Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Confession

I'm addicted


...to buying books.

And it's not because I'm some smart bookworm who likes to read all the time. No, no. Not even close. I honestly don't remember when my love for clicking the add-this-book-to-your-cart button started (most likely toward the end of my Junior year in college). I just know that, now, I have an affinity with Amazon.com's amazingly cheap books--not to mention the awesome student discounts which include reduced shipping rates. I bought 8 books tonight for approximately 45 bucks. The topics range from Christian theology to marriage and family therapy (both very hot topics in my head right now).

For those wondering, I have three very good reasons for why I am buying books even though I don't yet have a job: 1) I just got some delayed birthday money from the grandparents. So of course I'm going to put good 'ole Benjamin to use. 2) With the job search still not resulting in any successes, I'd like to be as productive as possible during the day. Since I'm no longer enrolled in school I figure reading might be a great substitute. I never did enough of it as a child, so I guess you could say I'm playing catch up. 3)  Let's be honest, I'm a total nerd in the fact that I feel giddy when I'm on Amazon.com and I look over at all the sidebars of recommended literature and see all the awesome books I could read someday. Not to mention, I have this picture of my future home where there is a room filled with paperback books, and my children love going to the "library" where they read and study and discuss various topics to their heart's content (by the way, I have no idea where that dream came from...). Also, I honestly feel a lot of satisfaction when someone asks me a question and I can answer it in reference to a book or talk or podcast I've recently studied.

Of course, my addiction for buying books might just be my subconscious secretly bloating my ego, the part of me that wants to someday be a renowned scholar--a knower of many things, if you will (as you can see from my accelerated word choice I'm clearly making leaps and bounds in the field of scholarship). Then again, you know what they say about compulsive behavior: it's really just a cover up for what's happening underneath. Perhaps I'm struggling with the fact that I'm an unemployed college grad who is still unsure of her next move. Wait, that's not a perhaps. That's just true. Hmm...food for thought.

Anyway, there's my confession. I'm a compulsive buyer of books. And like any addict I go through my phases of soberness and not so much....soberness, like tonight. (This all makes me wonder what kind of old lady I'll be. Cats have never been my style, so I guess I'll just be the crazy book lady who barks at kids texting on their phones instead of reading something...nahhh!).

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Feeling a little ambitious?

By the time I'm 25, I would like to say I've read over 100 books cover to cover, starting with these....

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 - 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
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 - Kazu 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

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