#59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

I almost forgot I had a chance to read this book before my massive amounts of work for grad school had started !!

I have to say I LOVED this book. As someone who went to school for special education, reading this through the voice of someone with autism was so insightful to how they think and how their brain works. The significance of the amount of red and yellow cars was so fascinating.

And the big twist at the end? Awesome!!!

I think that anybody who wants to become a special education teacher, Heck any kind of teacher, this should be mandatory reading !!!!!

I give this book a 5 out of 5 because it's so insightful into the mind of a young students with autism.

Book #18 Catcher in the Rye

So I said I was going to read The Bell Jar first. However I recently started grad school and have been very busy reading YA book after Ya book for one of my classes.

One of our assigned readings was The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. So at least I can cross that one off my list!!

I really thought I was going to enjoy this book. As a teenager I was rebellious like Holden Caulfield, not to the extent as he was but still it was there.

First lets talk about the plot. Holden gets kicked out of his 4th prep school for awful grades. He gets into a fight with his roommate and leaves to go wander around NYC for the weekend or however long. ( this is all I literally got out of this book)

I enjoyed the beginning while Holden was at the prep school. I enjoyed his interactions with his teacher ( his history teacher i believe?) I also enjoyed the chapters where he interacts with his roommates and suitemates. It reminded me of the book Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld Which I loved and have lost count of how many times I've read it.

But then he leaves to go bum around NYC and it just rambles. He came across to me as a whiny spoiled rich kid. He had no sense of how much of his parents money he was wasting by getting kicked out of all these different schools. I eventually found him to be very annoying, and couldn't wait to actually finish the book and throw it across the room I was so annoyed. I do find it interesting that his sister Phoebe seemed more mature and down to earth than Holden!!

And lets take a minute to discuss his language !! OMG I don't think there was one page free of swearing. No wonder this book is challenged and banned so often !

So my overall rating of this book? 1 out of 5. Mainly because I enjoyed the beginning and the parts with his sister. But also because I found the rest boring and the language irritated me.

The Official List

So I found this the other day and thought," I don't think I've read most of these, and I love to read." So I'm going to be working my through the books that I have no yet read.

I have put the titles I have read in bold print. And if you count those up I've only read 15 outta those 100 !!! So my mom and I talked about doing our own book club to work through these books and our first book will be #76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. So when I begin reading it I will be posting about it and what I think about it. Happy Reading !!!

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 ( Have it )
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte ( not looking forward to reading this, I hated the movie)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Epectations – Charles Dickens (Have it)
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 Faulks
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
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 (have it)
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ( have it)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (have it)
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 (have it)
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 Huley
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 – Aleandre 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 ( Have it)
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-Eupery
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 – Aleandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo