100 Books to Read before You Die

So, I get really tired of reading lists put out by various library associations about all the books you should read in order to be a literarily literate human being. Usually, these lists are pretty stuffy, and generally ignore female writers (or subjects), genre literature, and children's literature--even when pieces within these categories reach "classic" status. It doesn't make sense to me. So I've come up with a list of my own. I have not read all of these. As a matter of fact, by my own list, I've only clocked in at 64 of these babies. 

Before you look at the list, consider that I made myself a few rules before ever getting started. Except for certain passages in the Bible, the list contains no poetry--it also contains no plays and almost no non-fiction. Why? Because I felt like when you expand the list to include these criteria, what we're really placing value on is not the book/writing so much as the concept of story--and if we're going to do that, why not also include music? Besides, I'm guessing we all already know we should be reading Shakespeare.  

What I HAVE included that I feel is generally underrepresented in other lists are more American writers, children's/adolescent lit, genre fiction (how is that not important??), and books that are important milestones in the development of the novel form, even if no one would consider these books "good" by modern standards. They're important because without them we wouldn't enjoy the good things we read today. So. Here we go:

100 Books You Should Read:

1  .     The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

2  .     The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

3  .     My Antonia, Willa Cather

4  .     To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

5  .     Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

6  .     North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

7  .     The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

8  .     Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

9  .     Light in August, William Faulkner

1  . A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

1    The Holy Bible, God

1    Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

1    The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro Kazuo

1    A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

1    The Giver, Lois Lowry

1    The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

1    The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman

1    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

1    The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki

2    Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

2    The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

2    Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

2    The BFG, Roald Dahl

2    The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

2    Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

2    O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather

2    Number the Stars, Lois, Lowry

2    Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

2    Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

3    Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

3    Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

3    Emma, Jane Austen

      The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

3    Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech

3    Middlemarch, George Eliot

3    The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

3    Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

3    Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

3    The Cay, Theodore Taylor

4    Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K Rowling

4    For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

4    The Old Man & the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

4    Persuasion, Jane Austen

4    The Odyseey, Homer

4    Watership Down, Richard Adams

4    As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

4    The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

4    Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

4    Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne

5    Matilda, Roald Dahl

5    High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

5    Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

5    Howards End, E.M. Forster

5    Oroonoko, Aphra Behn

5    A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

5    Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

5    A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

5    The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

5    Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

6    1984, George Orwell

6    Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

6    Lord of the Flies, William Golding

6    The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

6    The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

6    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

6    Of Mice & Men, John Steinbeck

6    The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

6    Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

6    Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

7    Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackery

7    Catch-22, Joseph Heller

7    The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

7    Lolita, Vladmir Nabakov

7    Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

7    Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

7    The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

7    Moby Dick, Herman Melville

7    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

7    Persuasion, Jane Austen

8    The Call of the Wild, Jack London

8    Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

8    And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

8    The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

8    Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne

8    Beloved, Toni Morrison

8    Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

8    Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

8    Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

8    Ulysses, James Joyce

9    Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

9    One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9    Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

9    The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

9    The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings, Edgar Allan Poe

9    The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

9    The Green Mile, Stephen King

9    Contact, Carl Sagan

9    Atonement, Ian McEwan

9    Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

1    Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Three Stories, Truman Capote

Ada, 2 Years

So, in the midst of potty training and other craziness (more updates later), I thought about giving up on the ol' blog, but since it's pretty much the only real record I keep of our family life, I think I need to keep it going. First things first:

Miss Ada turned two a couple months ago. We happened to be in Newport Beach for a family vacation, so we spent the day in Disneyland and had lunch with some Disney princesses. She loved it, but I think it was an even bigger hit with her cousin Ethan, who got a kiss from Ariel and was Mr. Smooth for the rest of the lunch.

She was shy around the princesses, but Ethan was quite the charmer!

I was dreading a bit taking two small children to Disneyland, but it was so great! There was so much to do that we really probably could have easily spent 3 days in the park without getting bored. (I almost typed "board"--what is happening to me??)

