Happy Thanksgiving!!

I am a

horrible person. I read the 7th Harry Potter book for the fourth time instead of Flowers for Algernon. Please forgive me, oh faithful nonexistent readers of my blog. I will finish it and write about it as soon as I finish my 11 page paper on the economics of Communism. And no, I am NOT writing a review of Harry Potter. That's just ridiculous.

Oh! And btw I cannot get the design part of this site to load so my background may be doomed to be fall leaves til the end of time. We'll see.

Facebook Book List

I should be writing a paper but my head hurt so I took a break. This is from facebook. I can't get the background page to load so I decided to add a post instead. I really don't know why.

The original note: The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.  Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.  Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

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 

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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
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
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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
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
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
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 - E.B. 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

Most of the Italicized I tried to read years ago. A couple I read in grade school and can't really remember. But I've read 24 of these books. Huh.

Background Again

So I know people like thsi background but its winter now so I'ma gonna change it.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

   This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've read this book. I really like this book.
   It's not exactly a mystery, more of a crime adventure novel.  From the beginning you know that one of the main characters is a liar and is attempting to cheat his way into a dead boy's inheritance but he feels really guilty about it so you like him anyway. He mainly does it because he loves horses. It makes more sense when you read it.
   This is one of those books that I shouldn't read where anybody can hear me because I end up yelling at the characters. If a book can get me to hate someone who doesn't exist it's a good book. Also, this is a book that will surprise you the first time but not one that once you know the ending there's no point in reading it. That's usually the case with Tey's books.
   Criticism: The ending could possibly be considered a bit contrived. Not going to go into it though. There was a lot of jargon about horses that I did not have a clue about even though when I was younger I loved horses and learned everything I could about them. Although, really, that didn't matter as much as I just made it sound. Aaaand... anything else I would go into would be a spoiler alert. Except that I'm tired of her throwing in main characters of her other books in randomly. But since they are well respected investigators or whatever it does make sense for the non police characters to go to them for advice.
   Rating: Meh. I think I'll throw out another Holy Cow!! Well, great to Holy Cow.
   Read again? And again and again and again.
   You read? Yes. And The Franchise Affair. If you like history, read The Daughter of Time.
   Age; Teen, Young Adult

Russia... What?

   I just looked at my stats and, while there is a lot I do not quite understand, I am wondering who in Alaska and Russia are reading my blog. It's cool and all, but I don't know anyone living there currently. It's probably Google. I love Google.
  But you know what? If you have come here more than once then you should follow me. Just create a blogger.com account and follow me. Please? I'd like to have more than one follower. Not that it really matters but I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from... Unless you speak Russian and not English... Um...

Последующие моем блоге! Почему? Потому что я удивительный! И да я использовал Google Translate для этого, и именно поэтому это не имеет смысла.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

   First off, this is another Kiddie Lit book. And this time, I did not mind so much that I was reading a book meant for grade schoolers.
   This book is basically a compilation of Chinese myths and legends into one long story. It was interesting.  It was educational.  It was inspiring.  Basically, it moralistic story about how to achieve happiness but it was a good read. It made me laugh.
   Criticism: I have nothing really to add about the book itself. I just want to complain about what it said on the cover about this book following the tradition of 'The Wizard of Oz'. I've read 'The Wizard of Oz'. It is nothing like this book. At all. This book is based on a culture's traditions.  Oz was made up randomly by that one guy. The other problem I have is that the cover fulfilled one of my two pet peeves about book covers. It gave away part of the ending. Half the point of the book is that the dragon can't fly and what is he doing on the cover? Flying! I mean really!
   (The other pet peeve is when the cover makes no sense with the book. Example; the version of Out of the Silent Planet that I read had a guy in a space suit even though Lewis never had his characters use them. And the planet the spaceship and man were on  looked nothing like Malacandra could possibly have..
   Random comment: I loooooooved the pictures in this book. They were really pretty :)
   Rating: Good to very good.
   Read again? Maybe. Probably.
   You read? Sure.
   Age level: Pre-teen but a bit long.

go to this site... maybe

http://youarewhatyouread.scholastic.com

Iqbal by Francesco D'Adamo

   Hurray for another Kiddie Lit book! Let's see, where should I start?
   So my teacher pegged this one as a biography. Or maybe it's a memoir because those are fictional. And this book is completely fiction except for the basic outline. Strangely, I  have no problem with this because the author really had no choice. Iqbal was a real person who... couldn't be interviewed. Um... So the author wrote about what he thought Iqbal's life would be like from the eyes of a girl around his age.
   This book focuses on child labor/slavery/bond labor in Pakistan. Iqbal was a slave, not exactly but basically, and Fatima, the main character, was as well. Iqbal gives them hope and then he frees them and then he helps free other children and it's very uplifting and then I don't want to completely give away what happens. One last thing; this is actually a pretty non-graphic book considering its subject matter.
   Criticisms: This is just my personal opinion--which is a dumb thing to say on a blog--but I think that authors need to be very careful when writing through the eyes of a main character who is the opposite gender. I started reading and the voice made me think the main character was a boy. I have nothing more bad to say. That I can think of. Right now. Honestly, I forgot about my blog and already gave it back to the library.
   Rating: Pretty good.
   Read again? Probably not but only because of the intended age group.
   You read?  If you want to. :)  I'm really not passionate about it and there are other books you could find that would be better. But it wasn't bad.

The Island by Gary Paulsen

   I had a bit of trouble getting through this book because it is about a boy who spends a lot of time on an island looking at nature and I kept wanting to go do it myself instead of reading about him doing it. It's basically a story about a boy trying to find out more about himself and the world around him through an island. That's actually all I really have to say.
   This isn't like the books I normally read. Not much really happens, but at the same time a lot of stuff happens? Honestly, it's more of a thinking book than an adventure book. Does that make sense? There's a little section before each chapter that has some sort of profound story and lesson that the main character had learned in the past. Explaining this book would negate reading it. I don't know; I think it was pretty good but it's not one of those books you have to read. I never read those for one thing.
   I think I need to get other people's opinions on this one... but I think only one person I know might have read this book.
   I have no criticisms. Yes, this is really me. I know it's scary, but this was a  pretty decent book.
   Rating: Good.
   Read again? Probably not but it's possible. Actually, yes; I'll probably like it better the second time.
   You read?Yes.