New Catholic Flash Fiction site

There is a new web site/blog for Catholic flash fiction.

What's flash fiction? Like this blog post, only fictional.

Apostrophe Atrocities

"John has three cat's, a mother cat and it's babie's. One of the kitten's is real cute but the other ones face looks like the hind end of an as's."

This is an all too common example of apostrophe atrocity. As a peaceful prolife Christian, I think people who write like this should be killed. With wood chippers.

Well, that might be a _bit_ harsh. But there is no excuse for anyone who is an aspiring writer to write like this. Not even in an email or Facebook post. Not even if you are dyslexic or don't speak English or just had your brain eaten by a zombie.

If you think you may have committed an apostrophe atrocity, get thee to the English grammar confessional at once. Your penance will involve an intimate encounter with the first page of your Strunk and White.

Strunk and White? That's short for 'The Elements of Style' by William Strunk and E. B. White. Every household that doesn't have a copy wedged next to the other household essentials (The Bible, Webster's Dictionary, The Catechism of the Catholic Church (or your denominational equivalent), and The Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble) is probably inhabited by sister-marrying illiterate hillbillies, rather than the literate cousin-marrying hillbilly type that most of us strive for.

Correct version of above sentence: "John has three cats, a mother and its babies. One of the kittens is real cute but the other one's face looks like the hind end of an ass."

And now, for no apparent reason, a picture with cats.

Author Holly Lisle's gone Indie

Holly Lisle, author of 32 sci-fi and fantasy books, has announced she is quitting Big Publishing to go indie.

This will without doubt be a success for her, as her blog has a large following and she's been self-publishing her non-fiction for a while now.  But I think it will also be a good thing for all indie authors as it will bring more attention to the fact that indie publishing today is quite different than the old school vanity presses.

I remember years ago reading the author Laurence Block's advice to young writers. He said that in his early years, writers got started writing short stories for the many paying markets that then existed. He said that though the publishing world had changed since then, young writers would continue to find venues in which to serve out a writing apprenticeship.

Publishing has changed again. Now the unpublished writer will be serving out his apprenticeship in the world of blogging and indie publishing--- perhaps publishing early novels and short stories through Smashwords, or novels in real-book form through Lulu.com--- both free options. A blog, I believe, is essential for such an indie writer. It provides proof to the potential reader of your book that you are indeed able to write the English language without a net. It also provides immediate feedback.

I have reasons that have nothing to do with writing that make it essential that I be an indie writer. I have one poetry book out, Where the Opium Cactus Grows, which is published by Lulu.com. I had said I was going to publish most or all of the poems from the book on this blog. I still intend to do that, and I also want to provide at least most of 'Opium Cactus' as a free ebook through Smashwords.

I also have my new web fiction novel Taliesin, and may be publishing some short fiction on this blog and/or in ebook form.

Through my blog and related activities I've had the opportunity to meet other indie authors such as:
Amanda Borenstadt: Syzygy
Tracy Krauss: And The Beat Goes On
Michael Anthony Lee: Horker's Law (The Six Books of Magic)

One advantage of indie publishing is that you can create your own little niche-genre, and that actually will help you out in gaining a readership. Christian science fiction, especially that with hard science fiction elements, is not welcomed at major Christian publishers (or secular SF ones), but is a natural for indie publishing.

One thing you can do to help your indie writer friends is to purchase/download your indie fiction from Amazon.com. This helps the book climb in sales on that site. Reviewing and tagging indie books is also a mitzvah you can do for your indie writer friends.

Writers: How important is character naming to you?

Over at Faithwriters there is an excellent article called Seven Tips for Naming Characters. It set me to thinking about how character naming is more important to some writers than to others.

I'm sure there are some writers that could just pluck a name at random from a name book and use it for a character--- if they came up with 'Carol' that would be just as good as any other name and they'd have no problem with it.

Other writers agonize. I have one character who commonly goes by the name 'Mina Bayern'. Some time ago I came up with the absolute perfect name for her actual family name (which is also the name of her House, a clan-like grouping). But I don't know where (or if) I wrote it down and it's driving me crazy and I can't just pick another name because it won't be the right one.

Because of this name-obsessiveness I collect a lot of name books. I have one or two ordinary baby name books, 2 baby name books in German, a book of Esperanto names, and a book of Celtic names. I also have an encyclopedia of the Saints. I also have a hand-written list of Korean names gleaned from Korean dramas over the last 4 years.

