Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Eli Loves Books!

He was asked to make a collection for Scouts and he decided to collect books. Tonight we took pictures of his collection. This is so HIM! And the best part, he's read almost every single one, several times.

I asked him tonight at dinnertime what his favorite picture book was, and he asked if the Encyclopedia counted. Love that boy!

Friday, September 19, 2008

Couple of Book Reviews

March March by Geraldine Brooks


My review


rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beautifully written book about what the father of the March family was doing during "Little Women." Very eye-opening about the Civil War - I appreciated all the research that went into it. I loved how she threw a "rose-colored glasses" idealist into an impossible situation, how he finally came to grips with reality and learned to move on. I found his relationship with Grace believable - until the end. His emotional attachment to her seemed disingenuous to his character.

I liked the chapter that was from Marmee's point of view. So interesting to find out how differently they saw the same event!


View all my reviews.

The Lovely Bones The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold


My review


rating: 2 of 5 stars
Too grisly and disturbing for me! So much sadness and depression. I found it hard to read because it's yet another book - kind of like The Memory Keeper's Daughter - in which the family seems to have no coping skills and just falls apart completely for decades in the face of tragedy. And it's also similar to The Memory Keeper's Daughter in that both families seemed to have no good friends or extended family to get them through the trials. I think that was a convenience for the authors to make their stories more depressing. But I think real life is very different and much more hopeful.


View all my reviews.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Whatchya Readin'?

So, I saw this cool list on a friend's blog - I'd love to see what you've read and especially what you've loved! Enjoy!

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

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 admit there were sections of the Old Testament that I skipped!)
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 - Someday!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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 -I just reread this last month
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 Thank you Erin and John - C&P was an awesome b-day present last year! :)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll Adam's Uncle David chastised me for not having read this, so I did.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy Possibly my all-time favorite book.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen - How have I not read this yet??!!
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - can't do it yet with a 6 yr. old son. Someday I'll read it.
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - love it.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- oh please, why is this on this list?!
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Read this when I was 12.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - Honestly can't remember if I've read this, so I guess I'll have to say no...
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
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Adam read it a couple years ago, and he had a great sea captains' voice he would use whenever he talked about it
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 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
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
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

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo