Thinking of You

I found a lot of treasures in the room I worked my magic on. For some strange reason I kept seeing things that made me think of other bloggers. I haven't decided if this makes me a very thoughtful person or if it just makes me a real nut case.


First up is ChrisB over at Ms Cellania. I want to read it. I brought it home with me. It is just so hard for me to get into. I hope it gets easier. Anyway, when I saw this I immediately thought of her and Beccy.
This entire front row on this shelf made me think of Jenni over at Prairie Air.
This made me think of Nikki from My Husband Calls me Weird and my BFF Fianna. Nikki because of this and Fianna because she used to be my own lil' Strawberry Shortcake!
I found this magazine.
Inside the magazine I found something that made me think of AFF, it happened to be on the same day she posted this!
I found one thing that contained many more things. It made me think of another blogger but there was so many that it will have to be a post all it's own!
I do have one more for today. I found a book that was one of my favorites and one of my hubby's favorites all in one!


HIS:
and HERS:

Top 100 books of what I don't know.

So I saw this meme type thing over at Nine Acres, and thought I would do it too. It goes along nicely with what I have been blogging about recently!

Here is what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize the books you LOVE.
3) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

I didn't strike out any, but there are a few on here I have no intention of reading. I also thought if I used bold and italics together that it was too hard to tell which ones I LOVED. So if I Italicized it I obviously read it and LOVED it. Hey what if I make it RED? Makes it stand out easier! And I just realized due to my background the bold is hard to make out so bold will be in yellow.

1 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
6 The Bible ( I have read parts of it, but not the whole thing!)
7 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens
11 Little Women Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare William Shakespeare
15 Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams (saw the movie)
26 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck(on my must read list)
29 Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll(saw the movie and it's on my list of need to read)
30 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy (started it, but didn't finish,plan to)
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
37 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh AA Milne
41 Animal Farm George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown(saw the movie)
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies William Golding
50 Atonement Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi Yann Martel
52 Dune Frank Herbert(love the movie)
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
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
62 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road Jack Kerouac(on my must read list)
67 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary Helen Fielding (saw the movie)
69 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
72 Dracula Bram Stoker(saw the movie)
73 The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath
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
82 Cloud Atlas David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple Alice Walker(saw the movie)
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven Mitch Albom
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(on my must read list)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl(love the movie and I LOVE James and the Giant Peach, the book not the movie)
100 Les Misérables Victor Hugo

Now I feel bad for not having read more. Guess most on this list are just not in my kinda genre of fave books! Or should I say not my cup of tea?! iPost said it was a BBC list. No wonder the Little House on the Prairie series was not on there, or any Vonnegut. Maybe someday I'll make a list of MY favorite books that I have read!

Books

So, yesterday I showed you the magic I posses. I said that I would show you all the books. I just now realized I didn't take pictures of ALL the books in the book room,that or I didn't take quality pictures. So I only have 5 today. I have a post in the making of things I found that made me think of blogger buds. Then I have one that will be full of other treasures found in that room. There is also another one that I want to do that is more like a meme but it is all about books, which is rather fitting. I just have a ton of posts in my head and pictures to share. I won't make any promises as to when they will show up. On with the show! Click on any shot to big it. See if you can find a favorite book!
In the one below there is more books below the last shelf you can see in the picture.
One close up.As you can tell from this photo I double shelved the books. Mom hates that, I do too, but I had no other choice. There are only a couple of shelves on this wooden shelving, that my Dad built, that aren't double shelved!
Just FYI, the books shown in this room only represent about an 1/8th of the amount of books my Mom owns. Fianna and my hubby knows. Tell them I am not exaggerating.

A Simple Book

After almost all of my commenter's from my previous post were echoing my feelings about the day after Christmas I thought I'd share a book that I received for Christmas. I usually don't read "new" books until I've gotten through my current reading list. I felt this was an exception, especially when I wanted to recapture the joy of Christmas. The book is "Simplify Your Christmas: 100 Ways to Reduce the Stress and Recapture the Joy of the Holidays" by Elaine St. James.

If you click the link you can actually read up to page 46, if you like what you read then you can go check it out at your library. I am enjoying it and will be revamping my Christmas next year. I think what I am realizing most is that there really are a ton of preconceived notions and expectations that are preconditioned or burned into our psyche. I think that is what I am struggling with most. So far reading this book has helped me to feel that it is ok to let those things go. The more I read the more I wanted to go out and buy copies for everyone! If you have been feeling like I have, I hope that this book will help you in some way.

De-railing Update

Recently I wrote about getting de-railed. I wanted to give a small update on that topic. I made it to page 822 out of 870 before I went to see Harry Potter 5 last Thursday(July 19), in the kick ass theater near my hometown in KS. I had gotten sick on Tuesday and that slowed down my reading too so I think I did rather well. I almost completed my goal, I know I would have read the entire book before seeing the flick if it hadn’t been for that damn cold!

Now, the movie was a huge disappointment. Maybe it was due to my sickness. I understand fully that one can not fit an 870 page book into a 2 and a half hour film. However, there is no reason why one has to change the sequence of events, change totally how something happened, add small things that where never mentioned in the book and I mean small but still noticeable to me. I was also very disappointed that they (whoever they are) were unable to convey Umbridges pure evil vile-ness. She was not the villainess in the movie that she was in the book. I loathed that character, my blood boiled ie: high blood pressure, I wanted to reach into the book and kill her. I despised that character. I felt none of that in the movie.

I think I am done rambling on about this movie. I am nothing more than a freaky geek who refused to take my oldest with me when I saw it for the first time because it was MY first time to see it, even though it would have been his first time to see it as well I was the only one that has read the books, he has only seen the movies. I am the bigger fan, I have read all the books therefore I felt I should be allowed the pleasure of seeing HP5 for the first time ALONE without distraction from my spawn. So I guess that makes me a mean freaky geek but I do not care. He will get to see it in the theater; I just didn’t want him along with me for my first time.

Now I am off to finish the last 48 pages, then I will start my re-read of HP6 so that I can sometime this year start the final Harry Potter book. I bought it already, need to check to make sure I didn't get the version missing pages at least before I start it anyway. The suspense is getting to me and I am considering skipping my re-read of #6 but the last time I read it was when it came out what? 2 years ago? At least if I re-read #6 then that will let me prolong the end, since we are lead to believe there will be no more.... which by the tears I have read about by other readers of HP7 there really may not be anymore but I can't think of that now. I'd like to say JK would be a complete idiot not to keep cashing in on her empire, I'd be greedy if I was in her shoes, even though she is set for the rest of her life and her kids lives and her kids kids lives..... All I hope is that I can stay away from any spoilers of book 7. I am no speed reader, I have 3 lil' men, a house, a hubby and I blog so it may be 2010 before I get HP7 finished! I will savor every page! I hope and plead that whoever produces films 6 and 7 doesn't do what the ppl that produced film 5 did.

I got de-railed

I had the best intentions. I made a plan, a schedule.

I had started re-reading Harry Potter 5 later than I wanted to. I can't remember how many pages I had read when I decided to make my schedule to help me finish on time. I do know I had 15 days to do it, counting down to the opening of the 5th movie. I figured out that I would need to read 45 pages a day until the 11th of July.

According to the little pieces of paper I put in my book... I have 9 days left of reading. I have 430 pages to read in less than 9 days try more like 2 or 3 days. I would like to see it this weekend. There are a few spectacular movie theaters near my hometown. The movie theaters where we currently live SUCK.

Bad news: I have my work cut out for me.
Good news: I am back on track!