So Ashamed: Top 8 Books I Can't Believe I Haven't Read

Thanks, Ryan, for giving me the idea for this week's list.

I've always been a big reader. The first book I ever read by myself (I think I was 7) was Tom Saywer. Granted, it was a Children's Condensed Classics version with a picture on every other page. But I read the unabridged version a year later, so I can still claim it, I think.

I read Pride and Predjudice when I was 10 and Gone With the Wind when I was 12. I spent the summer between 6th and 7th grade reading Shakespeare. I still remember whole sonnets without trying. One day while I was goofing around on Priscilla's charminly Elizabethan balcony, I discovered that I had accidentally memorized whole scenes from Romeo and Juliet.

I once got grounded for a year because I kept getting caught staying up till the wee small hours of the morning reading when I was supposed to be sleeping. And that was the only time I ever got grounded. Did you catch that? The only thing I ever got grounded for was reading too much, people!

I am a big, big book nerd.

So you'd think I was pretty well-read, wouldn't you? I thought that, too. Until I realized how many of the BIG books I haven't read. I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit this, but confession is good for the soul. Maybe the shame will motivate me to read some of these:

1.) To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

2.) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

3.) Moby Dick, Herman Melville

4.) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

5.) Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

6.) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

7.) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

8.) A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

I know. I can't believe it either. You'd think I would have read at least half of them as required reading for all the jillion English/Lit classes I've taken. If someone had assigned them, I would have read them. But NOOOOOOOO. They were not on the list. So I ignored them.

I'm so ashamed.