Some writers have a real talent for coming up with appropriate names. J. K. Rowling comes to mind. Think of the names of Hagrid, Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, or Lord Voldemort. Aren't they just-right names for the characters?

Romance novels tend to have romance-y names for the heroine and her love-object. Some realistic writers make a point of using the most commonplace names they can find, one almost might think they derive the names from common-name lists. Science fiction names can include the weird, the unpronounceable and the randomly hyphenated. (like F'nor in Dra'gonride'rs of P'ern)

It's also possible to use temporary names for minor characters--- like Mr. Alpha, Miss Beta, Senator Gamma--- to keep the flow of your writing going rather than stopping for an hour to name them.

So--- how do YOU handle the name thing? How important is the just-right name to you? Do you have naming methods that you use? Please let us know in a comment!

A NAME GAME:
Here are eight Korean female names: Namju, Haebi, Dohui, Chunja, Boksun, Sunok, Juri, Sojin
From these, pick the names of:
1. a young main character from a poor family, who loves a rich boy, Taemin
2. an older woman at the market who sells dumplings
3. the maid of the rich family
4. a hateful over-the-top female villain (think Bellatrix from Harry Potter)


What do people want from this blog? According to this blog's stats, what people are looking for on this blog is mainly Billie Piper pregnant (all time most popular search terms), David Tennant naked, and Torchwood Miracle Day nudity. Just in case you were curious.

Holignes! I lost my notebook of cool word verification words!

When I am writing and a new character, place, or alien species pops up, I often take out a small notebook of word verification words I've encountered, and pick one more-or-less at random.

It's better for my writing than stopping the writing process to search for the perfect name for an hour and a half. And some of those word verification words are worth keeping in the final draft.

But today, alas, in between trading kittens around to different cat mommies and feeding a newborn kit milk with a spoon (she won't take a bottle), I discovered that my little word verification notebook is missing in action.

This is doubly tragic as I have started work on a writers' naming book. It will have a section on German names, one on Korean names, one on Welsh names, one on Esperanto names, and a list of word verification words as a source for alien and other odd names and words.

So--- I've had to start a new notebook. Luckily I have a spare one that's the same as the one I use for Korean names. I'm also going to start files on my computer and enter the WV words into that whenever I have a page or so. I already have similar files for Korean names.

But it's an ednesh lot of work, so if you have a cool WV word to share, mention it in your comment and it will be added to the list.

The Irresistably Sweet Blog Award

This blog is sweet? Really? I mean, I could understand winning an inconsistent blogger award, or a weird blogger award, or obnoxious off-topic ranting blogger award, or mentally challenged blogger award, but sweet?

I got this award from Amanda Borenstadt, author of the urban fantasy novel Syzygy, whose blog is A Fortnight of Mustard, which is the best condiment-titled blog of all time, easily beating out Catsup Dreams and Where's the Soy Sauce.

The Rules:

1. Thank and link to the person who nominated you.
2. Share 7 random facts about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 8 deserving blog buddies.
4. Contact those buddies to congratulate them.



The one scary part is passing the award along. The last time I passed out an award, one of my awardees was Operation Counterstrike, who as it turned out was not available to pick up his award due to being in jail for the death threats he kept making (which were no surprise to his blog readers.) So now I'm puzzled--- do I try to find bloggers who WON'T get arrested to award them, or should I consider it a challenge to pick another potential trouble-maker? I'm torn....

SEVEN RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ME:

1. My cats steal one another's kittens. In fact, that's how I found out my cat Psychokitty had given birth this year because I couldn't find one of Willow's three-week-old kittens which had been stolen by Psychokitty and stashed with her own newborns.
2. My favorite condiments are soy sauce and chocolate syrup. I put one or another on everything except communion wafers.
3. I swear too much. I had a dog who wouldn't come when called unless I said 'come [effing] here!'
4. In 1881 two loggers were lynched across the street from what became the site of my grandmother's house. (My brother lives in the house now.) My great-great-grandmother's cousin-in-law may have supplied the rope. [See Song of the McDonald Boys, my new blog, for more details.]
5. I have an unnatural obsession with ampersands. &&&&&&&
6. Mi amas lerni lingvoj, kiel Esperanto, Germana kaj Korea. (I love learning languages like Esperanto, German and Korean.)
7. I am totally in love with the following fictional characters: Angelique Collins from Dark Shadows, Pavel Chekov from Star Trek, Tracy Quartermaine from General Hospital, Niki Smith from One Life to Live, Romana from Doctor Who, Kes from Star Trek Voyager, Trance Gemini from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Annie and George from Being Human, Thomas Kincade Brannigan from Doctor Who, Rose Tyler from Doctor Who, and the Racnoss Empress from Doctor Who (the sexy red spidery alien with all the eyes). Because fictional people are just cooler than boring old real people.
8. I'm smart enough to join the genius organization Mensa but I'm too smart to want to.

