Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (finished 3/11/2016. It was wonderful)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (read 2010)
• The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank (read 1999)
• 1984 by George Orwell (read 2016)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (read 2000 and 2007)
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (finished May 2014... finally)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read 2003)
• Charlotte’s Web by Garth Williams 
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (read 2013)
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (read 2006)
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (read January 2016- sobering and relevant.)
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte  (read October 2014 in Jane's honor. Not my favorite but glad I did).
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (read 1999 and 2005)
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  by Mark Twain (read 2000)
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett (read 2012)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (read 2004)
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (read 2010)
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (read 2013)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (read 1999)
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (read 2005)
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (read December 2016)
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (read 1995)
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (read 1999)
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (read January 2017. Scary sobering and relevant)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Little Prince by Antoine de St-Expupery
• Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (read 1995)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Giver by Lois Lowry (read 1996)
• Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (read 1996 and 2014)
• MacBeth by William Shakespeare (read 2001)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (read 2000)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling (read 2007)
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (read 2001 and 2002)
• The Holy Bible: New King James Version (read 2001)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Catch-22 by Joesph Heller
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Stand by Stephen King
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (read 2001)
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (read 1999)
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling (read 2000)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin (read July 2016. Bleh)
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman 
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (read 2006)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (read 2000)
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by JK Rowling (read 2005)
• Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (read 2010)
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
• The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe (read 1999)
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (read 2012, 2013, 2014, audio 2015)
• A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (read 2001)
• The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (read 2011 and 2014)
• The Odyssey by Homer (read 1999)
• Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from 5 Years of Weekly Knowledge by Sri Sri Ravi Shanker
• A Prayer for Own Meany by John Irving
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (read 2012- fascinating and sobering)
• The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullogh (read 2015- LOVED it. Absolutely epic and beautiful)
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Wall
• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (read 2010)
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (read June 2016. Beautiful and challenging.)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (read December 2016 along with The Underground Railroad. So many lasting and awful legacies of slavery)
• Helen Keller: The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
• From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler by EL Konigsburg (read 1996)
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (read April 2014 and immediately deleted from my kindle. Not impressed. And I also "figured it out" right away, so that wasn't the reason)
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

51/100 as of January 2017

30 before 30 Goal List

Inspired by Making it Lovely, here is my 30 before 30 list of goals I'd like to accomplish. I'm putting it on this place holder blog for reference (I don't think anyone that reads my food blog cares, haha!)


I have 435 days. Time to get going.

1-Grow my hair out (done!)
2-Run in a race
3-Eat at the pizza place in Phoenix
4-Make and love something coconut (oatmeal cake- March 2014)
5-Plant a garden (front porch makeover- July 2015)
6-Shoot in manual
7-Learn to paint my right hand
8-Finish my French dresser (April 2016- girls room)
9-Learn to curl hair (summer 2015)
10-Be a vegetarian for a month
11-Make macarons with real feet
12-Hang plate wall (finished June 2014, looks awesome!)
13-Make a jewelry display in my room (Fall 2015, crown hooks and half the jewelry donated)
14-Learn to French braid (done! October 2013)
15-Make pain au chocolat
16-Decorate hall bath (done Summer 2015)
17-Paint laundry room (done! I'm keeping it white!)
18-Bike 100 miles
19-Make a Come Thou Fount canvas (done, Spring/summer 2015)
20-Crochet something
21-Get CPR certified again (or maybe here)
22-Go camping for fun (June 2014)
23-Girls trip with Kate and Beth (California, August 2014)
24-Perfect a Chinese chicken for Ben (sweet and sour, August 2014)
25-Wear tennis shoes and shorts without feeling like a weirdo (Summer 2015, skirts count right?)
26-Watch the long Pride and Prejudice (finally finished with Ben, October 2014. It was wonderful.)
27-Go to Dave and Busters
28-Take Will to the temple visitors center on a date (dairy queen after)
29-Switch out my almond outlets myself
30-Knife throwing class (expired. Oh well.)

Bow Tie How To

These look so quick and simple to make. I know that's not entirely too true but it doesn't look too hard to try!

And I think they would look so cute in Katie's hair- especially with all the new strawberry fabric MJ showed me.

via Pleated Poppy

Custom Fondant Stamps for Cupcakes

There are no words... I want one of these so bad. What would it say? I have no idea, but I want one!

Best Ever Paris Maps

I've been looking for a cute Paris map for Katie Baby's room and think this one is the most beautiful I've ever seen! It's also printed in France and... 35 pounds. Maybe another day!

This one is also super adorable and probably more "kiddy" but I think the first is the one I'm going to dream of!

Laundry Room and Wire Shelving

source

We have the free wire shelving in the garage and it looks suprisingly chic in this laundry room. Of course there's no room for it in our "laundry hallway" but I'm filing away this picture since it looks so great!