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Lara

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    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    So it seems this has been a good start to the year for me. Since I last updated, I finished both Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Both were great. 

     

    I've started reading Jane Eyre for the readathon, but I had less time last weekend than I hoped and I didn't get that far. I think I'll pick that one back up during the next readathon and finish it. It's my first book by a Bronte sister :) 

     

    Currently, I'm reading Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff. God save us. 

     

    Read-a-thon 2018

    in Group Reads

    Posted

    15 hours ago, karen.d said:

    Well anyone that's interested, we could read 'Jane Eyre'? What do you think?

     

    I'm currently doing the 'Year Round Robin Challenge' on this forum and 'Jane Eyre' is one of the books I have been challenged to read. So it would fit for the read-a-thon and that challenge too!

    Jane Eyre is a great idea. I'm down. Anyone else interested? 

    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    Thank you everyone! 

     

    Today I finished my first two reads of 2018. Dear Ijawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a collection of poetry titled An Attic of Ideals by Karen Swenson. Dear Ijawele, while not particularly groundbreaking, was perfect for what it was - honest, to the point, and clearly communicated. It is a short book, 60ish pages long, taken from a letter Adichie wrote to a friend who asked her how to raise her daughter feminist. Adichie writes about feminism without being moralizing, a quality I appreciate in any social discourse. An Attic of Ideals is a book I came across by chance. Of its many poems there were both hits and misses, but the hits were of excellent quality. 

    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted · Edited by Lara

    Read Last Year (2017):

    -Moshiah by Andrew Craven 

    -Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks

    -God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut

    -Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

    -All My Sons by Arthur Miller

    -Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

    -Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

    -Trifles by Susan Glaspell

    -The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmund Jones

    -God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

    -Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

    -Hamlet by William Shakespeare (re-read)

    -Arcadia by Lauren Groff

    -Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

    -Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

    -Machinal by Sophie Treadwell

    -Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

    -Choir Boy by Tarell Alvin McCraney

    -The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht

    -Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

    -Theft by Finding by David Sedaris

    -The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

    -Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard

    -Three Crows Yelling: Poems by Bill Noble, William Keener, and Michael Day

    -True West by Sam Shepard

    -Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 by J.K. Rowling and Jack Thorne

    -Buried Child by Sam Shepard

    -The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich

    -Antigone by Sophocles

    -The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

    -Wonder by R.J. Palacio

     

    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted · Edited by Lara

    Statistics

    *updated monthly

     

    2018 total number of books read so far: 38

     

    Number read for school: 19
    Number read for pleasure: 20

     

    Number of non-fiction: 10
    Number of fiction: 29
    Number of plays: 19
    Number of poetry collections: 1

    Number of graphic novels/comics: 0

     

    Number of new authors: 31
    Number of known authors: 5

     

    Number of books with male authors: 25
    Number of books with female authors: 14

     

    Nationality of authors:
    American - 22

    Bohemian/Czech - 1

    British - 2 

    Canadian - 2

    German - 2

    Greek - 1

    Italian - 1

    Nigerian - 1

    Norwegian - 1

    Russian - 1

    South African - 1

    Swedish - 1

    Swiss - 1 

     

    Number of books not originally in English: 8
    Number of books not in English: 0

     

    Time period published:
    -Ancient: 1
    -Medieval: 0
    -1500-1700: 0
    -18th century: 0
    -19th century: 5
    -1900 to 1950: 6
    -1951 to 1980: 8
    -1981 to 1999: 6
    -21st century: 13
    (-2018: 1)

     

     

    Average rating:

    Longest book: 
    Shortest book: 
     

    Most read author:

     

     

    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted · Edited by Lara

    To Read:

    *edited continually; crossed off  as read 

     

    -All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

    -Americanah by Chimamanda Ngoz Adichie 

    -Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

    -As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

    -The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

    -Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

    -Backstage Handbook: An Illustrated Almanac of Technical Information by Paul Carter

    -Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris

    -Beloved by Toni Morrison

    -The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam 

    -The Best We Could Do by The Bui

    -Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

    -Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

    -Born Both: An Intersex Life by Hida Viloria

    -A Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

    -Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

    -The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

    -Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

    -Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

    -The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

    -The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

    -A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

    -Dracula by Bram Stoker

    -Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

    -Endgame by Samuel Beckett

    -Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

    -The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty by Mary Hollingsworth

