Categories
Everything Else

I found this on Alethea’s blog and thought it was cool. It’ll also be a good list for me to have for “good” books that I still need to read. I guess 37 out of 100 isn’t too bad.

Here’s how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read – I skipped this
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE –
4) Reprint this list in your blog

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below. However, there’s no such list on that website, that I can find. *shrug* Either way, here goes…

Bold & Purple means I read it and loved it
Black & Bold means I read it
Bold font & red means I haven’t read it.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (not sure if I’ve read this)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (not sure if I’ve read it)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (not all most some)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 1984 – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa May 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 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 (want to)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by 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 (want to)
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 Meany – 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 (want to)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by 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 – 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
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince by 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

Categories
Food

Strawberry Margarita Cupcakes

I found this recipe online (I can’t recall where) and finally found somewhere to make them for. This week I took them to our Chi O Alum Dinner Club then shared the leftovers with co-workers. I admit they were really good! Thought I’d share the recipe with the blogging world.
Margarita Cupcakes
Ingredients
1 package (18.25 oz. white cake mix (no pudding in the mix)
1 can (10 oz.) frozen Margarita mix, thawed (undiluted) (I used strawberry) 
3 egg whites
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon grated lime zest 
Directions
Preheat oven to 350° F.
Line standard muffin pan with baking cups.
In large bowl, combine cake mix, Margarita mix, egg whites and vegetable oil using electric mixer.
Stir in lime zest; mix completely.
Fill prepared pans 2/3 full.
Bake 22-24 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center of cupcake comes out clean. Cool in pan on cooling rack 5-8 minutes.
Remove cupcakes from pan; cool completely. Frost cooled cupcakes with icing and garnish, if desired, with a strawberry and/or lime twist. Yield: Makes 24 cupcakes.
 
Key Lime Cream Cheese Icing
Ingredients
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 package (8 oz.) cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons key lime juice
1 teaspoon key lime zest or lemon zest
4-5 cups confectioners’ sugar
Directions
In large bowl, cream butter, cream cheese, juice and zest with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
Add 4 cups confectioners’ sugar, one cup at a time; continue beating until light and fluffy.
If icing is too thin add additional confectioners’ sugar 1 tablespoon at a time. Makes about 3 cups icing.