DESERVING BLOG BUDDIES WHO ARE NOT IN PRISON (YET)
1. Letters for George: I just discovered this blog which has a lot about local history in the town of Menominee, Michigan, among other things.
2. Happy Catholic: I added this blog to those I follow some time ago. Visit to find out why to boycott Nestle and what Saint Ambrose wants you to do when you're insulted (hint: it doesn't involve chainsaws.)
3. Bluegrass Pundit: conservative news, video and comment from the Bluegrass state. Visit the blog to find out which state that is, and to read about the complete and utter destruction of Al Gore.
4. Tracy Krauss-Expression Express, a blog by a Christian writer and artist who is author of My Mother the Man Eater and And the Beat Goes On....
5. Dragons in our Midst & Echoes from the Edge: how can you go wrong with a blog with an ampersand in the title? The blog by author Bryan Davis has a press release for his daughter's new book, do check it out.
6. WORD up! offers Bible study and book reviews.
7. Reviews from the Heart: a Christian blogger who does book and product reviews.
8. IT CAME FROM ALLEN'S BRAIN! Check out his job interview questions for the position of assistant. I particularly like #6:

06. I am capable of making:
__ Plutonium from common household items
__ Repairs and modifications to both atomic- and lightning-powered machinery
__ Flimsy excuses
__ Eleven different death-rays
__ Decent coffee
__ A mess

GETTING A BLOG AWARD IS TIME CONSUMING
I mean, I could have spent the time blogging about how Richard Nixon is one of my favorite Doctor Who companions, or providing proof that US President Barack Obama is the Doctor's arch-nemesis, The Master AKA Harry Saxon. Or doing laundry or returning stolen kittens to their real mamas or the mamas I want them to have. I guess that's why some bloggers don't accept these awards. But not me, I want all the awards I can get. Just because.

If YOU want all the awards you can get, add your name and blog address in a comment and I will add you to the list next time I get an award, or I will completely forget about you. One or the other.

Go ahead, write something shocking!

We are surrounded by a sea of bland, flavorless fiction, non-fiction, blog posts, bathroom wall graffiti.... The mucky waters of conventionality are rising and we will drown if we don't fight back.

How did we get to this point? Most of us learned to write in school. The purpose of a school is to homogenize us, to turn each of us from individuals into part of the school collective. *You Will Be Absorbed* says the school.

The school does the work so well that the child learns to rigidly conform even when proclaiming himself a non-conformist. All the non-conformists conform to a rigid non-conformist code.

As a result we are conditioned to see the bland and ordinary sentence as the safe and correct and grammatical sentence. And our readers drop with soft little thuds as they die from boredom.

So: write something shocking! Don't do what they expect you to do. Instead of 'she went to work as she did every day', write 'down! down! down! she fell, into a vat of melted lawn furniture'.

Don't write about some accountant who can't get the girl, write about the guy in purgatory who just found out Adolf Hitler is moving in to the purgatory-cabin next door. Write about the guy who sees fairies in the back garden--- then calls the exterminator.

If you are afraid to shock people with your writing, you may well end up seeing your writing coming to a screeching halt. After all, even if everything in your novel seems bland and inoffensive, something in it will offend somebody somewhere.

I am finding lately that my best writing in years is coming from a project that has an element in it that would shock the secular publishers silly, and another aspect that would put off Christian publishers as well.

Doing this is not safe. It's not practical. But at least it's not boring.

we kissed when I was 8 and he was 7....

...and now he's the Gay latino Elvis impersonator, El Vez. Maybe it's just as well I quit kissing boys...

Using Babelfish to write poetry

I have an unnatural obsession with machine translation. I have a great time using the various internet sites that provide computerized translation from one language to another, like Babelfish.

Since I am a person that actually knows about languages (during my Pagan days I translated a Pagan booklet from German into English) I know that computer translations usually suck. They are helpful if you already know the language you are translating into well enough to catch mistakes, but otherwise they can be trouble.

But while Babelfish and her sisters may not be able to solve the world language problem, they do have another use. They can write poetry.

You see, one day I was testing Babelfish to see how well it could translate into Korean. I know next to no Korean, so what I did was I wrote a test sentence: "My cat Claudius has a neurological disorder", translated it English-to-Korean with Babelfish, and then cut-and-pasted the resulting unknown Korean sentence into Babelfish and did a Korean-to-English translation.

This is what Babelfish spit out at me:

To my cat Claudius
there is a military force
at the nervous crane.

Who knew Babelfish could write a haiku? So, anyway, I slapped a title on it ('catpoem/claudius') and added it to my collection of poetry written. It is now included in Where the Opium Cactus Grows.

In this first case I liked what Babelfish did enough to keep it pretty much as it was, I just arranged it into three lines.

Most of the time Babelfish poetry is more work. You might have to run it through a couple of languages (Asian languages seem to work best), and pick-and-choose the best results and do a lot of rewrites. But it produces some pretty cool imagery and can help to fire up those creative juices on days when you just don't feel like writing anything.


Here is today's poetic rough draft:
1. (original sentence) The werewolf's girlfriend is now pregnant. When will the puppies be born?
2.(after translating into Korean & back) werewolf' s girl friends now are pregnancy. The pup when will be inherent?
3.(after translating 2 again into Korean & back) werewolf' s girl friends now are pregnancy. The pup of the case which will be characteristic?
4. (tranlation of 3 into Dutch and back) werewolf' s the little girl friends pregnancy now its. The young of the case which characterising will be?
5. (translated 4 into Japanese and back) werewolf' s now pregnancy of the friend of the girl. The young person when is the fact that it characterizes?
6. (translated 1 into Japanese and back) werewolf' The girl friend of s now becomes pregnant. Is the puppy when born?

1. (original sentence) How many puppies, how many? Only one, says the ultrasound machine. How odd, how very odd.
2. (1 translated to Korean and back) How many many pup, how many is many? 1 revealed the supersonic machine only. How many is odd, is quite odd and is how.
3. (1 translated to Chinese and back) How many puppies, how many? Only one, said the ultrasonic wave machine. How strange, how is strange.

These are the raw materials.

The werewolf's
little girl friend
now becomes pregnant.

The puppies of this case
when will they be inherent?
which will be the
characteristic?

How many many pup,
how many is many?
how many is odd
is quite odd
and is how.

the pregnant little girlfriend
and the wolf
will have one


Not really happy with that--- you don't get a military force at the nervous crane every day--- but will print it out and bury it in a file for awhile, then do some revision and reworking, add and subtract a bit.

How to Write a Juxtaposition Poem

When I write poetry I like to write what I call juxtaposition poetry. It's a little like found poetry, except that you 'find' the raw materials from three different sources--- books, newspapers and the like. It's not only interesting of itself, but is something that can get your writerly juices going when you have writer's block.

Your three sources need to be very different from one another--- in 'nuclear sainthood profits' from my book Where the Opium Cactus Grows I used a Catholic prayer book, a book about nuclear war, and something by Karl Marx.

What you do with your sources is 'point and click'. Open each one at random and point, without looking, at the text. Copy out words or phrases from that point. Do this one after another until you have enough material for the poem at hand.

A pure juxtaposition poem just uses this material as you found it. But the secret to writing a good juxtaposition poem is to cheat like hell. Fudge a bit when you are pointing to select your source material, and add, subtract and re-arrange the material to help it make more sense. Or less sense, depending on your writerly goals.

I might point out that my 'nuclear sainthood profits' is not an average example of my juxtaposition poems, but one I feel is one of my best efforts in that direction. Most juxtaposition poems are choppier and don't have unified themes (whatever themes are, I try to avoid them). 'nuclear sainthood profits' is what happens with juxtaposition poetry when your Muse is in the building.

Here is the complete text of 'nuclear sainthood profits' from 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'.

nuclear sainthood profits


wages after the labour, we beseech you, o limited nuclear war
a son is given to us, testing increasingly smaller warheads
if this limit is overshot, ground zero will accumulate debris
o mary conceived without sin, detonate a nuclear weapon
in the presence of mine enemies


behold, a virgin shall declare war on the soviet union and china
the market price of our pope, our bishop, and all true believers
includes mutual assured destruction when wages and prices are high
and large numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles
now and at the hour of our death

This poem was written 21 years ago--- wow, a poem that's old enough to drink! At the time I wrote it I was NOT a Catholic, and I WAS a Marxist. But I never meant it as in any was anti-Catholic. It was more like a nuclear-war-drives-us-all-to-pray thing. And of course there was the 'blame-capitalism' reish going on as well. (Did you know that capitalism is responsible for the lack of life on Mars?)