    -The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen

    -The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

    -The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

    -The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

    -Florida by Lauren Groff

    -Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

    -For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

    -Freud's Mistress by Karen Mack

    -Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

    -The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee

    -The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

    -The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

    -The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 

    -Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

    -The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien 

    -Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

    -The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston

    -How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

    -I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

    -In The Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks

    -In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka 

    -The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

    -An Ishmael of Syria by Almohammad Asaad

    -Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith

    -A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

    -Just Kids by Patti Smith

    -LaRose by Louise Erdrich

    -The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Daphne Scholinski

    -Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen

    -The Likeness by Tana French

    -The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

    -Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    -Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

    -The Lover by Harold Pinter

    -Maggie Now by Betty Smith

    -The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories by Tim Burton

    -Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

    -Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

    -The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

    -The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

    -Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

    -My Life With Bonnie and Clyde by Blanche Caldwell Barrow 

    -My Louisiana Sky by Kimberly Willis Holt

    -My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult 

    -The Name of God is Mercy by Pope Francis

    -Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

    -The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

    -No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

    -Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

    -On Liberty by John Stuart Mill 

    -O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

    -Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

    -Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

    -An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina 

    -Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

    -Othello by William Shakespeare

    -The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

    -Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

    -A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

    -The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani 

    -A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

    -The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

    -Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

    -Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

    -Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 

    -Remainder by Tom McCarthy

    -The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    -Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories by Roald Dahl

    -The Santaland Diaries and Season's Greetings by David Sedaris

    -The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

    -A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing by William Ball

    -Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

    -Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer

    -The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class by Bernie Sanders

    -The Spice Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen

    -A Spot of Brother by Mark Haddon

    -Stupid F*****g Bird by Aaron Posner

    -The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

    -The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin

    -Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal

    -The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond

    -Threepenny Novel by Bertolt Brecht

    -To The Novel by Michael Chekov

    -Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

    -The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart

    -A Vindication on the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

    -We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

    -We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    -We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch 

    -The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

    -The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman 

     

    The Well Educated Mind Suggested Reading List:

    *hidden for the sake of saving space 

    *to be slowly chipped away at

    *crossed off as read

     
    Spoiler

     

    Fiction:
     
    1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes 
    2. The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan 
    3. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
    4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
    5. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  
    6. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
    7. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    8. Moby Dick - Herman Melville  
    9. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
    10. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
    11. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    12. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
    13. The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
    14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
    15. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 
    16. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
    17. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad  
    18. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton 
    19. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald  
    20. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
    21. The Trial - Franz Kafka
    22. Native Son - Richard Wright 
    23. The Stranger - Albert Camus 
    24. 1984 - George Orwell  
    25. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
    26. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow 
    27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez  
    28. If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino 
    29. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison  
    30. White Noise - Don DeLillo  
    31. Possession - A.S. Byatt
    32. The Road - Cormac McCarthy


     

     Autobiography
     
    1. Augustine - The Confessions 
    2. Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
    3. Michel De Montaigne - Essays
    4. Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
    5. Rene Descartes - Meditations
    6. John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
    7. Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
    8. Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
    9. Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
    10. Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
    11. Henry David Thoreau - Walden 
    12. Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 
    13. Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery 
    14. Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
    15. Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf 
    16. Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth 
    17. Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 
    18. Thomas Merton  - Seven Storey Mountain  
    19. C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
    20. Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    21. Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    22. May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude 
    23. Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
    24. Charles W. Colson - Born Again
    25. Richard Rodriguez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez
    26. Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain
    27. Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea 
     
    History/Politics
     
    1. Herodotus - The Histories
    2. Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
    3. Plato - The Republic  
    4. Plutarch - Lives
    5. Augustine - The City of God
    6. Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
    7. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
    8. Sir Thomas More - Utopia
    9. John Locke - The True End of Civil Government 
    10. David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
    11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
    12. Thomas Paine - Common Sense
    13. Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
    14. Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
    15. Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America 
    16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Communist Manifesto
    17. Jacob Burckhardt - Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
    18. W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
    19. Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
    20. Lytton Strachey - Queen Victoria
    21. George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier 
    22. Perry Miller - The New England Mind
    23. John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
    24. Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day
    25. Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
    26. Eugene D. Genovese - Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
    27. Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
    28. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - All the President's Men
    29. James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
    30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
    31. Francis Fukuyama - End of History and the last Man
     
