Summer Challenge

My 14 year old son and I were talking about summer reading. He's become quite a reader but we both have a huge collection of books we have never read. We love the library and often read books from the library before we read our own. We talked about challenging ourselves to read only the books we own. Then we thought of a theme - books that have been made into movies. So we went through our YA books so that we could have books we could easily read through the summer and would interest us both.
The books we came up with were:
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Outsiders by SE Hinton
Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
The City of Ember by Jeanne Du Prau
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Stuart Little by EB White
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brahares
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
Curious George by HA Ray
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
Harry Potter by JK Rowling
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett
The Princess Bride by William Goldman

That was a longer list than we expected. There were a few rules - the movie must be based on the book not the book on the movie and we needed to be able to access the movie easily. We did talk about books that have more than one movie such as Escape to Witch Mountain but decided that we would cross that bridge when it came to it.

The challenge is to read one book each week and watch the movie. You will notice that the books vary in length and difficulty. I had my son pick out what he wanted to read most and cross off the ones he absolutely had no desire to read until we had 12 books for the 12 weeks of summer. We've determined our 12 books but not the order in which we will read them. We both have to read the book so some weeks we may have to patiently wait for the other person to finish the book. We'll figure out how we will fix that later.
Our 12 books are:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Outsiders by SE Hinton
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by EB White
Stuart Little by EB White
The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander
Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I hope you join us with your own 12 books. If you don't have 12 books in your personal library that have had movies made from them, try the local library. There are sooooo many books that have been turned into movies. If you have time, you can try some harder books but definitely take the time to see the movies as well. Our goal is to see what we like better. Some books/movies like The Princess Bride are so good that I can't choose one over the other.

Booklists

I was cleaning out files on my flash drive (and then subsequently left it somewhere) when I came across a booklist I had copied from facebook. According to this document, the BBC believed that the majority of people would have only read 6 books on this list of 100 (I will add the list at the very end of this post). I had copied it into a word document so I could give it my full attention later and going through the list, I got to thinking - who comes up with these lists? Along with that I have been following some reading challenges (not actually participating yet) and have the same feeling about the titles. I can understand themes, especially themes with few books in the genre - for example I found a challenge this morning to read YA LGBT supernatural books. I can't imagine the list is that long, in fact the person in charge had listed less than 10 books and asked for more suggestions and they weren't coming. But when you have an opportunity to come up with a list of books to comment on the reading quality of the world - who gets to determine what books go on the list? Okay maybe that's too broad of a question - maybe what I am really asking is - how does an okay book get on a list with great books and how does classics compete with newer prints?
On the BBC Booklist, I had read quite a large number of the books or had started them. There was one in particular that I started for a bookclub and couldn't get into and strangely that was the month the bookclub fell apart (no discussion on that book and no suggestions for future reads after that). I feel the same way about lists of books suggested for bookclubs. If you join a book club, does that mean you no longer get to read fun books? I have noticed that. I can't stand most of Oprah's suggestions. Maybe I am being picky but I feel like these lists are designed to punish the every day reader because they don't read "smart" enough.
I believe that reading should be fun and it should be varied. I think that sometimes we find great books where we never thought to look so maybe that is the real purpose of booklists.
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The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
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 - Too Many Cooks
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 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
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 X
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 Nighttime - 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 Inferno – Dante
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 - Kazuo 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