A Direction of Sorts

So after thinking about it for several days, I've decided. I'm going to try to read a list of books and hopefully I'll be able to get through it. There's over one hundred books on my list, and I'm a little ashamed to admit that I have only read a few of them.

I can do it! I won't be reading them in any specific order. Ready to see the list?

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
8. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Ulysses by James Joyce
14. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
15. Animal Farm by George Orwell
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
18. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
19. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
20. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
21. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
22. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
23. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
25. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
26. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
27. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
28. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
29. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
34. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
36. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
37. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
38. The Stranger by Albert Camus
39. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
40. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
41. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
43. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
44. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
47. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
48. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
49. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
50. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
51. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
52. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
53. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
54. Watership Down by Richard Adams
55. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
56. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
57. The Stand by Stephen King
58. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
59. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
60. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
61. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
62. Middlemarch by George Eliot
63. Dracula by Bram Stoker
64. Dune by Frank Herbert
65. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
66. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
68. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
69. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
70. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
71. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
72. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
73. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
74. The Trial by Franz Kafka
75. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
77. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
78. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
79. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
81. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
82. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
83. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
84. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
85. Atonement by Ian McEwan
86. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
87. Persuasion by Jane Austen
88. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
89. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
90. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
91. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
92. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
93. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
94. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
95. Emma by Jane Austen
96. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
97. The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
98. Light in August by William Faulkner
99. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
100. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
101. Under the volcano, Malcolm Lowry
102. Native Son, Richard Wright

Have any to recommend?

Titles Are Hard

So. I've joined the blog band wagon of sorts... It seems everyone has a blog. And now, so do I. It was bound to happen some time.

I couldn't come up with a title. I scoured the interweb, trying to cheat to find a decent title. How sad is that? I even tried a blog title generator, which left me with "Bum Fantasies" at one point. While that would have been lovely I'm sure, it just wasn't me (thank goodness).

I'd like to think I'm a perpetual optimist. I try to have a glass-half-full perspective, but it seems like conversations only continue if people are complaining about something. I am, self-admittedly, social inept. Small talk, current news, all of it, seems to hinge on problems or disaster or crapyness. That's right, I said crapyness. I think it's difficult to always be so negative, but good news isn't catchy I guess.

We'll see how this goes. I'm secretly wondering what the purpose of a random blog is.