The sharpness of this poem is a result of using sources with high emotional impact. You don't have to do that all the time--- I've used a local newspaper as a source many times, both for juxtaposition poetry as I've described it here, and for single-source found poetry.

These blander sources are essential for school teachers using juxtaposition poetry in the classroom, since in a school setting one WANTS a bland result. In homeschooling, a wider variety of sources are possible, whatever the homeschooling mother thinks is acceptable.

In my experience, some juxtaposition poems are finished after the first day's work, and others need more work. In addition, any type of poem benefits from being 'aged' in a file for a few months and then being given a bit of polishing if needed--- or even a complete re-write.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: write a juxtaposition poem of your own. (If you post your poem on your blog, do post a link to it here in a comment.)

Related Post:
Blogging 'Where the Opium Cactus Grows'

Featured Books:
The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets
Modern Korean Poetry
Where the Opium Cactus Grows





Seven Ways You Can Help The Lina Lamont Fan Club:
1. Pray for me and for the readers of my blog.
2. Share this post on FaceBook, using the button below.
3. Link to this post on your blog.
4. Comment on this post.
5. Buy a book from links on this blog or the Amazon.com search box.
6. Consider taking the Holly Lisle 'How to Think Sideways' course through the links on this blog.
7. Cuddle a cat for me. Any cat. Except maybe a surly tiger. They bite.

Strange Blog Wins Second Award

Amanda Borenstadt of A Fortnight of Mustard has awarded The Lina Lamont Fan Club the Stylish Blogger Award. Maybe it's because of the fetching nightgown and ratty blanket I'm wearing right now?

Amanda claims I now must tell seven things about myself. But then again she's part of some weird cult that worships Playmobil people, so what does she know? But I'll do it anyway as I promised I'd finish this blog entry before I have breakfast and I'm hungry....

1. There is a two-day-old kitten in the room making weird kitten noises. His name is Other Joel 2. Last year his mama had 5 kittens, 4 survived and were named Joel, Other Joel, Girl Joel and Other Girl Joel. This year his mamma had 5 of which Other Joel 2 was the only survivor. It was a narrow thing since he chose to spend his first night on Earth making kitten-racket all night long.

2. I used to have Asperger's Syndrome but I gave it up for Lent.

3. I am addicted to Facebook games, chiefly FrontierVille, and, lately, PriestVille (which is kind of like Mafia Wars but with less whacking people. Too bad, I like whacking people.)

4. My role model and secret crush is the Crazy Cat Lady from the Simpsons. Like her, I also enjoy screaming gibberish and throwing cats at people. I'm throwing one at Barack Obama right now, for interrupting the soap operas 2 days in a row. (It's a really bad tempered black-and-white cat named Sarah Palin. Yes, my cats are all Republicans. One is even named after Dick Cheney. Cheney is the mother of 5 kittens, by the way.)

5. My third favorite character from Doctor Who is The Master (Harry Saxon version). My eighth favorite character from Star Trek (The Original Series) is Khan Noonian Singh. I'm writing a story about The Master and Khan. It's a romance.

6. Is it seven things yet? I lost count. I hate mathematics and counting and crap.

7. I'm older than dirt, but I still haven't decided what I want to be when I grow up. I'm thinking 'cowboy'.

Now I'm supposed to pass on the award to seven other bloggers. Which ones to pick? I'll just have to pick out the top seven from my Best Blogs Ever list. Or maybe I'll just throw darts at the wall--- or cats--- to pick seven at random.

1. Fabianspace, by author Karina Fabian
2. The CHASTITY Ring, which is about my favorite alternative lifestyle.
3. Operation Counterstrike, by Melvin 'Operation' Counterstrike. Hey, he's got style, it's just not a very civilized kind of style. His blog has gone all by-invitation-only, so someone please tell Mel he's won an award?
4. The Least Read Blog on the Web by John, a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastor.
5. Tea with Morbius , a Doctor Who blog by Celestial Fundy.
6. Expression Express by author Tracy Krauss
7. Biblical Evidence for Catholicism by apologist Dave Armstrong

And now, The Game. I'm not going to tell the award winners that they won just yet. That's YOUR job! So, go to the blogs on the list and drop the authors a comment that they won an award.

