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What books I've read meme

"What Books Have You Read?" meme from Lori

Look at the list of books below:
* Bold the ones you’ve read
* Italicize the ones you want to read
* Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
* If you are reading this, tag, you’re it!


(Just so that you don't get twitchy, yes, none of the books are italicized, and no, that doesn't mean that I don't want to read any of them; I just did not feel like italicizing anything.)


1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien) (These are my favorite books)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy) (Unabridged)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Bigfoot spotted in Marysville, California

http://cbs13.com/seenon/local_story_057234544.html

To Chuckles

Here is a link just for you. When you read this, remember: it's not too late for you to start.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007090038,00.html

Pictures

Here are some pictures for all of the dear readers of my blog:

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Kazakhstan/photo411563.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Kazakhstan/photo452614.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/North_America/Canada/Northern/photo125499.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/North_America/Canada/Northern/photo283251.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/China/West/photo293024.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Mongolia/photo375992.htm

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/Mongolia/photo130255.htm

OK

To make certain people happy, I will post what you wanted me to:

Something

I don't like Ted Dekker

As the title says, I don't like Ted Dekker. His books, while action packed, are full of poor writing. I just finished reading Black, so I feel the need to complain about it. Although Black is the first book in a series of three, I do not want to continue and read the two others. I never want to read another one of his books again. There are other books that are well written, and have realistic characters that would be much better to read. Hear that, Ted?
Here is a review that I wrote on Black:

BLACK

Ted Dekker

Black by Ted Dekker is a book of unbelievable reality. As the first book in the Circle trilogy, it was published in February of 2004, and it has two sequels that came shortly afterwards in May and September 2004. It is 408 pages of pure action and Dekkerisms.
The weakest part of this book is it's writing style. The series of books was published in less than a year, and it shows. The fact that Dekker does not know how to really write also shows. A lot. He uses many sentences like the previous two; making one sentence into one sentence with a little fragment afterwards. It is used not only in dialogue, but also in the actual writing. Here is an example from Dekker himself: "Deeper and deeper into the jungle they ran. Straight for the lake. There were birds on almost every tree it seemed. Monkeys and possums." Well, monkeys and possums to you too, Ted. Also, on multiple occasions, he starts out a sentence with "and" when, if the period was taken away, and the "a" changed to lowercase, it could be added to the sentence before it to make them a single, real sentence. I honestly do not like Dekker's style of writing. I wonder how he was ever able to get published.
Another weak point was the character development. They are unrealistic, stale, and on occasions, ridiculously funny. When Thomas Hunter, protagonist, is trying to get the people at the Center for Disease Control to believe him that the Raison Strain meant death, he starts acting like a misbehaving child. To quote the book, "Tom smashed his cheek against the glass, tightened his choke hold [on himself], and stuck out his tongue. 'I'm dying! Help, help!'" For putting on that show, Tom gets exactly what he wanted: to talk to someone from the infectious disease department. If he is still doing this as a grown man, he must have had quite the parents. If this had been done in the real world, either the police or some nice men would have taken him away to a special place of his very own.
The story that Dekker has is an unusual one. Thomas Hunter, when awake, is on earth as we know it. When he sleeps, he dreams dreams that are as real as reality. He becomes confused between which is reality, and which is not, all while he tries to save earth from the Raison strain. From a few mistakes on Tom's part, both worlds have something bad happen. On earth, he gives the antagonists the key to making the Raison Strain of death they so desperately wanted, and in Tom's dream world of the bats, he is the one who unintentionally leads one of the inhabitants drink the forbidden water. Both of these were disastrous consequences of Tom's curiosity. Unfortunately, Thomas hunter was a human, not a cat (as the "curiosity killed the cat" phrase goes), so he was able to survive death. Twice.
Thomas Hunter is the protagonist in Black. I've covered him in the above paragraphs. The antagonist was Valborg Svensson. He's pretty much the stereotypical villain. A third character is Rachelle, the beautiful woman that Tom was in love with in his dream world. I don't have much to say about her, either.
Black was a book with an unusual plot, poor writing, and unbelievable characters. I would not read this book again, and neither would I recommend it to anyone, although, if someone that I knew did read it, I would ask the person's opinion of it. If you want to read this book, go ahead, but I just remember that I never told you to do so.

If you have an opinion on Ted Dekker's writing, please leave a comment. I will be more than happy to discuss it with you.