Dorky me

So last week I decided to find the list of books that Rory Gilmore read in Gilmore Girls. I want to try to read them all, and in my search I found this -- http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/758.The_Rory_Gilmore_Book_Club and I am in LOVE. My two loves have come together, books and Gilmores. :)

2009 100 book reading challenge update

1. The Female of the Species – Joyce Carol Oates (Jan 3rd)
2. Twilight – Stephenie Meyer (Jan 4th)
3. Harvesting the Heart – Jodi Picoult (Jan 9th)
4. American Wife – Curtis Sittenfield (Jan 12th)
5. New Moon – Stephenie Meyer (Jan. 16th)
6. Eclipse – Stephenie Meyer ( Jan 20th)
7. Breaking Dawn – Stephenie Meyer (Jan 24th)
8. The Boleyn Inheritance – Phillipa Gregory – (Feb. 23rd)
9. Wives and Sisters – Natalie Collins (Feb 26th)
10. The Hours – Michael Cunningham (March 9th)
11. Monster – Walter Dean Myers (March 12th)

And I am currently making my way through book number 12.. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates.. Always looking for new suggestions!

2009 A-Z Reading Challenge Update

Books

A-
B- The Boleyn Inheritance - Phillippa Gregory
C-
D-
E-
F- The Female of the Species – Joyce Carol Oates
G-
H- Harvesting the Heart – Jodi Picoult
I-
J-
K-
L-
M-
N-New Moon, Stephanie Meyer
O-
P-
Q-
R-
S-
T- Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
U-
V-
W- Wives and Sisters –Natalie Collins
X-
Y-
Z-

Authors
A-
B-
C- The Hours - Michael Cunningham
D-
E-
F-
G-
H-
I-
J-
K-
L-
M-
N-
O-
P-
Q-
R-
S- American Wife – Curtis Sittenfield
U-
V-
W-
X-
Y-
Z-

Some of my favorite quotes from The Hours

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it's as simple and ordinary as that.

Still, there is this sense of missed oppurtunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment.

What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk o a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at that time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

What is your reading personality?

Taken from.. http://www.bookbrowse.com/quiz/


Your Personality: All-Rounder!

Your responses showed you fitting equally into all four reading personalities:
Involved Reader: You don't just love to read books, you love to read about books. For you, half the fun of reading is the thrill of the chase - discovering new books and authors, and discussing your finds with others.
Exacting Reader: You love books but you rarely have as much time to read as you'd like - so you're very particular about the books you choose.
Serial Reader: Once you discover a favorite writer you tend to stick with him/her through thick and thin.
Eclectic Reader: You read for entertainment but also to expand your mind. You're open to new ideas and new writers, and are not wedded to a particular genre or limited range of authors.

BBC and Reading

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?"
Instructions:Copy, paste, put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (That's not fair. I've read a lot of Shakespeare but the complete works?!?!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
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 X
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
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
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 X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X (Half-way through it.. )
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 X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
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 Inferno - Dante
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 X
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - 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 X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

24.. Not bad.. but not good.. there are alot on here on my "Need to Read" list.. so maybe when I do this in 2010 I will be further along.. :)

You're packing your bag for a desert island—the one with no electricity—what 5 books do you take with you?

This is insanely tough for me.

I would want to say at least one of the Twilight books, but I don't know which one. I may have to say New Moon, because I think that captures the raw emotion of Edward leaving and him coming back, and there isn't a lot of Jacob being ridiculous in it, so I think New Moon. However, I LOVED Breaking Dawn,minus Jacob and Bella not freaking getting a damn abortion already. So... I suppose New Moon, out of those...

New Moon

I'd have to pick a Jodi Picoult novel because I love her stuff, so i think I will go with Change of Heart by her because I have yet to read it and I know I'd love it... so I guess that is 2..

Change of Heart

I also really want to read more Jane Austen and if I was stuck on a deserted island, I would have to read it because there would be no excuse... So now which one.. hmmm Sense and Sensibility or Pride and and Prejudice? I think Pride and Prejudice..

Pride and Prejudice

And since I guess there will be no alcohol on this island unless a Pirates of the Carribbean occurs, I think I would like a book about my other love soo..

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

and for my last book...

Catcher and The Rye..

gotta have a high school love on there.. :)

Read in February 2009

Well January started out with a bang in the reading department, but darn Twilight made February a little harder to find good reads to follow that up. At the end of the month I did kick my butt back into gear and so I read a whopping 2 books all of February.

8. The Boleyn Inheritance – Phillipa Gregory – (Feb. 23rd)I was slightly dissapointed by this one and slightly intrigued. It had been a full year since I read The Other Boleyn Girl, and while I thought I remembered a lot, I should have re-read it right before this one, or had read an overview. It was narraroted in different perspectives. One was Jane Boleyn who was married to George, who she testified against in The Other Boleyn Girl, which sent him and his sister Queen Anne to their death. I had kind of forgotten how sneaky she was. Wow, what an interesting character. Definetly self-involved and clearly delusional. Whether the delusions are protecting herself from herself, or how she is, is kind of up to interpretation. In the end she gets what she justly deserves. Another persepctive, is Anne of Cleves, who is sent to be married off to King Henry VIII. She pisses him off at first sight and he pretty much finds a reason to get their marriage annulled from the beginning. Oddly enough he spares her life, though she can never live fully free of the thought that he may come to have her killed for some reason. Another persepective is from young Katherine Howard, who in a roundabout way becomes queen at a very very young age and the simliarities between and her cousin Anne Boleyn are quite similiar. Like all the other wives of Henry VIII, the pressure is on to have a male heir. Obviously, not easy with a King near death and she manages to get herself into some trouble.

I enjoyed the premise of the book but sometimes the writing or the actions of a character irked me. Not enough to turn me off from more Phillppa Gregory but enough to not love this one as much as The Other Boleyn Girl.

9. Wives and Sisters – Natalie Collins (Feb 26th)Wow. This is written by an Ex-mormon about a girl who grows up in a mormon household most would think was abusive. Given events that happened to her as a young child, she has grown up openingly questioning the church and this pits her against her family. Her family dynamic is very interesting. Her father is very strict and quick to discipline and her mother died when she was 15, when she was giving birth to a child her father wanted to help populate his celestial family. Her brother is killed on a missionary trip and her younger sisters aren't without struggle. When she is in colllege she connects with her mothers sister who was disowned from the family for being a lesbian. This is a blessing for her when she falls into a deep depression and then gets raped. Her relationship with men is also very interesting. She starts out searching for anyone to piss of her dad but by the end of the book she is making better man choices.

Very interesting and nice to hear a viewpoint of one questioning religion that was all around them, engulfing them their entire life.Sometimes the writing was a lil shabby and sometimes I wasn't sure about the way conversations were worded, but in the end it was written by a former mormon about former mormons who aren't that crazy and let loose to begin with!Overall, two great books for the short month of February!

Books read in January

1. The Female of the Species – Joyce Carol Oates (Jan 3rd)
2. Twilight – Stephenie Meyer (Jan 4th)
3. Harvesting the Heart – Jodi Picoult (Jan 9th)
4. American Wife – Curtis Sittenfield (Jan 12th)
5. New Moon – Stephenie Meyer (Jan. 16th)
6. Eclipse – Stephenie Meyer ( Jan 20th)
7. Breaking Dawn – Stephenie Meyer (Jan 24th)The Twilight Series by far, were the best group of books I read this month. Really recommend them to anyone who hasn't read them yet. I also really enjoyed Harvesting the Heart and American Wife. Would definetly recommend any of them. Good book reading month. :)