The Book Worm

I
That chill is in the air
Which the wise know well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
Will soon be under snow.

The sun sets in a cloud
And is not seen.
Beauty, that spoke aloud,
Addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here
To feed on what has been.

Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.

II
Branch by branch
This tree has died. Green only
Is one last bough, moving its leaves in the sun.

What evil ate its root, what blight,
What ugly thing,
Let the mole say, the bird sing;
Or the white worm behind the shedding bark
Tick in the dark.

You and I have only one thing to do:
Saw the trunk through.

III
Distressed mind, forbear
To tease the hooded Why:
That shape will not reply.

From the warm chair
To the wind’s welter
Flee, if storm’s your shelter.

But no, you needs must part,
Fling him his release—
On whose ungenerous heart
Alone you are at peace.

IV
Not dead of wounds, not borne
Home to the village on a litter of branches, torn
By splendid claws and the talk all night of the villagers,
But stung to death by gnats
Lies Love.

What swamp I sweated through for all these years
Is at length plain to me.

V
Poor passionate thing,
Even with this clipped wing how well you flew!—though not so far as the forest.

Unwounded and unspent, serene but for the eye’s bright trouble,
Was it the lurching flight, the unequal wind under the lopped feathers that brought you down,
To sit in folded colours on the empty level field,
Visible as a ship, paling the yellow stubble?

Rebellious bird, warm body foreign and bright,
Has no one told you?—Hopeless is your flight
Towards the high branches. Here is your home,
Between barnyard strewn with grain and the forest tree.
Though Time refeather the wing,
Ankle slip the ring,
The once-confined thing
Is never again free.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Asterisk the ones on your list 

*Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

Harry Potter series- J.K. Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The Bible

*Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

*Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

*Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

*Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

*The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch – George Eliot

*Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

*The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

*Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

*Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

*Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

Emma – Jane Austen

Persuasion – Jane Austen

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

*Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

*Animal Farm – George Orwell

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

*The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

*Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

*The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Atonement – Ian McEwan

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Dune – Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

*A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

*Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

*The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

*Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

 *Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

*On The Road – Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

*Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

*Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

Dracula – Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

Ulysses – James Joyce

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

Germinal – Emile Zola

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession – AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

Charlotte’s Web – EB White

The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

Watership Down – Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I completely forgot Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Its the true story about a boy who moved from Brooklyn to Ireland with an alcoholic father. Absolutely depressing and fabulous. They also made a movie of it.