My Top 100 Favorite Books (Revised)

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin / Harriett Beecher Stowe

2. Black Boy / Richard Wright

3. Brother’s Karamozov / Fyodor Dostoevsky

4. Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell

5. Corelli’s Mandolin / Louis De Berniers

6. Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck

7. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank / Anne Frank

8 The Catcher in the Rye / J.D. Salinger

9 Les Miserables / Victor Hugo

10. 1984 / George Orwell

11. The Color Purple / Alice Walker

12. Notes from Underground / Fyodor Dostoevsky

13. The Good War / Studs Terkel

14. All Quiet on the Western Front / Erich Maria Remarque

15. Dracula / Bram Stoker

16. Uncle Tom’s Children / Richard Wright

17. Eight Men / Richard Wright

18. Cry, the Beloved Country / Alan Paton

19. Berlin Diaries / Marie Vasilnikoff

20. Anais Nin’s Diaries (all of them) / Anais Nin

21. The Good Earth / Pearl S. Buck

22. To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee

23. Boy / Roald Dahl

24. Native Son / Richard Wright

25. The Island on Bird Street / Uri Orlev

26. Going Solo / Roald Dahl

27. The Screwtape Letters / C.S. Lewis

28. The Winter of our Discontent / John Steinbeck

29. East of Eden / John Steinbeck

30. Memoirs of a Geisha / Arthur Golden

31. Tortilla Flats / John Steinbeck

32. Brave New World / Aldous Huxley

33. The Outsider / Richard Wright

34. The Long Dream / Richard Wright

35. Illusions / Richard Bach

36. Blue Beard / Kurt Vonnegut

37. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café / Fannie Flagg

38. Taras Bulba / Gogol

39. Cat’s Cradle / Kurt Vonnegut

40. Bird by Bird / Anne Lamott

41. Surprised by Joy / C.S. Lewis

42. Me Talk Pretty One Day / David Sedaris

43. Cold Sassy Tree / Olivia Burns

44. Reflections on the Psalms / C.S. Lewis

45. Naked / David Sedaris

46. Franny and Zooey / J.D. Salinger

47. Raise High the Roof Highbeam, Carpenters . . . / J.D. Salinger

48. The Glass Harp / Truman Capote

49. A Grief Observed / C.S. Lewis

50. Til We Have Faces / C.S. Lewis

51. Savage Holiday / Richard Wright

52. A Pen Warmed Up in Hell / Mark Twain

53. If I Forget Thee Jerusalem / William Faulkner

54. The Four Loves / C.S. Lewis

55. Of Mice and Men / John Steinbeck

56. The Reader / Bernhard Schlink

57. Lawd Today! / Richard Wright

58. Over to You / Roald Dahl

59. Letters to Children / C.S. Lewis

60. My Uncle Oswald / Roald Dahl

61. Cannery Row / John Steinbeck

62. The Crucible / Arthur Miller

63. The World According to Garp / John Irving

64. Diary of a Madman & Other Stories / Nikolai Gogol

65. Tom Sawyer / Mark Twain

66. Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky

67. Don Quixote / Cervantes

68. Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte

69. Stones from the River / Ursula Hegi

70. The Tin Drum / Gunter Grass

71. House of the Dead / Fyodor Dostoevsky

72. Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury

73. Candide / Voltaire

74. Robinson Crusoe / Daniel Defoe

75. The Odyssey / Homer

76. 32 Candles / Ernessa T. Carter

77. Lolita / Vladimir Nabakov

78. A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess

79. A Prayer for Owen Meaney / John Irving

80. The Sorrows of Young Werther / Geothe

81. Mother Night / Kurt Vonnegut

82. Nine Stories / J.D. Salinger

83.At Play in the Fields of the Lord / Peter Matthiessen

84. Like Water for Chocolate / Laura Esquivel

85. The Aeneid / Virgil

86. The Inferno / Dante

87. The Bell Jar / Sylvia Platt

88. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest / Ken Kesey

89. Midnight Cowboy / James Leo Herlihy

90. The Slave / Isaac Bashevis-Singer

91. A Literate Passion Anais / Nin/Henry Miller

92. Angela’s Ashes / Frank McCourt

93. The Long Walk / Slavomir Rawicz

94. Tale of Two Cities / Charles Dickens

95. Johnathan Livingston Seagull / Richard Bach

96. The Underdogs / Mariano Azuela

97. The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald

98. Things Fall Apart / Achebe

99. The Chocolate War / Robert Cormier

100. Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy

Oh no!

Oh no!  I only have 5 days left, and I haven’t a thing to wear.  Wait.  That’s not what I meant.  I meant, I haven’t written a thing!!

Wow!

Wow.  Two years have passed since I've posted on this blog.  I'm so sorry.  Sorry for myself.  Sorry that I have left my first love -- fiction.  How could I?  HOW COULD I?

I don't understand it myself.  I've just recently returned to reading fiction.  I've been into mainly non-fiction the past couple of years.  I can't tell you the last time I wrote a work of fiction.  I believe the neglect is part of a deep rooted depression (buried and hardly seen) that is part of my being.  I am a story teller.  If not that, I am a story lover.

Yes, I still write.  I write about trail running.  I write computer course descriptions for the district's adult education brochure.  I write course hand-outs.

But it's time to return to fiction.  In one month's time, I will post something new, either a chapter or short story.  Not sure where I'm going from here.  I WILL WRITE SOMETHING.  To prove that I'm sincere, I pulled out old journals with some poetry (AND I WAS NEVER A SERIOUS POETRY WRITER).  I'm going to put myself out there and post some of the pages, almost embarrassingly, here.  (Hopefully, I haven't posted prior).  Until next month . . .

A short untitled from 8/23/94

We walk about
     the world so blind.
          In a frenzy!
          Uneasy.
     so eager to bind.


The Fall (To be Free) 12/14/95

When God said to thee,
     Go forth, away from me -- 
We picked up our clothes and ran 
     Straight for the door.

Since then we've been fed
     By the serpent instead -- 
Like he, eating dust off the floor.

Desire (4/96)

His gifts to her stolen gold,
She pawned to pay his bail -- 

Feverish, drunken
All American Male!

He came to her unruly
A magician waving wands --

Revelry, spinning,
Dionysian dawns.

A moment time vanished,
Her soul should he set afire --

Ensorcelled, wanting,
Heartbreaking desire.