    Drama
     
    1. Aeschylus - Agamemnon
    2. Sophocles - Oedipus the King
    3. Euripides - Medea
    4. Aristophanes - The Birds
    5. Aristotle - Poetics  
    6. Everyman (14th Century)
    7. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
    8. William Shakespeare - Richard III
    9. William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
    10. William Shakespeare - Hamlet
    11. Moliere - Tartuffe 
    12. William Congreve - The Way of the World
    13. Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer 
    14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal 
    15. Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House 
    16. Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
    17. Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard 
    18. George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
    19. T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral 
    20. Thornton Wilder - Our Town
    21. Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
    22. Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit 
    23. Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire 
    24. Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman 
    25. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot 
    26. Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons
    27. Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
    28. Peter Shaffer - Equus 
     
    Poetry 
     
    1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 
    2. Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
    3. Greek Lyricists 
    4. Horace - The Odes 
    5. Beowulf 
    6. Dante Alighieri - Inferno 
    7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
    8. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
    9. William Shakespeare - Sonnets 
    10. John Donne 
    11. King James Bible - Psalms 
    12. John Milton - Paradise Lost 
    13. William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience 
    14. Williams Wordsworth 
    15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
    16. John Keats
    17.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    19. Walt Whitman
    20. Emily Dickinson 
    21. Christina Rossetti
    22. Gerald Manley Hopkins
    23. William Butler Yeats
    24. Paul Laurence Dunbar
    25. Robert Frost 
    26. Carl Sandburg
    27. William Carlos Williams
    28. Ezra Pound
    29. T.S. Eliot
    30. Langston Hughes 
    31. W.H. Auden

    Science
    1. Hippocrates - On Airs, Waters and Places
    2. Aristotle - Physics
    3. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
    4. Nicolaus Copernicus - Commentariolus
    5. Francis Bacon - Novum Organum
    6. Galileo Galilie - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
    7. Robert Hooke - Micrographia
    8. Isaac Newton - excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica 
    9. Georges Cuvier - Preliminary Discourse
    10. Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology 
    11. Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
    12. Gregor Mendel - Experiments in Plant Hybridization
    13. Alfred Wegener - The Origin of Continents and Oceans
    14. Albert Einstein - The General Theory of Relativity
    15. Max Planck - The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
    16. Julian Huxley - Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
    17. Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
    18. Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
    19. Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape 
    20. James D. Watson - The Double Helix 
    21. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
    22. Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes:
    23. A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe 
    24. E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
    25. James Lovelock -  Gaia 
    26. Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
    27. James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
    28. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
    29. Walter Alvarez  - T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

     

     

     

     

     

    Lara's Book Log 2018

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted · Edited by Lara

    I'm going to try this again this year. :)

     

    Reading Goal: 52 books

     

    For Fun Mini Goals:

    *crossed off as completed

    -Read a graphic novel or comic book

    -Read a memoir or biography

    -Read a book in Spanish

    -Read a mystery novel

    -Read a book published this year (2018)

    -Read a book I was supposed to read for class but didn't (ha ha)

    -Read a book set in my hometown

    -Read a book of poetry cover to cover

    -Read 2 Shakespeare plays

    -Read at least 7 plays

     

    Books Read:

     

    January

    1) Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4 stars)

    2) An Attic of Ideals by Karen Swenson (3 stars)

    3) We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4 stars)

    4) Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen (4.5 stars) 

    5) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (4 stars)

    6) Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (3 stars)

    7) Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (3 stars)

     

    February

    8) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (5 stars)

    9) Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (2.5 stars)

    10) Woyzeck by Georg Buchner (3.5 stars)

    11) Hunting and Gathering by Brooke Berman (3 stars)

    12) Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets (4 stars)

    13) A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (4 stars)

    14) Miss Julie by August Strindberg (3 stars) 

    15) Ruined by Lynn Nottage

     

    March

    16) Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov (3 stars)

    17) Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (3.5 stars)

    18) Angels in America (Part One: Millenium Approaches) by Tony Kushner (4.5 stars)

    19) Angels in America (Part Two: Perestroika) by Tony Kushner (4 stars)

    20) The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt (4 stars)

     

    April

    21) Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (4 stars)

    22) Dead Man's Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl (3 stars)

    23) A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (4 stars)

    24) The Drunkard: Or, the Fallen Saved by William H. Smith (2 stars)