Some fun facts about this little miss:

With Auntie Debbie out on the beach

*Is independent. She brushes her own hair, teeth, takes care of her own bathroom business, puts on her own clothes, and probably the phrase I hear most from her during the day is, "I can do it my SELF!"

*Is still game for whatever adventure W has cooked up.

*Knows how to push W's buttons like an expert. She knows that all she has to do is contradict him or persist in a line of logic she knows is nonsensical. This drives him crazy, and she loves torturing him.

Dancing with Pop Pop at the beach house

*Is just about fully potty trained, including nights. We have not had diapers or pull-ups in this house for about a month (Hallelujah!). Also helps her dolls use the toilet as well--and loses her patience when said dolls have accidents on the carpet (I'm sure I don't know where she gets that from...).

*Loves snuggles in her big-girl bed. She loves to have her back rubbed as she falls asleep.

*LOVES (I can't emphasize this enough) Glenn Miller, and will ask anyone with a music source, "Moonlight Serenade? Serenade in Blue? Stardust? Glenn Miller. Those are his glasses, his trombone." Seriously. And she will know if you try to fool her.

*Climbs onto any counter top, especially if it's near a sink.

And dancing with cousin Ethan

*Climbs up onto anything, actually. Half the time I call her my climber monkey. Anything she can scale, she will. And she folds up so compactly into your lap; she really is like a little monkey, and I adore her teeny tiny-ness.

*When Mom (me) is being mean, she calls out for others for help. I hear her run away from me, and call out, "Higg! Pop Pop! Help me!"

*Starting to learn numbers, letters, and counts to 10.

*Finally got her first haircut a couple weeks ago. I was sad to do it, but the baby mullet had to go.

Will, 4 Years

This is painfully overdue. Please excuse my tardiness and celebrate this amazing little dude with me. W turned four a couple months ago. He is enjoying being a Sunbeam in our ward's Primary; I sat in on singing time today, and was so gratified to see him sitting reverently and singing all the verses to "I Am a Child of God." He gave his first talk earlier this spring. I'm so excited for the Primary Program this fall, his first ever. His very on-the-ball Primary Presidency handed out CDs today to all the Primary kids of all the songs they'll be singing for the program, so they can practice at home.

Recently, to my great surprise (as I have not been on-the-ball enough to be teaching him), we discovered that W can do basic math in his head. We were in the produce section of the grocery store a few weeks ago, and I told W we needed six tomatoes; I already had two in the bag, how many more did I need? I don't know why I asked him this--I wasn't expecting any answer and wouldn't know the first thing about teaching math. But he promptly answered "four," and deposited the necessary tomatoes into the bag. Thinking this was perhaps a fluke, I asked him a similar question while making dinner with him a couple days later. "Will, I put two of these carrots into the sauce already. How many more do we still have to put in?" "Two." Again, a quick response. When I told Chris about it, he had an even more impressive story of his own. He'd been playing a game with W where they were imagining underwater creatures. Chris asked, "So, what do you see?" W: "Sharks." Chris: "What kinds of sharks?" "W: "Red sharks and blue sharks." Chris: "How many are there?" W: "Twenty. Ten are red and 10 are blue." What?!

On top of this, the other day I was teaching him rhyming sight words, and within just a couple minutes of grasping the concept, he was quickly reading, "sun/fun/run/bun/gun, hit/fit/bit/sit, hat/fat/rat/sat/bat, etc." Then when I asked him to spell words, he was able to do so--and continues to sound out more and more complex words as time goes by. I am truly amazed at his ability to learn and understand. I have never known such a smart child, and it's humbling to me to be blessed by his abilities.

Thanks to his brilliant Aunt Laura, and her concept of the "chocolate chip game," he is also rapidly learning the geography of the Western US. In a nutshell, find a placemat-size map of the states. Place a chocolate chip on one of the states. They don't get to eat it until they correctly name the state. I promise; it takes only a couple times of you eating the chip for naming the state for them to consistently remember.

