What have you read lately?

I stole this list from my friend Sherri.  Looking through it, and the comments on her blog, make me wonder if there was a website that had a list of literary classics.  I am happy to report, I found a few, and I thought I’d share them with you.  :) 

http://www.classicauthors.net/

http://www.americanliterature.com/

http://www.americanliterature.com/ARCHIVES/ARCHIVES.HTML

http://www.literature.org/authors/  (their main page, http://www.literature.org/, describes their purpose.)

http://www.literatureclassics.com/

 

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?  (I got 21)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline 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 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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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 Hugo

Punctuation Perseverance

For writerly types, you almost have to admire their determination.  Check out the article I found in the press today.  “Typo personalities  Armed with Sharpies, erasers and righteous indignation, two apostles of the apostrophe make it their crusade to rid the world of bad signs”

I thought you guys might get a kick out if it.  Enjoy!

Back and Forth

Ah, it has been a long absence.  Offline for a month.  Sigh.  Hopefully that’s behind us now and we can get back to the business of writing. 

I noticed a sharp decline in the contest interest level, so I figured that you all had better things to do.  No big.    Some of my ideas were probably pretty lame anyway.  I know writing is hard.  It’s hard too to figure out ways to spark creativity in writers.  You’re a high maintenance bunch!    I kid I kid! 

Seriously, I’m not sure I’ll do the contest thing for a while.  I’ll put up ideas and such, but not in a competitive way, and not on a schedule.  Prompts, information, things I think might be helpful to writers, but no contests.  I’m really no judge and I feel guilty about the ones who didn’t “win.”  Like my dorky graphic was a prize - sheesh!  LOL   

So, in that vein, you may - or may not - be aware that My Beloved Husband (aka MBH) has been in a bit of a slump lately.  He really wants to increase his vocabulary, and he also has been looking for ways to push through is bad case of block.  I found a couple of sites that might help him, and thought they might be of interest to you as well.  I also found one more that I think might be cool.  So here they are, for your perusal.  Oh, and write something!

A totally free guide to increasing your vocabulary

Stuck in a rut? Read our irreverent guide to pushing past writer’s block.

101 Best Sites for Writers 

Hope for all of us

If this guy could do it, any of the rest of us can too, right?  Don’t give up!

New York subway worker in Hollywood’s fast lane

Haiku

How about a Haiku?  Can you think of one?  Or more?

And the Winner is …

DarcKnyt

“Let me be frank, Colonel,” General Warthsmith said, sighing. “I don’t really care who’s at fault for the leak. We haven’t got time for that sort of rubbing any more.” He took a long, thoughtful drag on his Cuban and the blue plume wrapped itself around his head as he exhaled dragon’s smog through his lips.

New Game! Behind the Picture

Okay, here’s something a little new - write a story that explains what happened in this picture. You can be something like a journalist reporting on it, or maybe the homeowner, or the car owner, maybe the homeowner’s neighbor … whatever suits your style.

Post your stories in the comments section. Comments will be closed at noon on next Tuesday, April 1st. The winner will be posted on the 2nd, as well as added to the Winner’s Page.

Ready? Write!

Parts of Speech brush-up

I found this over on kwiznet and thought it would be fun to post it, just to brush up on our knowledge. I know I always need the little reminders - I tend to forget things the more time goes by since I was in school. And it’s been a loooong time since I was in school!

Revised Post - "When I was little"

Due to inclement weather with some of our friends, and by special request, this game is being changed to an exercise.  There won’t be any “winners” this week since no one got to play the game, and anyone can jump in any time. 

Write a story that begins with the line, “When I was little, I was really afraid of …” and ends with, “… and now I …”  No word count so it can be any length.  And it need not be autobiographical.  :) 

New Game! F Words!

Well, since the “C words” game seemed to be kind of popular, and the “When I was little game” not at all, I thought I’d stick with what worked before. And sorry I’m late today - sickness has invaded our place and none of us escaped to wellness.

Write a story - any length - that includes the words frank, fault, false, foreign, and fresh.

Post your answer in the comments section. Comments will be closed at noon on next Tuesday, March 25th. The winner will be posted on the 26th, as well as added to the Winner’s Page.

Ready? Write!