Wednesday, June 26, 2013

What Books Have You Read?

I got this from my sister, Kelsey.  Here is: Kelsey's List

Have you read more than 6 of these books? 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 an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Bible
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 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
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 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 Berniere
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
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 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

Read=18
Not bad, but as an English, Literature, and Creative Writing student, you would think I would have read more of them.  Kelsey has read 34!  She is a reading machine.  :)

Monday, June 10, 2013

Projects!

I have been having a really fun time lately doing projects to decorate our house and make it feel more homey.  I revamp some things we already have, and get a lot of things from D.I. and then fix them up.  That way, it doesn't cost very much.  Here are some of the results!

I have had this toy box for as long as I can remember.  Originally, it was bubble gum pink.  Then, in the summer of 2004, I got really "creative" and started painting random things all over it.  I should have taken pictures of all sides of it; you would really get a sense of the transformation.  
 Here it is now, all one color:
We are using it for storage under our entertainment center now.  And I am still planning on adding a cushion to the top of the box, in a colorful print, so more pics on that later.

These next items are ones I found at D.I., like this picture frame.  I thought it was really interesting to look at.  This picture was taken after I removed the ugly floral print that was in it before, so this in and of itself is an improvement to the original.
 And I love the end result even more.
I liked how this thing was a little unusual looking.
 I repainted it and hung it right inside our front door for our keys.
I was really excited when I found this twelve by twelve frame, because it was a completely blank canvas.
 Justin and I picked this cool bird print off of Art.com, and I painted the frame the same blue to match the "pink box" and the tones in the print.
I forgot to take a "before" picture of this frame, but it was just a plain brown frame.  I sanded it down and painted it.  I like how chunky it is, and how the greens in the background of the photograph play off the frame color.
Our living room furniture is all browns and blacks, so I really wanted to paint everything to be bright and happy.  The colors I am using are ones that I pulled out of a bright, multi-colored area rug we bought.  I think once I get all the pictures hung, they will play really well off of each other.

This is the cutest wagon I found at D.I. and I just had to get it.  I didn't really know what to do with it at first.
 But look how cute it is with a couple succulents planted in it!  I just pray I don't kill them.  They are supposed to be very hard to kill...but that's never stopped me before, unfortunately.  :)
It's been a blast to remake things into my own style.  I still haven't really hung any of them yet, so that's the next step.  I will post pictures of how they all look when I do.