Here's a brief day-in-the-life:

*Wakes anytime between 5:30 (ouch) and 7:30; comes to the living room where he whispers to himself loudly enough to wake us all (dear child).

*"Eats" breakfast, joins me in my daily exercises. "Mom, can we go for a walk/play the Wii Fit/Dancing Game/Zumba/Yoga today?" He keeps me fit. Bless him.

*Watches a show with Ada while I get ready for the day.

*"Eats" lunch

*Has "quiet time" with me while Ada sleeps. This usually consists of scripture time, a quiet chore, reading time, and on really rare days, preschool time.

*After Ada's nap, depending on the day's menu, we'll either head out for a brief walk or begin making dinner while listening to the Family Folk Station on Pandora (best ever). When a song we all know plays, we stop our prepping and dance and sing around the kitchen. It's my second favorite time of day.

*Plays with Chris when he gets home from school/work

*"Eats" dinner (truly, if you have the magic formula for getting a super active 4-year-old to eat well at meals, please clue me in)

*Has clean-up time, followed by more playing with Chris, reading stories, etc.

*Prayer, bed, then my very favorite time of day: Snuggle time. Recently I have discovered that W is a much more cooperative boy when we have snuggle time at bed time. I think in the muss and fuss of the day-to-day that much tenderness is lost; this snuggle time is good for both of us to feel good about our time together. Especially as he recently developed an aversion to "kisses germs." Oy.

I'm beginning to get a better handle on what makes this boy tick. He appreciates predictability--so many of his tantrums (which, thankfully, seem to be slowly decreasing in number) seem to arise out of a break in routine or when plans fall through. Understandably, he hates getting his hopes up only to have them unfulfilled; it's a condition of life, but seems particularly difficult for him to deal with. His remaining tantrums seem to arise from not being able to do things as well as he'd like; he's very hard on himself for small things like not being able to stack all the blocks before they fall over or spilling his drink at dinner time. It has taken me a long time to discover, but he actually dislikes high praise. I think this is why potty training took so long--all the literature says to make a BIG DEAL out of every successful attempt, but he sincerely hates the attention. I think he may have avoided going potty so he wouldn't have to be the subject of spotlight. He'd much rather have a quiet high five and a hug; what a sweet kid. (The same thing happened the first time he sounded out a word on his own; I didn't even know he could do it; he just pointed to a word on a mug and sounded it out. I freaked out, I was so proud of him, and he refused to sound out any more words for an entire month.) In terms of temperament, I think he's an introvert like me--and I'm so thankful we're living through a time when being a introvert is no longer considered something that needs to be fixed. He seems even more introverted than I am, so I am having to learn his preferred ways of meeting the world. It's not that he's shy; he just wants to get to know people one-on-one instead of in a crowd. I can absolutely relate to this.

He is strong-willed, and while I don't want him to run headlong into foolishness, I really believe that this is a gift that will serve him well if I can teach him how to harness it. It's no wonder he turned out this way with two such parents. One day we were having a play date with friends and W and I were disagreeing about something. My friend observed, "I love how he is sticking to his message, and you are sticking to yours." This about sums it up. Much better to make him think the right decision was his idea all along. He seems downright impervious to influence. This is a blessing and a curse. But I can't help but think how well this will serve him in his late teen/early adult life. I don't want to "break" him. He has such a wonderful spirit; I think I'd regret it my entire life if I somehow smashed that right out of him. Perhaps it's folly, but I think I'd rather teach him how to temper his will so he won't be a slave to it--rather than rub it out of him entirely.

Lately, he's just been saying the sweetest things. "Mom, you are my beautiful pirate princess," etc. I am so grateful to be his Mama, to have him as my little companion and helper. He has such a genuine love for mischievous humor and imaginative play. "I am IronMan" are words we hear on an almost hourly basis. Here he is, heating his dinner with his IronMan lasers:

Words, Words, and oh, Look! More Words!

Lately, I've been getting back into the world of words.

