Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass

I just finished reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I was reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as well, but once I finished Alice, I HAD to read the second installment, Through The Looking Glass. I love these stories. It is a great little play on logic with Alice finding herself having to rely on logic to navigate this foreign and crazy land called Wonderland that she doesn’t quite belong to. I think it plays on the era in which it was written and how she did not fit into the society of the time and was looking for a place to call her own. Alice herself, although she sometimes loses her composure, is stubborn, brave, mature and determined. She handles a lot of the situations she is thrust into with just elegance and grace, a great quality for a child and great role model for other children.

During her journey, Alice meets some of the most unique characters. I think those characters were actually my favorite part. They are all so deliciously crazy. Carroll found a way to give each of them their own unique voice, which I really enjoyed and was very impressed with.

Because I was such a huge fan of the movies, I thought I would know what to expect, but I found myself constantly flipping to the next page and the next wanting to know what would happen next. It really was a delightful story and if you have not read it, I would recommend it.

I am going to get back to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes now that I am finished with these two delightful stories and I will review on it next week! Oh, and before I go….NEW LIBRARY CARD!

My old one, which I have had since I was 8, was apparently deactivated. They wouldn’t let me keep it, which I am kind of sad about. (Again, I apologize for the sidewaysness. I am trying to figure out why it is doing that and how to fix it, I promise!)

The 100 Books List

One of my goals was to make a list of 100 books that I wanted to read and read them in the next couple years. At first, developing this list was easy. There was this running list in my head of classic British novels (probably my favorite genre) that I had always wanted to read and books on my bookshelf I had never finished; I had just never made the time. This was actually part of the reason I decided on that goal in the first place. Why 100 you ask? That number has no significance except I was watching A Walk To Remember at the time I wrote the goals list and she was “reading all the books on Mr. Rothman’s list of 100 contemporary American authors”, a list that does not actually exist. I know, I checked.

So, after I wrote down the classic British novels and the books on my bookshelf and only had about 30 books, I started to freak out a little bit. I looked online for lists and upon discovering the one form A Walk To Remember didn’t exist, I checked out a few websites where people voted on the books they loved the best. However, the voting websites just had different versions of Twilight and Harry Potter listed about 12 times each, so that wasn’t very helpful. Next I stumbled onto Times’ list of the 100 best books of all time. That got me about 15 more books added to my list. We were cruising now!

Then, a friend of mine introduced me to Good Reads. I spent HOURS on this site looking at different books and completing my list. I am pretty happy with it! If I didn’t have six of the books already, then I don’t know where I would have started. I want to read them all right now! So, without further ado….the list.

The List of 100 (in no particular order):

• Alice In Wonderland  by Lewis Carroll (currently reading)
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (currently reading)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Me Talk Pretty one Day by David Sedaris
• On Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Brave New World by Aklous Huxley
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• East of Eden by John Stenbeck
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Emma by Jane Austen
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chboksy
• Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Sound and the Fury by William Falkner
• A Little Princess by Fances Hodgson Burnett
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Sait-Exupery
• The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles
• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• Dead Until Dark Charlaine Harris
• Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
• Club Dead by Charlaine Harris
• Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris
• Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
• All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris
• From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris
• Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
• Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
• If There Be Thorns by V.C. Andrews
• Seeds of Yesterday by V.C. Andrews
• Garden of Shadows by V.C. Andrews
• The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
• The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
• The Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice
• Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice
• The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice
• Merrick by Anne Rice
• Blood and Gold by Anne Rice
• Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice
• Blood Canticle by Anne Rice
• The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• Only the Good Spy Young by Ally Carter
• Heist Society by Ally Carter
• Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Persuassion by Jane Austen
• Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

So, there it is! I already started with the two e-books I had.  Next week, I am going to head down to my local library and get my library card renewed…apparently it doesn’t work anymore.