The BBC thinks most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I'm kind of floored by that.  I think I had to read at least 6 of these suckers in high school.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (tried, but didn’t get into it)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (ok ok, not all of it)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
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 X+
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X+
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X (worst book ever)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X+
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving X (I really loved it until I talked with somebody who violently hated it… and made really valid points)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (ugh)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X+
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (… this was a book?)
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 X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez * (I love everything else I've read, so time to get on it)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X (in FRENCH bitches!)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac  X (10 pages left…)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X+ (I have reasons)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (I’ve read some of his other ones…)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X+
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+ (French)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+ (again with the repetition, BBC)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

51!  And two of those were in French!  Take that, BBC!  Oh and I didn't count the ones I'm planning on because things like "Jane Eyre" have been on that list for the last 4 years.  So if you respond... don't cound the *s.

Ok, here's my 2008 booklist and related thoughts.  Comments and suggestions for 2009 appreciated.

1.  The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory 672

   Anne and Mary Boleyn.  I'm on a Henry VIII kick, so I found it really interesting.  It's not high literature, but it's true to history (as best we can tell) and it's fun.  The movie sucked.

2.  Suite Francaise – Irene Nemirovsky 448

   I think probably everybody else read this when it was huge last year.  It's a novel about people living and falling in love on both sides of WWII.  Nemirovsky died in Aushwitz before she could finish it.  It was really good for my French.  I also learned how to say "land-mine."  ("Mine antipersonnel.")

3.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera 352

    I didn't only read historical fiction, I swear.  Young Bohemians living in a communist Czecholslovakia.  It's beautifully written and I really bought all of the characters even though for the most part I didn't like them.

4.  Terrorist – John Updike 320 (negative stars)

    How is this guy so successful?  This book is crap.  Young utterly stereotypical Muslim kid who has an Irish mother (so that updike could describe her hair and temper every 3 pages) is seduced into a terrorist cell.  Also included are stereotypical, completely unbelievable Black high-school aged reluctant prostitutes and stereotypical, completely unbelievable sympathetic and apparently telepathic English teachers.

5.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers 496

    Nothing actually happens in this book.  You read it for the style.  Which is fun.  And clever.

6.  Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka 94

    Having never read this, I figured I should so as to not embarrass myself in the company of academics at high school reunions.

7.  The Boleyn Legacy – Philippa Gregory 544

    Not nearly as interesting (or good) as Other Boleyn Girl, but at least you get some insight into the wife nobody ever talks about (Anne of Cleves.)

8.  Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami 298

    Sex and death and mental problems for Japanese students.  I never understood the Beatles reference, but the characters are really well developed.

9.   Red Sky at Morning – Richard Bradford 356  ***

    BEST BOOK OF 2008!  A sort of Huck Finn meets American homefront, it's the story of a southern kid growing up out west while his dad is away fighting in WWII.

10.  Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides 544

    Ok, this book is about incest and transsexuals, but it's also an interesting look at a Greek-American family's history over a couple of generations and it really gets at what it means to be a sexual outsider.  That said, the resolution was crap and the ending was a cop-out.

11.  The Six Wives of Henry VIII – Antonia Fraser 496

    I told you I was on a Henry VIII kick.  (In 2008 I also watched both seasons of The Tudors.)  This one is a history book, but Fraser does a good job making history juicy.

12.  Rhinoceros – Eugene Ionosco 160

    I never actually read this in French lit, but as I am a fan of the absurdist movement, I thought it was great.  A sleepy town is rocked when a rhinoceros crashes through the streets.  Or was it two?  Debates ensue.  And it only gets weirder from there.

13.  One Hundred Years of Solitude – (English) Gabriel Garcia Marquez 448 ***

    LOVED it.  The story of several generations of a family in Latin America that weaves magic and mythology with history.

14.  Everything Is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran-Froer 288

    Fun narrative voice even if the plotline doesn't really go anywhere.  An American boy seeks the Ukrainian who may have saved his grandmother from the Nazis.

