Book #2 and #3

Blueberry Muffin Murder and Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke.

Nice little murder mysteries. (It seems I'm on a bit of a food kick with my recent reading.) Anyway, they have recipes included since the main character is the owner of a cookie bakery. They are fast paced and have decent character development and if I get the opportunity, I'll definitely pick up another in the series.

The premise of this little exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

Here’s how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.

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
6 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 Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
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

Ripped off from Blue Soup. Anything in italics either I mean to read this year or I started but didn't finish, therefore I need to go back and read.

Friends never made

Just spent some time catching up on someone's blog that I knew for a time. I can't even say that we were friends. The potential was there but either I wasn't breaking through or they didn't want to. I know this is extremely vague and it is meant to be. I don't want any offense to be given or guilt trips to be handed out. Not the way to make friends and influence peeps.

I've tried to stay in contact but I've never been very good at that so maybe its my bad. Could be that association with me reminds them of the hellhole of a job they had. I know I started this blog because they inspired me to. I enjoyed our conversations and they had a pretty good sense of humor too. I received advice from them and I gave some. But we never moved to the "sending emails, inviting over" sort of relationship. I regret I that I didn't make that opportunity.

All I can do at this point is wish them well. I hope they succeed (which is what looks to be happening) and I have fond thoughts of someone who I should have tried to be a friend to a little better.

Book #1

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry - By Kathleen Flinn

Interesting story of a lady struggling to achieve her dream of a degree, deciding to attend Le Cordon Bleu and what she went through to do it.

Now I'm hungry.

Yay!

Home just in time to watch my CSI. I'm enjoying Mr. Fishburne's performance, although I miss Grissom. 11th hour is a hoot more for being strange and laugh worthy than accurate.

I traveled to see the husband. Now I'm home. And packing. There's a house waiting for me, hopefully a job to work at, and a husband who wants me with him. Yet again, yay!

Life is good. Mostly.

Late Late Nights

It's pitiful. I'm watching late night t.v. All the time.

Partly because my mind won't let me rest and I'm all wound up from trying to get make sure all my loose ends are tied up for this move. And not making any sense in the process.

Arm hair. Yup, it's late.