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Valentine’s Day Gifts

Julie — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:12:21 +0000

Valentine’s Day is coming up soon, which means it’s time to start thinking about what you want to get for that special someone in your life. I always end up buying personalized gifts from RedEnvelope for Valentine’s Day because I love having engraved stuff all over my house. Coffee mugs, picture frames, champagne flutes, business card holders… practically everything we own has either our initials or our names on it!

Anyway, if you’re stuck for gift ideas, all you have to do is spend a few minutes at RedEnvelope and you’ll come up with something good!

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Best and Worst Books of 2011

Julie — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:02:39 +0000

The title of that post is a bit misleading. This list is a compilation of the best and worst books that I read in 2011, not of books that were published in 2011.

As usual, my opinion is just that and isn’t meant to be a final pronouncement about anything. My main goal when reading a book is to be entertained, so that’s how these titles were judged. If you want to debate or discuss the storytelling techniques of a particular author or the literary merit of a work, you’re definitely in the wrong place!

(Links go to my reviews.)

Fervent Reader’s Best Books of 2011

Fervent Reader’s Worst Books of 2011

Book Meme

Julie — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:19:23 +0000

I found this list over at a blog called Still Learning, and thought it looked like fun to go through. I’m not going to tag anyone, but here are the instructions if you’d like to play along. (I’ve read 66, btw.)
Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• 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.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouak
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton?
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Christmas 2010

Julie — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 22:14:37 +0000

So now that the holiday is over, I can finally sit back and relax with some books! I received quite a few books this year, as you might expect, but also got some very interesting and unusual christmas ornaments that I can’t wait to use next year. I started collecting unusual ornaments a couple years ago because I just got tired of the tree being covered in those typical colored balls. Now I get ornaments in animal shapes, ornaments that open up to reveal secret compartments, ornaments with sports team logos, etc. It makes for a more interesting tree, IMO, and just adds to the festive spirit of the season.

Anyway, I hope you had a terrific time with your family and other loved ones, and are ready to close out the year in style!

Enriched Edition Kindle Books

Julie — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:47:27 +0000

Have you heard about these new “enriched edition” Kindle books that are currently being offered? I just stumbled across them today as I was looking at Michael Connelly’s latest book, The Reversal. Enriched editions sound more like video games than books, which makes me anxious to try one!

No, you don’t need to hook up to an xbox 360 in order to take advantage of the special features in an enriched edition. The extras include things like audio and video clips, as well as interactive maps. (Well, that’s what’s included for The Reversal… I’m not sure what other titles come with.). And though this might sound like something you’d need a home gaming system to navigate, that’s not the case. You will, however, need an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, as the Kindle device isn’t sophisticated enough to handle video and interactive maps.

Anyway, I’d really love to try one of these enriched editions on my iPad, but the thing costs $16.99! For that kind of money, I could get two standard Kindle books or a used xbox video game or something. I’ll need to think about whether or not it’s worth spending the extra dough on this title.

Happy Birthday, Agatha Christie!

Julie — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:17:17 +0000

I was fooling around on Google earlier this morning, mostly looking for epiduo reviews to see if that stuff would work for my skin, when I came across a blurb stating that today would have been Agatha Christie’s 120th birthday. To honor the occasion, Google.co.uk has this awesome Christie tribute doodle on their homepage. One of the o’s seems to have been done in. Fortunately, Hercule Poirot — the G, if you couldn’t tell — is on the case. No doubt the culprit will be brought to justice soon!

Anyway, as you know from reading this blog, I love Agatha Christie and am continuing to work my way through her novels. I’m on The Mirror Crack’d right now and am enjoying it thus far. Can’t wait for Miss Marple to lay the solution on me!

Too Many Textbooks!

Julie — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:41:50 +0000

Now that I’ve been in grad school for over a year, I’m starting to accumulate a bunch of used textbooks. Back when I was getting my undergraduate degree, I kept almost all of my textbooks because I thought I might need to refer to them someday. But of course I never did, and ended up having to simply throw them away because they had no resale value at that point.

Needless to say, I’m not going to make that mistake again. I’m looking for places where I can sell used books for cash, and I’m going to go out there and grab the best deals. I figure with the Internet being what it is these days, I can always just look something up online if I need to instead of thumbing through old texts. Can’t wait to get some of my money back, because these textbooks were mind-bogglingly expensive!!

Cigar Aficionado

Julie — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:26:51 +0000

I’m not all that into cigars myself, but a good friend of mine is. Since her birthday is coming up soon (yes, I said “her”!), I’m thinking about getting her a box of cigars as a present. Problem is, I know absolutely nothing about how to choose cigars. Back when I was younger, a group of us used to smoke Swisher Sweets while drinking, but that was more of a joke than any serious attempt to be seen smoking cigars. Still, even I know those aren’t meant to be any kind of gift. Guess I’ll have to put in some research time if I want to make the right choice here!

Book 99 Years Overdue

Julie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:53:05 +0000

You know how you sometimes start searching for a particular piece of information on the Internet but then one thing leads to another and you find yourself reading about something completely different from what you were initially trying to find? Yeah, that happened to me today. At first I was looking for some jenny craig reviews because I’m thinking of joining the program, but somehow I ended up reading about a man who returned a library book that was 99 years overdue!

Apparently, the book, called Facts I Ought to Know About the Government of My Country, was checked out by Stanley Dudek’s mother and was due back at the New Bedford (MA) library on May 2, 2010. Dudek finally returned it in Dec. 2009 after finding it 10 years ago in his mother’s home after she died. The library waived the fee (a penny a day for 99 years would have been about $360).

Wow — 99 years!! The longest I’ve ever kept an overdue book was probably about three weeks….

Kindle Stand?

Julie — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:12:56 +0000

This is going to sound like a weird question, but does anyone sell a stand for the Kindle? I know they do for regular books, but I need something that can hold my Kindle because there are some occasions where I’d like to read without having to hold the device the entire time. Plus, sometimes it’s just easier to read when the text is at eye level rather than lying flat on the table. I know it can’t be an entirely hands-free experience because I still have to hit the page turn buttons, but then again, even with paper books I’d have to turn the pages.

Come on, they make music stands for sheet music, plasma mountsfor televisions, and regular book stands for paperbacks and hardcovers. Is there anything that will work with a Kindle? I’m telling you, if I ever come across something like that, I would buy it immediately.