I have always had a special connection with words--from the stories I wrote in grade school to published poetry; from winning spelling bees (I only ever lost to Brian Criddle! But thankfully, not often...) to editing manuscripts; from.... Well, you get the picture. Me and words: We just like each other. They speak to me, tell me their secrets, and I do my best to uphold their integrity (which is why I rarely listen to pop--and for Heaven's sake, certainly not rap! Do I sound like an old schoolmarm yet? Good. Better the librarian than the bimbo.).

Let's play catch-up real quick: Several months ago, I got a part-time, at-home freelance proofing gig. I get about a project a month from a marketing firm, and every project is large in scope and meaning--even though my part of that is minimal, it's truly a blessing to be part of what's going on. I couldn't have asked for a better client/boss. This has reawakened my love for editing and proofing. Then there are the conversations I've had with this Katie and this Katie (it also seems I'm blessed with a special affinity for "Katies") about writing, working, mothering, and what it all means.

To sum up: I'm back in the world of words, which means that if you continue to read this blog, you will be, too, because I want to start writing about the things (in addition to motherhood) that make me tick. You can expect more lists of grammar errors that drive me bananas (this day is bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S! Anyone else out there associate this more with Mindy Kaling from The Office rather than Gwen Stefani?); you can also expect just random bits of writing/editing/other word-smithing gems I happen to be thinking about lately. None of us needs this except me. Most of my very good friends are also word nerds. I'm writing down this stuff to keep it in my consciousness--and if a good discussion comes of it in the comments section, then so be it! It's so fun when editors argue. Oh, the ego! Especially when one is used to winning said arguments (I know I should totally be over it by now, but I still get enormous satisfaction from the time that I bested my managing editor at the Chronicle in just such an argument--it was her misfortune that our faculty advisor happened to be walking in during the debate, and without evening hesitating, sided with me, using the very same logic I'd been using. It was about capital letters: yes, or no? And yet, winning said debate brings me joy and pride not in proportion to the circumstances. Whatever! I won!). So, if I state something that you disagree with--by all means, say so!

The cardinal rule here is that it's not OK to poke fun at my own grammatical mistakes (remember that ego thing I mentioned before?). Seriously, though, if there's one rule every editor knows, it's what? Anyone? You always have more than one pair of eyes look at a document. That's just the way of it.

Who knows when I'll post again. But in the meantime, if you are interested in the world of words, you ought to take a gander at my updated blog roll to the right. You'll notice some literary-themed blogs, all of which I read and recommend, particularly Pub Rants and Query Shark. You won't get better information on the publishing industry. I don't know any of these bloggers in real life.

A word of caution: My editor's "voice" is different from my everyday, tra-la-la Becca voice. Editor Becca is enormously snarky. I find I have to do this to keep my sanity--you can't have a job that is all about nitpicking without that impetus to correct attention to detail creeping into your personal life. So I developed an alter-ego. She's a lot more sophisticated and witty and mean than everyday Becca. That said, I think you will enjoy her when she pops up here from time to time.

Why Jane Austen Matters

As you may well be aware, today marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Pride & Prejudice. Much is being said on the matter, especially by frenzied fans of the films. I enjoy the films very much myself; however, I am frustrated when people (fans and indifferents alike) reduce to her work to be called "romances," or label it as interesting/ relevant for women only. Then there seems to be the sort of confused group of people who scratch their heads and wonder why on earth she is praised both by intellectual circles and pop-Hollywood productions--how her work can be treated both so seriously and flippantly (a word I learned from Jane herself).

Literarily speaking, what she ought to be most praised for is the invention of the English-language novel as we know it. It's a huge claim to lay on her shoulders, but it is in fact accurate. Have you read any novels written before about 1810? There's probably good reason for that. The novel was still a new and somewhat unaccepted art form when Jane Austen came on the scene. The novels written prior to Sense & Sensibility's first publication in 1811 (Oroonoko, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe) are meandering, poorly focused, contradicting tales. This doesn't mean that the stories are necessarily bad or that the writers were bad writers--rather, that no one had been able to take the concept of the novel and say, "Here is this art form. This is what works, this is what's important. This is how to provoke your reader." She knew which elements to expand (character development, action) and which to contract (physical descriptions of what people look like, where they live, etc.). She was able to harness the concept of a long fictional story and make it complete--not a word wasted or superfluous or boring.

