Carol's Notebook

I ran across Newsweek's top 100 books list yesterday. I know no list is perfect, there are always books that should be added or deleted, but I was curious how many of them I've read. Ones I've read are in bold. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 1984 byGeorge Orwell Ulysses by James Joyce Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov * The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (I think I did read portions of this in school) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift Middlemarch by George Eliot Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Beloved by Toni Morrison The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie Brave New World by Aldous...

Congratulations to the winners of My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield. Mia J. MMW rhapsodyinbooks cenyasmom Heather E I'll e-mail all the winners shortly. I just need your mailing addresses to pass on to the Hachette Book Group....

Join in at Booking through Thursday. What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently? This is actually a harder question than it sounds. I just don't read that many truly funny books. Of course, I'm one of those people that always laughs at inappropriate moments in movies, and in conversations I'm the only one who finds me funny, so maybe my sense of humor's just screwed up. I think the last funny book I read was A Night at the Operation by Jeffrey Cohen. One of my favorite books of all time is Pipsqueak by Brian M. Wiprud, which I thought was hilarious. I guess I just really enjoy comedic mysteries. What about you? What funny books have you read?...

I stated a few days ago that my daughter, Amber, loves dragons. I told her I had mentioned her on my blog, and she wanted me to show you one of her drawings, so here's a dragon she drew a couple months ago....

Thanks to Bermudaonion's Weblog for hosting this weekly event. Head over there to play along. I only ran across one new-to-me word this week.  It's a bird I'd never heard of in The Old Motel Mystery created by Gertrude Chandler Warner. anhinga- any of a genus (Anhinga) of long-necked birds having a sharp, pointed bill and inhabiting swampy regions of tropical and subtropical America. Also called darter, snakebird, water turkey. "Now the bird is coming up. He's speared a fish with his sharp beak." "The bird ia an anhinga," Rolf said. Any new words for you this week?...