    25) Dutchman & The Slave by Amiri Baraka (3 stars)

     

    May

    26) A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (4 stars)

    27) The Homecoming by Harold Pinter (4 stars)

    28) Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway (4 stars)

    29) Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook by Mark Bray (4 stars)

     

    June

    30) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (4 stars) 

    31) Genocide by Jane Springer (2 stars) 

    32) Pastrix by Nadi Bolz-Weber (4 stars)

     

    July

    33) Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (5 stars)

    34) Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence from Poland by Christopher R. Browning, Nechama Tec (5 stars)

     

    August

    35) The Liars' Club by Mary Karr (4 stars)

    36) Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis (4 stars) 

    37) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (4 stars)

    38) Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing (4 stars)

    39) Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O'Connor (2 stars) 

     

    September

     

    October

     

    November

     

    December

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Lara's Reading Log 2016

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    Hi everyone who happens to be reading my thread! Just thought I'd check back in here.

     

    February has been a horribly slow reading month for me, unfortunately. School and work have been keeping me quite busy, so I haven't had as much time to read as I would like. If I counted textbooks in my list here I'd definitely appear much more productive! 

     

    I have been able to finish Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which I read for my English class. I enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to, though I found the narrator to be infuriatingly egotistical. I think that was intentional, though, so I guess it's a mark of good writing! I do admire Shelley's character development in that novel. I also finished A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren. I adore Elizabeth Warren, and that's why I started reading it (it's her autobiography), but I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite informative about recent economic reform in the United States. It was interesting to hear about the workings of Washington from a behind the scenes, personal sort of view. If you are interested in U.S. politics and lean towards the left, I'd definitely recommend it. 

     

    Just today, I finished World War Z by Max Brooks. This was another book I read for my English class. While it is absolutely not something I'd ever read of my own volition, it was enjoyable. The format was interesting - it is presented as nonfiction, a collection of interviews about the "Zombie War" the world has recently undergone. Brooks does a fantastic job maintaining realism. There was a couple bits which I thought were inconsistent with each other, but it could be argued that those inconsistencies made sense considering that the entire book is recollections from a bunch of different people - memory and perception can be faulty. I found the book to be quite terrifying, to be totally honest; the first night after I began reading it I dreamed that I had to hide from zombies. Horrifying.   :hide:  

     

    I hope that I'll be able to get some more reading done this month than I did the last, having the time to read for pleasure is so nice. Hope you all are having a great reading year! 

    Lara's Reading Log 2016

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    Happy reading in 2016, Lara.  :)

     

    Frankenstein is on my 'to read' list (on Kindle) - on a purely shallow note, I love your cover!  :D

     

     

    Happy Reading in 2016 !  :D

     

    I hope the Zen Motorbike book improves for you; I remember reading it and thinking Wow! at one point... :smile:

     

    Thank you both! 

    Lara's Reading Log 2016

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    Aw, I really loved Freakonomics. I resisted reading it for a while because I thought it wouldn't be interesting (I used to work with many economists in a bank, and they wrote about dull stuff, which I then had to read), so I guess my low expectations helped in that regard. :D

     

    Just goes to show it's all subjective  :smile:

    Lara's Reading Log 2016

    in Past Book Logs

    Posted

    I finished Freakonomics last week. I had been wanting to read it for years, but like you I was left a bit disappointed. It wasn't nearly as interesting as I thought it would be, and there seemed to be a bit too much worshipping of Stephen D Levitt, as the next best thing. I found that a bit offputting, as if someone is really that great, you don't need to be told it at the start of every chapter. :dunno:

     

    I felt the exact same way. It was strange. My copy also had eleven pages of "praise for Freakonomics" at the beginning of the book before the introduction which I found rather...excessive  :rolol: . 

    What do you dip your chips in?

    in Food, Cooking & Recipes

    Posted · Edited by Lara

    Usually ketchup, but also queso if I have some around. I'm a queso addict  :wub: . My dad likes to mix salt and vinegar with ketchup, and then dip them in that. It tastes pretty good, but I'm usually too lazy to go to the trouble of mixing it up. Sriracha is good as well. I went through a phase where I dipped just about everything in that. 

     

    I do *not* understand how some of you can eat them with mayo! It's definitely not a thing here. Mayonnaise just grosses me out in general, though. Ah, to each their own! 

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