100 Books to read before you die

Slightly off topic and outside the (sand) box today.  Thoughts of home, family and the holidays naturally make me think of literature.  Below is the 2010 BBC list of 'must read' books.  The BBC says that most people have actually read fewer than 6 of these. 

I beat the odds with 12 (in bold) but have a long way before I'm fully literate according to the Brits.  Some of these represent multiple volumes of works (ie. the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the Lord of the Rings).  I've read several of the Shakespeare plays, all of the Holmes books and the 3 Rings books.  Also notable, most of these (except for Dan Brown) I read either in grade school or in college. 

Some writers, I think, are over represented (probably because they are British).  Jane Austen for example shows up multiple times on the list.  Seems so long as they are lumping Shakespeare, Doyle and Tolkein's works together they could have done the same with Austen.  This would have made room for a few more must reads like Crane's 'Red Badge of Courage,'  Cornwell's 'Sharpe' series and Forester's 'Hornblower' books.  Notably missing are Mark Twain's American saga of 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn.'

How many have you read? 

1.               Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Yes!)

2.               The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3.               Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 

4.               Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5.               To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6.               The Bible

7.               Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8.               Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9.               His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10.           Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11.           Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12.           Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13.           Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 

14.           Complete Works of Shakespeare 

15.           15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16.           The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17.           Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18.           Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19.           The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20.           Middlemarch - George Eliot 

21.           Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 

22.           The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23.           Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24.           War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25.           The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  

26.           Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27.           Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28.           Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29.           Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30.           The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31.           Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32.           David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33.           Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34.           Emma - Jane Austen

35.           Persuasion - Jane Austen

36.           The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37.           The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38.           Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39.           Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40.           Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41.           Animal Farm - George Orwell

42.           The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43.           One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44.           A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45.           The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46.           Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47.           Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48.           The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49.           Lord of the Flies - William Golding  

50.           Atonement - Ian McEwan

51.           Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52.           Dune - Frank Herbert

53.           Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54.           Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 

55.           A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56.           The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57.           A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 

58.           Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59.           The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60.           Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61.           Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62.           Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63.           The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64.           The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65.           Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66.           On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67.           Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68.           Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69.           Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70.           Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71.           Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72.           Dracula - Bram Stoker

73.           The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74.           Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75.           Ulysses - James Joyce

76.           The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 

77.           Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78.           Germinal - Emile Zola

79.           Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80.           Possession - AS Byatt

81.           A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 

82.           Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83.           The Color Purple - Alice Walker 

84.           The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro

85.           Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86.           A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87.           Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88.           The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89.           Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90.           The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91.           Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92.           The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 

93.           The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94.           Watership Down - Richard Adams 

95.           A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96.           A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97.           The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98.           Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99.           Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100.       Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

FNGs and others

For those who don't know FNG stands for "Freakin' New Guy."  Sometimes this is used as a compliment to point out the new blood in the room and sometimes its ribbing to do the same.  Most often its a warning to look out for the FNG because he doesn't have a clue what he's doing and may well cause harm to himself/herself or others.

Around here its fairly easy to tell the FNGs.  The new troops who are on their first tour.  Their uniforms are fresh, colorful and unfaded by the desert sun and harsh laundry detergents.  Their eyes are big and you can tell they are all nerves.  You can pick them out especially in the DFAC (chow hall).  They fumble through the lines because they haven't figured out the system yet.  In a few weeks they'll have it down pat.  But until then they will get in the way.

Sometimes you can tell with returning troops as well.  Especially those who were in Iraq back when things were really hot.  These guys have a different look.  More angry and dissapointed.  Things have changed a lot since their last tour and they don't like it.  Like having to live your Freshman year over again after having been a Senior.  They came back expecting the country at war and got a fairly consistent peace.  No more high octane, adreneline rushes and crashing around blowing things up.  Lots of paperwork and advise and assist missions.  Many, especially the fast types (or those who consider themselves so) seem to resent this state of affairs and feel like its a waste of their time to be here.     

For those of us who have been here a while I guess we are somewhere in between these two stages.  We know where things are and how to get things done.  We know the jobs we're doing and are fairly focused on our daily routines.  I won't say we aren't afraid of the chance of being hit by one of the regular mortars or rockets that drop in on us, or indirect shots fired, or IEDs but we have accepted it.  Its so random these days that there is little that could be done to prevent it.  So you get up every day and do the best you can.  We are in a perpetual state of casual, hyper alertness.  Not quite the 1000 yard stare but quietly aware of everything going on around us at all times.    

Its the routine that gets you through.  Focusing on the job that has to be done rather than the conditions in which you are doing it.  After a while you get numb to the environment.  It is what it is.  Of course, some handle it better than others.  I've seen people snap over little things - or things that can't be figured out at all.  Everybody handles it differently. 

We are yesterday's FNGs, todays old guys and, en shalla, won't be tomorrow's troops returning to cover the same ground.