I stiffed you guys a book post yesterday because, frankly, the last book I read was yet another book about meth addiction and there's really only so much one wants to think about a topic like that.

And I was pissy yesterday, too. I was walking around yelling at people, feeling like some tragedy was on the verge of occurring and I needed to be on guard.

After some time with my beloved stationary bike and elliptical machine, I felt a little better. Better enough to write for awhile and not bite off the head of anyone in my immediate family.

Today, things are different. I have a god-awful headache for 10 a.m., but I'm not feeling tragic yet. And I finished two books yesterday:

and  

And here is what I have to say about them:

The Bermudez Triangle is typical Maureen Johnson - effortless and interesting third person narrative, quirky characters, and an emphasis on the dynamic of close relationships. Fans won't be disappointed, but the middle kind of lost my attention for a bit.

Marley and Me is a guy talking about his dog. For nine whole discs of audiobook. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Grogan is mildly hilarious and Marley is downright mentally deranged, but nine whole discs?? I could have done with 5, 6 maybe. After awhile, the anecdotes start to repeat themselves, and there's only so many descriptive phrases regarding dog poop that one can stomach.

But I stuck with it. So that's probably a better indicator of quality than my above criticisms.

And then this morning I found this nifty website:

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

which I guess is lifted directly from a book by the same title. I thought about cutting and pasting and just bolding the ones I've read to share with you all,  but that would just be pointless, since I've read about 2% of them. So I'll make you a little list, instead! And I color-coded it. Books my dad to read me as a child. Books I read for high school. Books I read for college. Books I read on my own free accord.

Pre-1700s -

• None

1700s -

• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

• A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

1800s -

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgard Allan Poe
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Hard Times by Charles Dickens
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carrol

1900s -

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
• They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath
• Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
• The Shining by Stephen King
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt

2000s

• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Curious Incident With of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

37 books. Out of 1001. Kind of evenly split between the categories. I wonder how well I would score on the 1001 children's books you should read before you die. Maybe I should just write that list myself, if I can't find one.