A Bucket List of a Different Kind

There are times I truly believe I was born reading. I don't remember a day I didn't know how to read. As I've written before, we moved a lot when I was growing up. One of the effects was that I learned to let go of things that didn't pack or travel well. Books, packed a few to a box, travel well. And books are an excellent way to pass the time - most especially since, when I was a child, the electronics our children now enjoy didn't exist. Books are also, for the most part, inexpensive. As a result, I am a voracious reader.

Being a reader, I am also a continual student. I believe reading and learning go hand in hand. You learn as you read. Even fiction depicts cause and effect, case studies, facts that we didn't previously know. And non-fiction is far more than just dry facts. One of the most fascinating non-fiction books I've read covered the Black Plague. The Renaissance couldn't have been as illuminating as it was were it not for the Bubonic Plague.

Up through 2002 I read almost constantly. If it contained words, I read it. Ads, cereal boxes, ingredient lists, magazines, newspapers, billboards, books, anything and everything. But after my son, RJ, died I all but stopped reading. The death of a child, especially an infant, affects us in different ways. For me, those things I enjoyed most, my escape from reality, no longer held any joy. And after Gabriel was born in 2003, reading still held no joy. I was in mourning for the passing of my son RJ, and for the knowledge that my son Gabriel may never be able to lead a normal life. Gabriel, you see, is Autistic. Instead, we have spent the last eight years working with, and advocating for, Gabriel. He is now almost nine, is getting ready for third grade, and is high-functioning. (More about him in a different post.)

It is only the last year that I have finally eased back into reading. At first it was light reads - books by Elizabeth Young and Meg Cabot were light and happy. Then I joined an online reading group and started participating in online reading circles. I read Room and The Hunger Games trilogy. And slowly, my  reading habits picked up. I started back on science fiction, non-fiction, biography, fantasy. I read my first series of Steampunk novels.  I was introduced to www.goodreads.com and http://www.audible.com/, and my parents gifted me with a Nook. I also loaded Kindle and eBooks to my iPod and Android phone.

I feel as though I finally have my joy back, as though I am finally healing. And to that end, I decided to come up with my own Bucket List of Books. I'll briefly explain my reasons for this bucket list. First off, I am  not really into bucket lists. While there are things I'd like to do and places I'd like to visit, right now I am not compelled to pursue them. Secondly, books, reading, is something I love. I am most comfortable in a library or book store. And I believe that a bucket list should comprise that which one loves or can't imagine living without. Thus, my Bucket List of Books.

Now there all all sorts of lists of books "you should read before you die", "the BBC insists must be read", and so on. And while these lists include several universally acclaimed authors and books, I think that for my bucket list I want to include classics, authors, genres, fiction, non-fiction, historical, and more. And I do not think it should be limited to 100 books. Oh, and it should be flexible. The list may change. Books/authors may be added but never removed. Therefore, I present Julia's Bucket List of Books. I guarantee it will change. But as I said. The list will grow and never shrink. New books are published every day and are therefore worthy of consideration. The hard part for me now is to read all of these books.  Many I have read, yet many more I haven't. Some of which I have not had any desire whatsoever to read, but read them I will. Join me, if you will. And share your progress. I will share mine.And if you are a reader like me, consider joining www.goodreads.com. It's free and an excellent way to keep tabs on the books you've read.

Enjoy!

Julia's Bucket List of Books

1. The Bible
2. One Thousand and One Nights
3. Beowulf (Anonymous)
4. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
6. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
7. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Mitch Albom)
8. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
9. Bless Me, Ultima (Rudolfo Anaya)
10. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
11. I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)
12. The complete works of Jane Austen
1. Pride and Prejudice
2. Persuasion
3. Sense and Sensibility
4. Emma
5. Mansfield Park
13. The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
14. Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie)
15. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Judy Blume)
16. The Faraway Tree Collection (Enid Blyton)
17. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
18. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
19. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
20. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
21. Notes From A Small Island (Bill Bryson)
22. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
23. Possession (A.S. Byatt)
24. The Alchemist (Caleb Carr)
25. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
26. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
27. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)
28. Hercule Poirot’s most famous cases Agatha Christie
1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
2. Peril at End House
3. Murder on the Orient Express
4. The ABC Murders
5. And Then There Were None
6. Five Little Pigs
7. Crooked House
8. A Murder is Announced
9. Endless Night
10. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
29. Ramona the Pest (Beverly Cleary)
30. The Hunger Games Trilogy (3 books) (Suzanne Collins)
31. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
32. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
33. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
34. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis De Berniere)
35. The Little Prince (Antoine De Saint Exupery)
36. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
37. Ubik (Philip K. Dick)
38. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyesky)
39. The complete works of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
1. A Study in Scarlet
2. The Sign of the Four
3. The Advantures of Sherlock Holmes
4. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
5. The Hound of the Baskervilles
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes
7. The Valley of Fear
8. His Last Bow
9. The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
40. Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)
41. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
42. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
43. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
44. Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
45. The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald)
46. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
47. Alas Babylon (Pat Frank)
48. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
49. Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
50. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
51. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
52. The Princess Bride (William Goldman)
53. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
54. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Mark Haddon)
55. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
56. Same Kind of Different As Me (Ron Hall)
57. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein)
58. Dune (Frank Herbert)
59. Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)
60. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
61. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson)
62. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
63. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
64. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
65. A Prayer For Owen Meaney (John Irving)
66. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
67. The Lottery (Shirley Jackson)
68. Ulysses (James Joyce)
69. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
70. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
71. Pet Semetary (Stephen King)
72. Dolores Claiborne (Stephen King)
73. Last of the Breed (Louis L’Amour)
74. The Millenium Trilogy (Stieg Larsson)
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2. The Girl Who Played with Fire
3. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
75. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
76. The Chronicles of Narnia (7 books) (C.S. Lewis)
77. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
78. The Giver (Lois Lowry)
79. Dragonflight (Anne McCaffrey)
80. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
81. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
82. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
83. Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
84. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
85. Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
86. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
87. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
88. Beloved (Tom Morrison)
89. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
90. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
91. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
92. The Power of Positive Thinking (Norman Vincent Peale)
93. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings (Edgar Allan Poe)
94. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
95. His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
96. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (Howard Pyle)
97. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
98. Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
99. Where the Red Fern Grows (William Rawls)
100. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
101. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
102. Contact (Carl Sagan)
103. Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
104. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
105. A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
106. 4 works William Shakespeare
1. Romeo and Juliet (tragedy)
2. Taming of the Shrew (comedy) 
3. Henry V (history)
4. The Rape of Lucrece (poetry)
107. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
108. A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute)
109. Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
110. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
111. A Girl of the Limberlost (Gene Stratton-Porter)
112. Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
113. The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
114. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
115. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Tole)
116. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
117. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
118. Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
119. Mila 18 (Leon Uris)
120. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
121. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
122. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
123. The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
124. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
125. Winds of War (Harman Wouk)
126. The Shack (William Paul Young)
127. The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
128. Germinal (Emile Zola)
129. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)