Vacation or Bust!

We are leaving Tuesday for a week long trip out to Lake Havasu. We have rented a gorgeous home with a lake view for the week. The home has a killer patio with a heated salt water pool, a jacuzzi, and a fire pit (see image to the left). I think we plan on spending the majority of the week by the pool and on the lake in our boat.

As a result of all of this relaxation time (so, so needed after a month from hell at work), I am taking a hefty pile of books to occupy my time. Yay for the opportunity to read as much as I want for an entire week. Yes, I know that my excitement for wanting to read every spare minute for a week straight makes me the biggest nerd on the face of the planet. To each his own, right?

So, this is my book list for the week. I am fairly confident I will be able to get through all, if not most of these, books:

1. I need to finish Picture Perfect - Jodi Picoult

2. The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

3. The Stranger - Albert Camus

4. The Gatecrasher - Madeleine Wickham

5. The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle (Now I doubt I will get through this one completely, but I plan on starting it and reading bits here and there throughout the week)

6.Buffalo Soldier - Chris bohjalian (This is my back up book in case I read everything above)

Stay tuned for a blizzard of blog entries as I read each of these!

Such a Pretty Fat - Jen Lancaster

I love Jen Lancaster. I mean I really, really, really love her. Her first two books, Bright Lights, Big Ass and Bitter is the New Black, were fantastic, laugh out loud, hilariously funny peeks into her life. Such a Pretty Fat picks up where Bitter left off, with Jen wanting to tackle the little issue she has with her weight.

Jen has no issues whatsoever with her size or her self-esteem. She carries a few, or more than a few, extra pounds around with her. She has for a long time, and yet it doesn't bother her in the least. She is happy and confident with the person she is. What a concept! A woman being happy with who she is despite not being stick thin. Did I already say that I love Jen Lancaster?!

Well, a visit to the doctor reveals some frightening health news, and Jen decides she really should do something to be a little healthier. And, hey, why not turn the project into another best selling book?

Jen has the ability to say outloud what each and every one of us is thinking, but just never ever says outloud, with spunk and charisma. And the result is absolutely hysterical. She is brutally honest, and it is so refreshing and comforting to know that it is possible to be happy despite all of the pressure we get as women to be thinner, prettier, and, yes, even thinner.

Every woman should read this book. I laughed out loud so many times that my poor husband thought I was loosing my mind.

The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud

I picked this book up and read the back cover, like I always do, and thought, hey, this sounds like a really great interesting book to read. Fast forward about a year when the book finally rose to the top of the To Be Read pile. I was really interested in this book. and I was especially wanting to read something a little smarter and a little less mind numbing this summer. Note to self - smarter isn't always better.

The basic plot of this book is the intersection of the lives of three 30-somethings making it - and not making it - in New York City. The three friends are trying to find their way and find themselves until a twist is thrown into their lives that changes each of them forever.

This book got some really great literary reviews. It was a New York Times Book of the Year. However, I just didn't like it. I found the characters dull and the story line utterly lacking. Who knows, maybe I'm not intellectual enought to really "get" the book. But I thought it was bad from beginning to end.

New Moon - Stephanie Meyer

I have jumped on the Twilight bandwagon, see post below on Twilight, and when I jump on a bandwagon, I usually buckle down and get 'er done. What? I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have now finished New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Series. I am oddly fascinated with these books. After I finished the first, I ran right out and bought the second. Now, I want to run right out and buy the third book, Eclipse.

In New Moon, the story deviates a bit to tell Jacob's story. Sadly, Edward is pretty much out of the picture in this book. That being said, I actually thought this book was a little better written and the characters a bit more fleshed out than Twilight. I kind of feel like the overall story is starting to get in stride. But, without Edward, the book just wasn't as good, overall. Frankly, Edward makes the story pop.

That being said, I am anxiously awaiting the next chapter, or, should I say, the next book in the series, and the return of Edward.

The Five Love Languages - Gary Chapman

This book has intrigued me for a while. I bought it a few months back and have been meaning to get to it. Still being somewhat of a newlywed, I figured any and all information I could learn on how to communicate better could only help me in the long run.

In this book, Gary Chapman, a Christian marriage counselor, asserts that each indivual speaks and expresses love in one of five ways: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. He says that one of the biggest problems in marriages is that often times partners speak different love languages and do not understand the language of each other, which causes conflict and misunderstanding. This book asserts that most problems in marriages can be fixed by learning your spouces love language.

This was an interesting book, but very much common sense to me. I went into marriage knowing that communication is the key. If you can't communicate with your partner, your marriage is not going to last. Maybe I've been reading too many of these types of books lately. Or maybe I just waited so long in life to get married that I learned these lessons long ago. But, nevertheless, it was a simple and easy read and I could see how it could be a good starting point for learning how to better communicate with your spouse.

Many Lives Many Masters - Brian Weiss

I am always looking for something new and fresh and different to read. I have a neighbor who is a life coach, and she is always recommending new metaphysical, inspirational, and self help books for me to read. When she recommended this one and told me I wouldn't be able to put it down, I figured I should give it a shot.

This book is about a phychiatrist, Dr. Weiss, who begins to treat a patient suffering from severe anxiety and phobia issues. After treating her for 18 months and not making any significant breakthroughs with her and her condition, he decides to try hypnosis.

When Dr. Weiss puts the patient under hypnosis, his intent is to regress her back to her childhood and uncover any possible traumatic events that happened to her. Instead, she regresses back 2,000 years, shocking Dr. Weiss. The rest of the book details many of the hypnosis sessions and describes the many different lives the patient has experienced before the one she is living today. These hypnosis therapy sessions complete cure the patient of all of her anxiety and phobia issues. During the hypnosis sessions, Dr. Weiss is also able to communicate with master spirits, who give a lot of insight into our purpose here on earth as humans.

I've never been on board with the idea of reincarnation. However, this book was extremely interesting. I read the entire thing in two sessions and it really made me wonder what if? I am still on the fence in regard to the idea of reincarnation.

But beyond the reincarnation discussion this book does a good job of dealing with "the meaning of life" so to speak, and what our purpose is while we are here in human form. I actually got a lot out of those discussions. I would definitely recommend this book. If nothing else, it will really make you think about your life and they way you are living it.

Books Read Survey

This is circulating throughout blogs all over the internet, so I thought I would join in for the fun.

Here's how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. I italicised books that have been on my TBR pile for years. I swear I will get to them all some day.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts says that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below. Wow! I have read about of third of them, and I thought that was a low number.

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 (not the whole thing front to back, but sections)
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 – I have read many plays, but not the complete works!
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
42 The 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 Atwood4
9 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

Twilight - Stephanie Meyer

Well, I bit the bullet and finally gave into all of the hype surrounding the Twilight series. I have never much been into vampire stories, so I really didn't have any expectations going into this book.

I think most people know the plot of this book already, since I am sooo way behind the times. Girl meets boy. Boy is a vampire. Girl's life is endangered because vampires like to drink human blood. Vampire saves the day. So starts the series!

My biggest issue with the book is the heroine, Bella. She is a little weak for my taste. I think she could have been a much stronger and compelling character, and that would have only made the book better overall. But I liked the book, despite my feelings for Bella. And I must say I did love Edward. He totally made the book, in my opinion.

All in all I have to say that I ended up liking this book much much more than I thought I ever would. It was very entertaining read and I have already picked up the second book, New Moon.

Many people have compared this book series to the Harry Potter series. In my opinion this series is no where near as good as Harry Potter. But Stephanie Meyer has created a wonderfully entertaining story to keep me reading, and buying, more books.