The Big Read: Top 21

It's no secret that I love the 43things website.  I think it's a really positive site and a great place to keep track of personal goals.  I always like to take a few minutes to cheer other users' goals, and use the opportunity to look for things I've never heard of before.  Today I found "Complete The Big Read" and immediately adopted it for my own list of goals.

The Big Read is a list of UK's "Most-Loved Books" that was compiled by the BBC in 2003 after several months of voting by viewers.  What I love about this list of 200 books is that they range from classic to contemporary, and from low- to high-brow choices.  So I decided to challenge myself to read the top 21 books from this list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen  
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee  
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell  
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks  
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier  
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger  
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame  
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott  
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

I'm pretty excited to see that I've already read about 10 on the list.  I say "about" because there are at least four that I know I've started but can't remember finishing.   Worst case scenario, there are 11 left to read and 11 months left in 2013.  Absolutely an attainable goal!

I need to stop drinking soda :)

So last May I had to go to the emergency room because of horrible pain in my side. Turned out I had a kidney stone, which I thought was odd, since I have no family history of that. So I did a little research on the internet, and found out that the phosphoric acid in soda can actually cause kidney stones. And since that was the worst pain I have EVER experienced, I would like to avoid future kidney stones. So I think I’m giving up soda. Nope, I AM giving up soda!!

See more progress on: stop drinking soda

Goal: Read all the books from the Rory Gilmore Bookclub

I actually started this project ages ago, and forgot about it, so I’m going to get back on track!

001 A Month Of Sundays by Julie Mars
002 The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
003 Small Island by Andrea Levy
004 My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
005 A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
006 My Life in Orange by Tim Guest
007 Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
008 The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
009 The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
010 How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
011 The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
012 Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen
013 The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
014 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
015 How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
016 Oracle Night by Paul Auster
017 Quattrocento by James McKean
018 The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan
019 Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
020 Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
021 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
022 The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
023 The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
024 Old School by Tobias Wolff
025 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
026 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
027 The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duff
028 Brick Lane by Monica Ali
029 Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
030 The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
031 Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
032 The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
033 Property by Valerie Martin Find out more
034 Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman
035 The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
036 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
037 The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
038 Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
039 Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
040 Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
041 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
042 Unless by Carol Shields
043 Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
044 When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
045 Songbook by Nick Hornby
046 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
047 Extravagance by Gary Krist
048 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
049 The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
050 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
051 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
052 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
053 Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
054 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
055 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
056 The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
057 The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
058 The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
059 Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
060 Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
061 The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
062 A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
063 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
064 Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
065 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
066 Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
067 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
068 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
069 The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
070 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
071 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
072 Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos
073 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
074 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
075 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
076 The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
077 Night by Elie Wiesel
078 The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
079 Hamlet by William Shakespeare
080 Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
081 Beloved by Toni Morrison
082 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
083 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
084 Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
085 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
086 The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
087 The Awakening by Kate Chopin
088 Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
089 Time and Again by Jack Finney
090 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
091 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
092 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
093 Sybil by Flora Schreiber
094 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
095 Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac
096 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
097 Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
098 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
099 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
100 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
101 Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
102 The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
103 1984 by George Orwell
104 The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
105 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
106 An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
107 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
108 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
109 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
110 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
111 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
112 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
113 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
114 The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
115 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
116 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
117 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
118 Emma by Jane Austen
119 On The Road by Jack Kerouac
120 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I think my next book on the list will be The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, since I’m pretty sure I own that one already!

See more progress on: Read all of the books from Rory Gilmore's bookclub

43Things.com

Since I've come to Colorado, I've been introduced to lots of my aunt's friends, including Jill, who I think is the only person that actually will read this :) She wondered if we had ever gone to 43Things.com and made a list of 43 goals. So I had to check it out! Apparently you list 43 goals and then it reminds you of them, hooks you up with others who have the same goals, and keeps track of what you've acheived. I'm definitely gonna work on this, since I think it's pretty awesome! But the first thing I did when I got to the site was take the personality quiz:

I took the 43 Things
Personality Quiz and
found out I'm a Creative
Extroverted Self-Knower

I am not really sure how accurate this is...since I wouldn't call myself creative, extroverted, or a self-knower. Actually, since I don't really know what a self-knower is, I guess I could be one. But I don't know...