Fresno Famous

http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/books-that-shaped-america/

I'm not much of a book reader, but I do like books. I like to collect them and hold them and thumb through them. I will actually read some pages in a book, but I can't hardly finish a whole book. The last book I actually bought was Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks in 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia. What I really like is the knowledge that is contained within the book, or the mind of the author and my best ways of getting that knowledge is to listen to the author in an interview, listen to an audio book or watch the author make a presentation about his/her book on C-SPAN. Talking about those ideas is fun, too. Funny how the other tv networks can't seem to find the time to have authors make presentations about books and the ideas in those books. I think it's because of the contraints of commercial tv; whatever the program, they're headed to that 60 second commercial and so they have to make sure the commercial is better than the program and the way they do that is to make the program so light and fluffy as to not conflict with the commercial. 

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/307119-1

When I first saw the Books that Shaped America on C-SPAN I had to get the list and see how many of the books Jocey and I have read. I think this is the way the two rules of this game are gonna go:

A. If your significant other has read the book, the spouse gets , say 1/4 of a read.They always have to tell you every detail of the book.

B. If you've held the book in your hands several times, reading a few pages and thinking about the movie that you've seen at least 5 times, then you get 1/2 a read for that book.

We went through the list and found that we have read a bunch of the books on the list, most in our childhood. But, there are so many great titles and authors I haven't read and I feel bad about not having read some of these.

I went to Barnes and Noble to find a copy of The Call of the Wild, (my all-time favorite) for my granddaughter and to my surprise they have a big selection of these kinds of classics in nice but plain binding for a budget price. There's a lot of these titles I'm going to get just so I can read in them and have them.

The video clearly explains why there are 88 titles, not 100 or 50; it's because the Library of Congress wants us to start a discussion about these books and add the titles we think should be on there. You just need 12 more to make it a hundred.

There are three that I can think of: 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell and Sidhartha by Herman Hesse, but these are not American authors, so they can't be on the list. oh well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_%28novel%29

                                      Loved this book as an eleven year old (not on the list):

                                             This is one I'm reading now, also not on the list:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Shaff

http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/books-that-shaped-america/

America’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.

More information: Read the news release
Visit the online exhibition
Give your input by completing the online survey.

Here are the Library of Congress' 88 books that Shaped America in alphabetical order:

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (1884) D&J
"Alcoholics Anonymous" by anonymous (1939)
"American Cookery" by Amelia Simmons (1796)
"The American Woman's Home" by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1869)
"And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts (1987)
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand (1957)
"The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
"Beloved" by Toni Morrison (1987)
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown (1970) D
"The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (1903) D&J
"The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss (1957) D&J
"Catch-22" by Joseph Heller (1961)
"The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White    (1952) J
"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine (1776) D
"The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" by Benjamin Spock (1946) D&J
"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan (1980)
"A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible" by anonymous (1788)
"The Double Helix" by James D. Watson (1968)
"The Education of Henry Adams" by Henry Adams (1907)
"Experiments and Observations on Electricity" by Benjamin Franklin (1751)
"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury  (1953)
"Family Limitation" by Margaret Sanger (1914)
"The Federalist" by anonymous/ thought to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1787)
"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan (1963)
"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin (1963)
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
"Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell  (1936)
"Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
"A Grammatical Institute of the English Language" by Noah Webster (1783)
"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck (1939) D
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
"Harriet, the Moses of Her People" by Sarah H. Bradford (1901)
"The History of Standard Oil" by Ida Tarbell  (1904)
"History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark" by Meriwether Lewis (1814)
"How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis (1890)
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie (1936) D&J
"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg (1956) D
"The Iceman Cometh" by  Eugene O'Neill (1946)
"Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures" by Federal Writers' Project (1937)
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote (1966)
"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison (1952)
"Joy of Cooking" by Irma Rombauer (1931) J
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair (1906)
"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman (1855) D
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) J
"Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy" by Louisa May Alcott (1868) J
"Mark, the Match Boy" by Horatio Alger Jr. (1869)
"McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic Primer" by William Holmes McGuffey (1836)
"Moby-Dick; or The Whale" by Herman Melville (1851) J
"The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" by Frederick Douglass (1845)
"Native Son" by Richard Wright (1940)
"New England Primer" by anonymous (1803)
"New Hampshire" by Robert Frost (1923)
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac (1957) D
"Our Bodies, Ourselves" by Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1971)
"Our Town: A Play" by Thornton Wilder (1938) J
"Peter Parley's Universal History" by Samuel Goodrich (1837)
"Poems" by Emily Dickinson (1890) D
"Poor Richard Improved and The Way to Wealth" by Benjamin Franklin (1758)
"Pragmatism" by William James (1907)
"The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D." by Benjamin Franklin (1793)
"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane (1895)
"Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
"Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey (1912)
"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) J
"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" by Alfred C. Kinsey (1948)
"Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson (1962)
"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
"The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner (1929)
"Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams (1923)
"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert E. Heinlein (1961)
"A Street in Bronzeville" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams (1947) J
"A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America" by Christopher Colles (1789)
"Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914)
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (1960) J
"A Treasury of American Folklore" by Benjamin A. Botkin (1944)
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith (1943) J
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
"Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader (1965)
"Walden; or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)
"Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak (1963)
"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum (1900)
"The Words of Cesar Chavez" by Cesar Chavez (2002)

I have read 11 of the books, Jocey has read 16 of the books. How many have you read?

A new, still-shrink-wrapped, 3-DVD set of House MD Season 1 to the person who has read the most books on this list.