"A Good Book Has No Ending"

I promise not all of my blogs are going to revolve around the list, but then again, I can't really guarantee that...so...I guess I shouldn't promise it.  Number 22 is to "Read 50 of the Top 100 Books according to Random House."  Well, upon further review of this, I found out that Random House actually has two lists of Top 100 Books, The Board's List and The Reader's List.  Now, there are several books that appear on both lists, so in order to compile my list of 50, I started there.  The first 25 or so on my list appear on both of the Random House's lists.  The rest are then a pretty even mixture of books from both lists.  In full disclosure, I did include a few books that I have already read.  I did this because I "read" these books in high school or college, but I don't remember them very well...I'm not really quite sure I actually read them...So, without further ado, here's my reading list:

  1.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
  2.  Ulysses - James Joyce
  3.  Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  4.  The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
  5.  Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
  6.  Lolita - Vladamir Nabokov
  7.  Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
  8.  1984 - George Orwell
  9.  I, Claudius - Robert Graves
10.  To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
11.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
12.  Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
13.  Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
14.  Animal Farm - George Orwell
15.  As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
16.  Lord of the Flies - William Golding
17.  The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
18.  Light in August - William Faulkner
19.  On the Road - Jack Kerouac
20.  The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
21.  The Catcher in the Rye - JD Sallinger
22.  A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
23.  A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
24.  Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
25.  The Call of the Wild - Jack London
26.  The Magus - John Fowles
27.  One Lonely Night - Mickey Spillane
28.  The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
29.  Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
30.  An American Tragedy - Theodore Drieser
31.  Native Son - Richard Wright
32.  All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
33.  The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
34.  Howard's End - E M Forster
35.  Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
36.  The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
37.  Deliverance - James Dickey
38.  The Maltese Falcon - Dasheill Hamlet
39.  Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
40.  Sophie's Choice - William Styron
41.  Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
42.  Battlefield Earth - L Ron Hubbard
43.  Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
44.  A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45.  The Handmaid's Tale -  Margaret Atwood
46.  Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
47.  Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
48.  Something Wicked this Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
49.  The Door Into Summer - Robert Heinlen
50.  It - Stephen King

Good thing I really like to read!  I've thought about making a short list of alternates just in case I start reading one of these books and it's so bad that I can't finish it...oh well, I'll cross that bridge is I get there, but rest assured, you'll get a review of each one that I read.

Have you read any of these books?  What's your review?

~Blevins - out!

From Here to Eternity

Well, I watched my first movie for the list.  It was From Here to Eternity (1953), starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, and Frank Sinatra (love him!).  It takes place in Hawaii just before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  The entire movie is centers around these Army guys.  This one guy (Prew, played by Montgomery Clift) gets transferred to Hawaii and the Captain finds out he’s a good boxer.  Unfortunately, Prew doesn’t want to box anymore so the Captain decides to make his life really difficult by always getting him in trouble and stuff.  Prew is able to rise above some of this by meeting and falling in love with this chick played by Donna Reed.  He also becomes buddies with the guy played by Frank Sinatra (both Sinatra and Reed won Oscars for their supporting roles in this movie).   There’s this other guy named Milton played by Burt Lancaster.  He’s a sergeant that has a soft spot for Prew and tries to take care of him, but he’s kinda busy having an affair with the Captain’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr.  There’s a scene on the beach between Lancaster and Kerr that many people say is one of the best love scenes ever.  I guess it was ok.  I definitely liked the fact that it was not nearly as gratuitous as “love” scenes today, but I didn’t really get all that emotional about it.  Overall, it had a kinda crappy ending, but then again, war never is all that pretty (even though all of this movie happens before America entered WWII) and not all movies can end happily-ever-after.  I really love movies about this time in history (WWII) and I imagine that this was quite a ground breaking movie since it was made less than ten years after the war had ended.  I’m glad I watched this movie, it was worth it…plus, it had Ernest Borgnine in it too, and he will always hold a special place in my heart…(because he’s Mermaid Man in Spongebob Squarepants…)

~Blevins - out!

#23 “Watch 50 of the Top 100 movies”

I love to watch movies…Nick and I have an extensive movie collection and probably watch three to four movies per week (on average).  Unfortunately, I have always felt that my repertoire of movies is somewhat lacking in quality, hence number 23 on my list, “Watch 50 of the Top 100 movies.”  I went to the American Film Institute to find out about their Top 100.  After reviewing the list, I then eliminated any movies I have seen more than once.  This meant that I nixed Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather (Part I and II), The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Star Wars, The African Queen, E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial, West Side Story, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Sound of Music, M*A*S*H, Fantasia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, American Graffiti, Rocky, and My Fair Lady (I must say I was pretty surprised at how many I‘ve seen more than once…).  Then, I decided to eliminate any movies I’ve seen pretty recently and can remember really well, this cut out Fargo, The Deer Hunter, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  This meant that I needed to narrow down the 87movies left down to 50.  Here are the 50 I chose and the year they were released:


  1.  Citizen Kane (1941)
  2.  Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
  3.  On the Waterfront (1954)
  4.  Schindler’s List (1993)*
  5.  Singin’ In the Rain (1952)
  6.  Sunset Boulevard (1950)
  7.  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
  8.  Some Like it Hot (1959)
  9.  All About Eve (1950)
10.  Psycho (1960)*
11.  Chinatown (1974)
12.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
13.  The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
14.  2001:  Space Odyssey (1968)
15.  The Maltese Falcon (1941)
16.  Raging Bull (1980)
17.  Dr. Strangelove (1964)
18.  Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
19.  Apocalypse Now (1979)
20.  Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
21.  Annie Hall (1977)
22.  High Noon (1952)
23.  Midnight Cowboy (1969)
24.  The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
25.  Doctor Zhivago (1965)
26.  Double Indemnity (1944)
27.  North by Northwest (1959)
28.  Rear Window (1954)
29.  King Kong (1933)
30.  The Birth of a Nation (1915)
31.  A Street Car Named Desire (1951)
32.  A Clockwork Orange (1971)
33.  Taxi Driver (1976)
34.  Jaws (1975)
35.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
36.  The Philadelphia Story (1940)
37.  From Here to Eternity (1953)
38.  Amadeus (1984)
39.  All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
40.  The Third Man (1949)
41.  Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
42.  Vertigo (1958)
43.  Tootsie (1982)*
44.  Stagecoach (1939)
45.  Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
46.  Network (1976)
47.  The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
48.  An American in Paris (1951)
49.  Shane (1953)*
50.  The French Connection (1971)
*These are movies I have seen, but don’t really remember them that well.

Now, I must admit that I’m not entirely thrilled that all of these movies are older than I am (by many years with the exception of Tootise).  We’ll see how this goes.  I’ll be sure to write my own review of each movie as I watch it.  The really cool thing is that after this, there will only be 37 movies left for me to watch of the Top 100.  Maybe that will be on my next list…:)

~Blevins - out!