last two weeks or so of pregnancy, and then I can send my faithful husband to the library with a very long list, and lay in bed and read all dayAND NO ONE CAN STOP ME.  Thank you, and have a nice Saturday.

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell*
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel*
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin*
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park*
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers