Danielle’s blog

These are the books I definitely want to have read by the end of the summer:

• War and Peace
• It's Not About the Tapas
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• La Casa en Mango Street

Of course, I would like to read more than just these four, but these are my "must-reads" for the summer.

I haven't posted anything related to books in a while, so I figured I would at least write something related to my upcoming reading plans.

1. Finish Angels and Demons before the movie version comes out. This is my second time reading this book and I am doing so in order to refresh my memory on the details. My mom and I are supposed to go see the movie when it comes out on May 15th. I had read and saw Da Vinci Code- I liked the book, the movie was decent enough. Angels and Demons is my favorite of the Robert Langdon books out now. I'm hoping that the movie will be better than the Da Vinci Code movie. We shall see...

2. Finally tackle War and Peace. I bought this book a couple Saturdays ago in preparation for reading it in May with Michelle and possibly a few others from RBC. I have had this one on my "Giant Books to Finally Tackle" list for years now. Next month will finally be when I do this. I think that it will definitely be a greater motivation to start and finish it if I read it with other people.

3. I might try to read The Awakening with RBC if I have time and energy. I'm not entirely sure though, as I know War and Peace will use up a lot of my reading energy.

How are you a better person today than you were ten years ago?
Sponsored by Nature Made.

I have a backbone!

Michelle posted this and I thought it looked interesting, so I'm posting my version. She mentioned that BBC said that most people have only read 6 out of the 100 books on the list. I've read 19 of them, so I guess I'm not as bad off as most people, haha.

Copy and paste - put an X next to the ones you have read. If I tagged you for this note, it's because I believe that you actually may pick up a book or two every once in a while.

1. ( ) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. ( ) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. (x) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. (x) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. (x) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. ( ) The Bible
7. ( ) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. (x) 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. (x) 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. (x) 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
26. ( ) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. ( ) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. (x) 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. (x-but not the whole series) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. ( ) Emma - Jane Austen
35. ( ) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. (x) 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 - AA Milne
41. ( ) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. (x) 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. (x) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. ( ) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. (x) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. ( ) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. ( ) Dune - Frank Herbert (and about 4 others in that series)
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. (x) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. ( ) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. ( ) The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. (x) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (and "Lucky")
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. (x) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. ( ) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. ( ) Ulysses - James JoyceThree
76. (x) 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. (x) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. ( ) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. (x) 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
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. (x) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. ( ) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. ( ) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

If you could choose any time period in which to have been born, which one would you pick?
Submitted by L33tchica.

Either when my grandparents were born (1920s) or when my parents were born (1950s).

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

I finally finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl after about 1 month of milking it. It took me so long because of course, school interfered with my ability to read my own books. I loved this one though. I loved Blue; I could see elements of myself in her and I love how she perceived things and events. I loved all of the references. I found myself googling some of them to see if they were real or made-up. I wonder how Pessl managed to put all of the references in at the right places. Very creative! I loved the conspiracy in the story, as I am fascinated by all sorts of conspiracies. The ending was also great. At first I was kind of annoyed that it was so open, but after I thought about it for a while, I realized that the open-endedness was what made the book so intriguing. It was fun to fill-in the blanks according to how I wanted the story to end. The "Final Exam" portion at the end was genius! I felt terrible though about the situation with her father at the end. It was so sad! I highly recommend this to anyone who hasn't read it!

What keeps you up at night?

Uncertainty about the future.

What's your favorite thing about Monday?

Techno nights at Necto! Haha, it is so much fun!

What's the most complicated part of your life right now?

Everything, it seems...

Do you have any stereotypical Type-A personalities in your life? How does that affect you?

HA! Myself! I am very, very Type-A. It effects me by causing me to stress out about the littlest things and I am neurotic about having things organized. I also have been known to lose my temper when my buttons are pushed too far. In group projects, I am the group member who likes to be the boss and I would much rather do everything just so I can be reassured that it will be done the right way, haha. Being Type-A wears me out...