15.  Les Jeux Sont Faits – Sartre 164

    Typical Sartre depressing novel.  You really are a hapless victim of your own fate.  Boo hoo.  I loved it.

16.  The Looming Tower – Lawrence Wright 576

    Non-fiction.  The history of Al-Quaeda and the road to 9/11.  Very comprehensive and unbiased.  I think everybody should have to read it.

17.  Ute

    Whimsical story of porcelain afficionados who can't really cope with the real world.  (Rec. by Alec.)

18.  Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 378

    I will never understand what makes a book popular in the USA.  This book had an interesting setting (Afghanistan before and after the Soviet occupation) but it was the MOST PREDICTABLE PLOTLINE EVER.  And the characters were 2-dimensional.  And the sheer number of coincidences were just laughable.  Don't bother.

19.  Cent ans de solitude – (French) Gabriel Garcia Marquez 460

    I figured since it was written in Spanish to begin with, I oughta re-read it in French.  It's just as good the second time through.

20.  Pudd'nhead Wilson – Mark Twain 256

    Twain at his best!  Whimsical story about two boys switched at birth.  A satire attacking the legacies of slavery and racism.

21.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz 352

    A Dominican-American family and a multi-generational curse leaving tragedy and broken hearts in its wake.

22.  The Eleanor Wong Trilogy – Eleanor Wong

    A bright and ambitious lesbian lawyer in Singapore struggling to succeed in a conservative society.  (Rec. by Alec)

23.  The Second World War – John Keegan 608

    If you want to read a 600-page comprehensive history of EVERYTHING involved in WWII (and who wouldn't?) this is the book.  Added fun - read it on the train from Berlin to Prague!

24.  Gouverneurs de la Rosee – Jacques Romain 202

    A story about a family struggling to overcome prejudice and hostilities in drout-ridden Haiti.  It's really, really depressing.  But has great landscape descriptions.  I had to carry around a French-English dictionary since I had no idea there were so many synonyms for "leaf" or "valley."

25.  Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 368  ***

    I devoured this book in about 3 days.  An eloquent Brit and his fascination/obsession with a crumbling aristocratic family.

26.  The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton 272

    People seemed to think it was important that I read this.  Can't imagine why.

27.  The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama 365

    I probably should have read this before the election, but I didn't.  Anyway, I'm even more optimistic about next Tuesday now.

The Night of Your Life - Jesse Reklaw

I used to love writing here.  I love writing for an audience.  I get so flustered when I try to talk about what I'm feeling that I often come across as utterly opinionless or a complete airhead.  I used to post and then force myself to wait a couple days before I posted again.
But something happened and I stopped writing too.  Maybe it was because I wasn't proud of it anymore.  I didn't have anything really to say about me that anybody else would find important.  Or even interesting.  And that's the whole point of writing about yourself, isn't it?  To be able to present yourself with the forethought that speaking never gives you so that you can carefully and meticulously make yourself sound good.
I don't know if I'm going to be proud of myself anytime soon, but I'm going to try to scrape off some rust and write again.

It's 2009.
In the last year, I sweated my face off in the summer dessert that is Tunisia.  I fell in love with the casual ugly deliciousness that is Brussels and the generous beauty that is Brugges.  I ate happy candy bars in Amsterdam.  I stepped on what was once the Berlin Wall and I drank beer with a 10 year-old in Dresden.  I listened to 12 different mosques sind dischordant calls to prayer in the medina of Marrakesh in the last week of Ramadan.  I found Rick's cafe in Casablanca!  I climbed Halloween-colored hills in Prague and poked my tongue out at my reflection in the river where my ancestors lived in Czecholslovakia.  I went to a fetish market in Togo and bribed my first official to get back over the border to Ghana where the sun beats down so hard onto the Gold Coast that all you can do is sleep or run away to the shade of the rain forest.  8 new countries isn't bad.

I read 28 books and probably a couple that I forgot to put on my list.  I'll post that later.  By my estimate it was 9,973 pages.

I kept alive a long-distance relationship for a full year.

So here's to 2009.  I'm aiming for 10,000 pages and a not-so-long-distance relationship.  It'll probably mean fewer countries though.