Satori Smiles

People that know me would be shocked that I would say this, as I’m constantly reading! But there’s a thread going on in one of my favorite forums, that shows lists of 100 books and how many you’ve read. BBC said the average person only read 6 out of 100. That list was a compilation of the top 100 favorites of the average person. The list below is the top 100 of the LibraryThing members, people who probably read a bit more. I’ve bolded the books I’ve read. I have quite a few classics to catch up on, but I shall make it a priority the next few years!

I read just over half of this list. Obviously, some are not considered “classics”, but it’s a great list to motivate me to read more quality literature.

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J.K. Rowling
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) by J.K. Rowling
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) by J.K. Rowling
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) by J.K. Rowling
6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) by J.K. Rowling
7. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J.K. Rowling
10. 1984 by George Orwell
11. Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) by Jane Austen
12. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
14. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
16. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
17. Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Bronte
18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
19. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
20. Animal Farm by George Orwell
21. Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
23. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
25. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1) by J.R.R. Tolkien
26. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
27. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
28. The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, Part 2) by J.R.R. Tolkien
29. The Odyssey by Homer
30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
31. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
32. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
33. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
35. American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman
36. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
38. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
39. The Lovely Bones: a novel by Alice Sebold
40. Ender’s Game (Ender, Book 1) by Orson Scott Card
41. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman
42. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman
43. Dune by Frank Herbert
44. Emma by Jane Austen
45. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
46. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bantam Classics) by Mark Twain
47. Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy
48. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
49. Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
50. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
52. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
53. The Iliad by Homer
54. The Stranger by Albert Camus
55. Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen
56. Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens
57. The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel by Margaret Atwood
58. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
59. Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
60. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
61. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
62. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
63. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
64. The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck
65. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
66. The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
69. The complete works by William Shakespeare
70. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
71. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
72. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
73. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare
74. Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by John Steinbeck
75. A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens
76. The Alchemist (Plus) by Paulo Coelho (7,710)
77. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (7,648)
78. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics) by Oscar Wilde
79. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk
80. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
81. The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman
82. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
83. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
84. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
85. Dracula by Bram Stoker
86. Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions) by Joseph Conrad
87. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
88. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
89. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
90. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce
91. The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Milan Kundera
92. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
93. Neuromancer by William Gibson
94. The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer
95. Persuasion (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen
96. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
97. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (just read this a few weeks ago)
98. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
99. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
100. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

I have been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to upload some photos and other random thoughts I’ve been meaning to! First off, the weather here has been ABSOLUTELY PERFECT! Mid-70′s, the perfect mix of sun and occasional cloud… We’ve been playing outside on the new playset, been camping, hiking, geocaching, enjoying the outdoors. Thus, not a lot of sit-down learning going on, but no worries, she’s only 4.

Satori finished the first Handwriting Without Tears workbook, and is now starting the Kindergarten workbook – Letters and Numbers For Me. She loves all the coloring in it and then does a bit of letter practice, hehe. She wakes up in the morning, wanting to work on her “orange book”. She started going through it faster than I was ready, so I hadn’t even looked at the teacher’s manual. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t even need to purchase the TM (teacher’s manual).

Letters and Numbers for Me

The upside of this, is that we’ll get to our lowercase letters that much sooner!

I quickly made an order for the gray block handwriting paper that the HWT program uses, in fact, it was my very first order from Rainbow Resource, which is probably the ultimate, grand-daddy homeschooling online supply site. (They could use a modern interface though, me speaking as a former web programmer.)

I normally don’t combine different thoughts on one blog post, but here’s some more…

Satori has been wanting to make a cake for a few months now. (I hate making cakes, I don’t really like them and they never turn out, I blame it on the altitude as always.) But after she finished her above HWT workbook, our very first official curriculum workbook finished, I thought we could celebrate with Pinkalicious Cake! She also finished Lesson 50 on Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and Lesson 5 of All-About-Spelling.

Pinkalicious Cake

We got the idea from a book called Pinkalicious, but it was about Pink Muffins.

Yum!!

Snapped some photos before I cleaned up from the Dino party… We had fun eating the spewn lava – Pop Rocks!

Dino volcano

And a sample of all the dino posters that Satori drew all by herself, no prompting from me… I like those trees she’s been drawing recently!

Brachiosaurus and tree

We’ve been having fun geocaching a little bit every weekend. This has been a hobby I have wanted to get into for years, if it was just me, I’d have found hundreds already. But I want it to be mostly a family activity, so waiting for the time when David has a free afternoon and it’s a nice day is rare. You can always see what our total geocache count is by looking at the real-time chart up on the right side.

Geocaching has brought our 4-WD truck out a lot, here we are in “our big backyard”. Places that are pieces of paradise to me, with its beauty and tranquility. And the occasional herd of cows in the road.

few miles behind our house, on 4wd roads…

The last time Satori went camping was when she was two years old. She was so excited that I don’t think any of us got any sleep that night, with our active toddler crawling all over us in the tent, giggling and talking… Fast forward two years and Mom and Satori try again. Success! We had SO much fun! We went to Kelly-Dahl, a campground just a few miles from our house, with a cool wooden playset.

Camping at Kelly-Dahl campground

It was mom’s first time ever pitching a tent, grilling out, and building a camp fire. (I didn’t realize I always let someone else do it for me, I have been so sheltered.)

Satori and Mary-Jeanne

We invited our friends and the two little girls loved warding off the 171 mountain lions and 4 bears from our camp circle. Here the girls are, lit by camp fire only.

By the campfire

That night we read stories in the tent. Mama also stepped out to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower and saw lots of shooting stars! The next day, both Satori and Mom (and Maddie our dog) wanted to stay again, so we stayed another night. After a few hikes, we retired to our campsite and drew nature sketches. Here Satori is studying animal tracks and drawing them.

Drawing/Studying animal tracks

Satori then drew pictures of our tent, our campfire, and herself and Maddie (shown below), while Mom read Magic Treehouse Books (which I hope she’ll be able to read next summer by herself).

Satori and Maddie camping

We had such a great time, we can’t wait to go again!