I have been seriously reading again. My husband thinks I'm crazy the way I read. I read two, three, sometimes four books at a time. He doesn't understand how I can go back and forth between them. I don't know how I do it, I just do it.

I never finished the Gunslinger books by Stephen King so this summer I decided to go back to the beginning and read them all. I just finished reading "Wizard and Glass" tonight. I had put this one off for a couple of months because I knew the first time I read it I was a crying mess at the end. I just didn't want to get to that again so soon. I finally made myself sit down and start reading. I guess having two pre-schoolers running around at the climax of the story doesn't lend to crying uncontrollably. I teared up, but definitely did not have the waterworks from the past. So...now it's on to "Wolves of the Calla", and that will be the first of the series that I have not read.

I plan on starting "Child 44" tomorrow sometime. It is supposed to be very good. Not my usual type of book, but I'm trying to expand my genres.

I am also currently reading "The Hollow Hills" and "The Road". It is a wide variety of books. Maybe that is how I can read so many at one time.

I just love, love, love, love, LOVE to read. I would probably rather do that than almost anything else. I can't wait to get some bookshelves in my house so I can get out all my books again. I miss having my books out. I don't like the fact that I can't "get to them". It will happen...I just have to be patient.

Reading, reading, reading, reading,reading.....

Got this from Ian at Perpetual Writer's Block...



The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?



1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.


2) Italicize those you intend to read.


3) Underline ( I just changed the color) the books you LOVE.



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 Faulks


18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger


19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger


20 Middlemarch - George Eliot


21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell


22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald


23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens


24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy


25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh


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 Dickens3


3 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 - AA Milne


41 Animal Farm - George Orwell


42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown


43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


WHERE DID 44GO?


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


WHERE IS 51?


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


75 Ulysses - James Joyce


76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath


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 - EB 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 HugoHey





36 out of 100 not too bad. Even missing a couple. :) How did you do? The ones that I marked in red (that I luv them) I have read multiple times.

and many a Saturday afternoon......

If any of you had any doubts about my total geekdom, this post should but them to rest forever:

I was catching up on my news this morning before the girls woke up and found this obituary in the technology section of all places.

"Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons creator, dies"

I was introduced to the game in 1981. I was chosen to participate in a gifted program held at one of the universitys in Arkansas. It was a two week program and we had one main class each day and then two side classes (one each week). I believe those two weeks help shape me and the person I became tremendously. My main class was "Medieval Studies". We talked about the Crusades, the Plague, Shakespeare, Jousting, Knights, Religion.... just what it was called: Medieval Studies. That began my love for the romantic notion of that time period: knights, maidens, kings, crusades... I also read the Arthurian Legend series by Mary Stewart during that time.

We had lunch and free time before our mini classes. One of the free time activities was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted to find out what it was all about and went and played. I was hooked! It wasn't long after that my mom found an add in our local paper asking for anyone interested in joining a D&D group to call. Of course I called and began playing almost every Saturday afternoon with a large group of guys. I was 11/12/13 years old playing this amazing game with a bunch of goofy guys.

I believe we had a good solid group of 8 players who met regularly and played together. We took turns meeting at each other's homes. I fell in love with fantasy books, games, shows, movies.... and I still am to this day. I've played D&D, and then later in life an online game called Evernight

I've been elves, humans, gnomes, dwarves, demons, fighters, pixies, magic users....I've been a good gal and a bad one...I've even been a guy a few times. I guess I just think it's fun to get to play at being someone or something else every now and then.

Good bye Gary, thanks for all the hours and hours of fun and fantasy!