Consider her contemporaries, like Mary Shelley or Sir Walter Scott (who was a great Austen fan). Her work is enormously different from theirs. Where Shelley and Scott are often repetitive, unfocused, or convoluted, Austen is direct, concise, and funny. She knows it's more important to describe character rather than person, allows her characters' actions to speak for themselves rather than belaboring a point.

Just a generation later, when the Bronte sisters wrote, the novel had become a much more sophisticated beast. Charlotte Bronte in particular turned her nose up at Austen as being a bit too prim and pressed, probably not considering that her own highly skilled work depended on the foundation of literary techniques that Austen was first to define.

On top of all this, she wrote characters who were multi-dimensional. Read Robinson Crusoe, for example--it's a marvelous concept for a story, and often I couldn't bring myself to put it down. But what one really longs for and does not get is a character that seems like a real human being. It would be wonderful if we were all born fully-composed people, knowing who we are, what we want, and how to get along with each other. But we aren't this way at all; we're lucky if we have a sense of self and an average ability to get along with each other. Even with these things, of course, we all know ourselves to be not only fundamentally flawed but curiously contradicting--how often we want two things at once that are simply mutually exclusive (like my deep desire to return to pre-pregnancy weight, and my just-as-equal-sometimes-greater desire for chocolate chip cookies...). Austen was able to write characters who were both flawed and attractive, whose motives ought to be other than what they were. Yet, we still like them, still root for them.

Another (and perhaps the most important) reason Austen matters is that she was skilled at observing and relating human behavior and emotion. No matter how well-written her work, if her subject matter did not continue to strike a chord with people, her skill would perhaps not mean much of anything. No matter who you are and where you come from, one thing that all human beings can relate to is the concept of home and family--even if you are without both, your relationship to them has informed who you are. Austen writes about these things that everyone has in common. She writes about a world that is bound by structure and rules, and characters are defined by which rules they choose to keep and which they choose to break.

Last night, Chris and I watched a program about her on PBS, where we learned that she has a substantial male following from a group of intellectual elites called the Janeites, of which Rudyard Kipling and F.R. Leavis were both members. Kipling even wrote a short story about the Janeites. We also learned that her work was enormously popular with soldiers during the world wars--who wanted something to read in the trenches, wanted to read about home, and found their solace in Austen's clean, structured, sunny world.

It's the propensity of fans and filmmakers alike to mistake her clean and direct writing, her happy stories as "simple." They do whatever they want with her work; sometimes, of course, it's brilliant (Clueless is still one of my favorite adaptations of her work); other times, like the Keira Knightley P&P, it's a mixed bag. (Oh, I could write an entire essay just about that...) The greatest sin of all, in my book, is to polarize her characters--Elizabeth Bennet is no angel, and she's certainly not Darcy's moral superior, as is often seen in adaptations. Mr. Bennet is far from a charming, perfect father. Mrs. Bennet, however aggravating, works tirelessly for the welfare of her daughters who otherwise would literally be homeless without marriage upon their father's death. It's not as though Mr. Collins has the generosity of heart to care for them. Actually, I think that in any adaptation, the only character consistently well-portrayed is Mr. Hurst. How sad is that, when her characters are so delightfully relatable just the way they are? And when, in fact, the story's power is derived from the friction of these characters' desires and shortcomings?

In any case. Still more than all of this is that her language itself is delightful. It's impossible to come away from Pride & Prejudice without feeling uplifted, and this is perhaps her greatest gift of all: to make people feel better. Even Winston Churchill once credited reading her work for curing an illness he was suffering from. She's delightful and funny. She has given me hope when I was lonely, entertainment when I've been bored. I love her. And I don't care who knows it.