UPDATE: Celestial Fundy is the first award winner to have discovered his award, so as a prize, he gets one of the NEUTERED cats. The hard bit is sticking enough postage stamps on the cat to get it to the UK.

Operation Counterstrike (real name Theodore Shulman) will probably not be picking up his award as he's been arrested for making death threats. When he gets out he will probably have to give up his blog, or at least refrain from making death threats there, which means he's going to have to find a new theme for his blog. Please folks, pray for Theo!

And Other Joel 2 the kitten has passed away. His mamma has also had 1 other dead kitten for a total of 6. Luckily there are other kittens around here who will volunteer to dispose of her milk supply.

Related Post: Prolific Blogger Award goes to Crazy Cat Lady

Read the Bible in a year--- and the Catechism

There are a lot of plans out there for reading the Bible in a year, and now that I am a Bible Christian instead of an Odin-worshipping Neopagan, I see the value of them. It's harder to get in the discipline of Bible-reading if you always are wondering which part of the Bible to be reading on any given day.

Today I found a Bible reading plan with something extra--- it's based on the complete Bible, not one that omits the books tossed out of the Bible by most Protestants after the Reformation. And it ALSO includes daily readings of the Catholic Catechism, so that you will also read THAT in a year (if you so choose.) Read the Bible and the Catechism in a Year

The daily reading includes a chapter from 3 different books of the Bible each day. It's in PDF format and if you print out the 2 pages onto the same sheet of paper and fold it in quarters, you have a little leaflet you can keep in your Bible.

Some people might assume that only those Bible Christians who are Catholic would like this scripture reading plan. But nowadays Protestants and Evangelicals are often less than fully convinced that Martin Luther was inerrantly inspired by the Holy Spirit when he treated the Deuterocanonical books (the 'Apocrypha') as not really Biblical, since Luther also wanted to kick the epistle of James out of the Bible altogether (the Deuterocanonicals were included in the Luther translation of the Bible, but grouped together between the Old and New Testaments).

Even Pastor Arnold Murray of the Shepherd's Chapel TV Bible study program is not against reading the Deuterocanonicals and says good things about them, though he doesn't preach on them as he does with other books of the Bible. So this Bible reading plan meets the needs of many Bible Christians who are Protestant/Evangelical as well as the Catholics.

I'm starting with the Bible reading plan today. Another nice thing about it is that it doesn't have the months and days listed so you can start any time, and if you skip a week, you can just keep going with where you left off--- and you can read ahead when you are energetic. I challenge anyone out there to do likewise.



Kindle Bible (KJV with Apocrypha) (best navigation with Direct Verse Jump)
Kindle Catholic Bible (D-R) (best navigation with Direct Verse Jump)

How many of these books have you read?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I found this over at Fabianspace, Karina Fabian's blog. Read her post here: http://fabianspace.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-many-of-these-classics-have-i-read.html

Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

TAG! YOU'RE IT!

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 1984--George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - boring, then I found out it was written to teach kids atheism. Still boring.

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 - I like Titus Andronicus the best.

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 - one of the first grown-up books I read as a child.

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I read the first paragraph or so in Russian when I was learning Russian.

25 The Hitchhicker'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 - I thought the ending was really, really funny....

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (All 7 of them!)

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 - very dull, at least if you've already read the book Brown used as his source for the wild theories.

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 - liked it in spite of the hysterical anti-Christianism

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 (and Seamonsters?)

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 - is that the one about the kid with Asperger's Syndrome? if so it's on my must-read list.....

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - I only read it for the smutty bits.

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I keep thinking of it as the Count of Monte Crisco....

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - my mom made me watch the movie because Colin Firth was in it and she has a crush on him.....

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - did you know Melville is believed to have Asperger's Syndrome?

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - must have read it a hundred times in school (if I had admitted I was finished with it, I'd have had to write a book report.)

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 - I like the Doctor Who version better....

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - Nearly as funny as Anna Karenina.

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom  - I'm betting one of them won't be 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 - I want to have a lackey just like D'Artagnon does.

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 


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Well, actually it's a kitten. And she's so wild you'll have to come here and catch her yourself.