booktastic

The title of this blog does not refer to my moving-out-of-my-apartment day, but to the fact that I am moving this blog to a different provider:

http://booksandwich.blogspot.com

Please update your links! Thanks! – Mrs. Hall

I think, as a reader, I would have to say that the worst part of moving is moving my books.

Not that I’m terribly anal about them or worried they’re going to get battered on the trip… Well, maybe there’s a touch of that. Just a touch. But that’s not the worst thing. The Worst Thing is that they take up so much space and are so freaking heavy once they’re packed. I mean, look at my collection here…

Granted, it’s only four or five boxes. Not a big deal… if each of them didn’t way somewhere in the area of TWO HUNDRED POUNDS.

Someone please remind us to rent a dolly with the truck. Either that or someone recommend a good physical therapist who can help us rehabilitate from the injuries we are going to suffer trying to move these things…  — Mrs. Hall

I made a mistake tonight. This is the third time that I have babysat Miss A.V.S. Each time I have babysat, I brought a book. The first time, although I brought a book, I didn’t have an opportunity to open it because she was a baby proper - I was watching her constantly. The second time I babysat her, I brought a book. It looked like I was going to get to read it after she fell asleep. However, she didn’t fall asleep - she got over-tired and I had to hold her and carry her around the house for a half an hour while she threw an over-tired tantrum.

This is the book I was going to bring tonight. I’m supposed to be reading it so that I can review it for the publisher. (Isn’t it pretty?)

However, as I was getting ready to leave and throwing things into my tote bag, I thought to myself, “Who am I kidding? I’m not going to have an opportunity to read.” So, I left the book at home.

You know where this is going, don’t you? At nine o’clock sharp, my charge fell sound asleep. Her parents don’t get home until eleven, so I’ve got two absolutely empty hours to myself. The one time I would have got a chance to read is the one time I didn’t bring a book!!!

Oh well. As you can see, it gave me a chance to catch up on my blogging. (Thank goodness Miss A.V.S.’s parents have an internet connection or I would be totally out of luck. I might have been forced to watch television - shudder). And I should have plenty of time to read this book, since the only thing I’m doing in the next few weeks is packing up boxes (my temp job ended on Thursday and now I’m moving).

But trust me not to bring a book the ONE time that I would actually have had an opportunity to read it. And, of course, the next time I babysit I suspect I will bring a book - and have no opportunity to read. Because that is how These Things Work. — Mrs. Hall

By the way, I just wanted to go on record: I did not switch my blog’s visual theme to make it look like this. Inexplicably, my blog provider’s company decided that ALL its blogs are going to be formatted this way.

I am against it personally as I think it looks very awkward and ugly the way it is organized now… but what to do. – Mrs. Hall

I’ve posted this once before on one of my previous blogs… but it’s worth posting again. Some time back I was in the process of applying to a Graduate school’s English program, and I noticed that they had a recommended list of reading you were supposed to have completed before enrolling in the undergraduate English program (i.e. in High School.) As an exercise, why not check and see if you are ready to enroll in a undergraduate level English course by crossing off the materials below that you’ve already read? (Um. I’m apparently almost ready.)

Just to be all open and above-board, I’ll mark the ones I’ve already read with a smiley face.

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READING LIST: HIGH SCHOOL

Fiction

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass

Cather, Willa. My Antonia or Death Comes to the Archbishop (I read “O Pioneers!” which evidently wasn’t important enough for the list)

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Some Sherlock Holmes stories

Eliot, George. Silas Marner (again, I missed out: I read “Middlemarch” instead)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies (I refuse to ever read this book)

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun

Harte, Bret. “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “Tennessee’s Partner”

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, “The Minister’s Black Veil”

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms (I read “A Moveable Feast” instead)

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle”

London, Jack. The Call of the Wild

Maugham, Somerset. Of Human Bondage

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Benito Cereno

Orwell, George. Animal Farm

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado”

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye

Scott, Sir Walter. A novel (Waverly, Rob Roy), Ivanhoe

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men or The Pearl

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, Kidnapped or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer or The Prince and the Pauper

Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds or The Time Machine

Wright, Richard. Black Boy

Poetry

Arnold, Matthew. “DoverBeach”

Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess”

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

de la Mare, Walter. “The Listeners”

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “I Like to See It Lap the Miles”

FitzGerald, Edward. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Frost, Robert. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches”

Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

Housman, A.E. “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “When I Was One and Twenty”

Hunt, Leigh. “Abou Ben Adhem”

Keats, John. “Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “To Autumn”

Kipling, Rudyard. “A Ballad of East and West,” “Mandalay”

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “The Village Blacksmith,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” The Song of Hiawatha

Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress”

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “To Helen”

Sandburg, Carl. “Chicago,” “Grass”

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias”

Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Crossing the Bar”

Whitman, Walt. “I Hear America Singing,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

~~~

Well, that’s the list. I’m contemplating now whether I should embarrass myself by showing how well I scored on the list of books you’re supposed to have read before enrolling in a graduate level course. — Mrs. Hall

I was harassing Mr. Hall a few minutes ago about getting behind on his blogging (he maintains the Toys 365 blog) when it suddenly struck me that I’ve let mine get away from me, too.

Of course, life has been rather interesting this past week or so. Our lease is up at the end of this month and we’re moving to a different state. This is a rather big change of course, and my mind is not unlike a several-years-old computer… You start up a new program, and then suddenly the whole thing sloooowwsss dowwwwnnnn.

So I haven’t been reading. I haven’t even been listening to books. Well, I have, but I’ve been doing it with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

I’ve been listening to The Camelot Caper by Elizabeth Peters. None of the Agatha Christie novels I wanted were available for download, so I clicked through the “If you liked ___, you will also like…” buttons (past dozens of Agatha Christie novels, I might add. So, Computer, so you think that if I enjoyed Agatha Christie I might like MORE Agatha Christie? What a deduction!!) until I came across this book. It’s apparently a parody of Gothic romance novels tied together with a mystery, which is not an unpromising combo. (I’ve only read one Gothic romance, Wuthering Heights, but I did enjoy it.) So, despite its rather crappy title, I downloaded The Camelot Caper.

The Plot: The heroine, whatshername, has been invited from America by her estranged grandfather to come to jolly old England and visit him before he dies. And bring the family heirloom ring, he adds. So she goes and almost as soon as getting off the plane she finds herself accosted by a mysterious man who seems to want to rob her or accost her in some way. He follows her around town until revealing his motive: he wants the ring. Well, she meets up with a skinny, big-nosed author of Gothic novels and they chase across England, avoiding and getting into scrapes and trying to figure out the significance of the ring.

Oh, it’s been light and enjoyable so far (I’m over 3/4 of the way through), but my heart just hasn’t been in it for the past few chapters. I don’t know why - maybe I’ve just been too distracted to really get into the book. I know that’s the problem I’ve been having with Dying for Chocolate - which, yes, I am still reading, one or two pages at a time. I got to a section in the book where not much was happening and got stuck.

I think our move is going to go relatively smoothly, so hopefully my brain will speed up again soon and I’ll be able to blog regularly on my bountiful reading. I had such a good momentum at the beginning of this year - I don’t want to lose it! — Mrs. Hall

P.S. Come to think of it, I really need to get back on track as far as reading goes - the mail yesterday brought not one but TWO books that I have to review in this blog. Not just for fun, mind you, but because I’m actually professionally employed to do so. Hooray for being a professional writer!