She says, as the shelves of the bookshelf groan in agony

I hope everyone out there in Internet-land had a safe and wonderful Christmas. I enjoyed my Christmas in the company of my husband (not to sound all sappy, but that's really all I needed) while wrapped up like an eskimo in this blanket/throw/wrap contraption that my father-in-law gave me on Christmas Eve. It has zippers and snaps and SNUGGIES BE DAMNED. I am now Eskimo Wife. And as Fiyero spent a good part of the pitiful Colts game yesterday under the blanket with me, he is now Eskimo Kitteh.

While I have lots of Christmas themed things to write about (the bulk of which center around Catholic church attendence on Christmas Eve by this not-at-all-a-Catholic girl), I thought I'd throw this out there in the meantime. It's a random meme that I found floating around out there and thought it to be rather timely since I'm at the beginning of a massive "Read all the books you always 1) wanted to read 2) thought you should read 3) heard you should read" project. The ever-growing project list is currently at 525 books. I've managed to cross sixteen off of that 525. The project began when I was out of work and had a lot of time on my hands while armed with a library card. Reading time has been scarce the last few months, will probably become scarcer still, what with this Lost project, but it's always something that I can come back too. For the meme, it's apparently the consensus that most people will only have read 6 of the 100 books.

So here's the deal. From this list, you bold the books that you've read and italicize the ones that you've not completed. I'm also adding a new category by asterisking (is that a word? If not, it should be. Websters, TAKE NOTE) the books that are part of my project, so you all can see my good intentions. I liked this list because even with the ones that I haven't read and don't own, there are a ton that are on my personal to-do list as well. And yes, I too find it kind of silly that they have the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe listed separately, but I guess that's because most people have read the one part of the series while not reading any of the others.

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 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 Dickens*
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
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*
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 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 Hugo

So between completed and started I'm at 25 out of the 100. Not too shabby, I don't think, but it could definitely be better.

I'm working on it.