SaraPepparkaka

Chocolate. Tea, but I drink tea everyday, year round, so it doesn't qualify as comfort food. Mu mum always gave me yellow Jaffa lemonade (Finnish brand of orange lemonade) if I had any kind of illness when I was little. So that's a sure thing to make me feel better. Funny that. I know the reasoning behind it now too. If your appetite is down, make sure what you do eat has A LOT of sugar. If the weather is less than perfect, I feel the flu approaching, I have failed a test, my husband's out of town, or something else mildly depressing, I make fish soup. If it's more than mildly depressing, nothing but chocolate helps.

OK, so slow on the updating part. I read Hope by Lesley Pearse, my Book Day book (Thank you Nici!) and enjoyed it. Somewhere along the road I got the feeling I've read it before, but I'm not entirely sure. The Wife Test, Betina Krahn, arrived in the post and I read that one too. I'm very fond of this trilogy, they are cozy reads. Not the best I've ever read, but they all have a romance well thought out, likable characters, a little bit more than "they meet and fall in love", and a little effort put into historical research even if most of it is a bit improbable. If you are a medieval romance kind of person, these books are worth your time. Continued with Living Dead in Dallas, Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse number 2. I liked number 1 well enough, but I liked this one more. That's promising when I know there's a whole bunch of them still to read in this series. Only one thing, Bill the vampire seemed more twodimensional in this book than he did in the first one. (OK, so I've read reviews, and she does leave him, but it's a bit unfair to Bill to take the easy way out and make him .. flat.) Easy reading here I go. Kelley Armstrong, Broken, was next. I'm very fond of Elena. Again, I haven't read a lot of books in this series, but I will certainly do so. This one I finished last night, and continued with No Humans Involved. And the guests that arrive tonight will have to accept the way our house looks.

Pizza, eaten when we have a meeting at work.

I mooched two books, and they arrived on the same day. Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes "Full house"- I enjoyed the read but am contemplating to put it on my mooch list, it's not something I think I will go back to. The other one I will hold on to: "The Marriage Test" by Betina Krahn. I read "The Husband Test" a while back and have been trying to find the other books in the series forever. Well, one did arrive and the third in the series, "The Wife Test" might actually be making its way here. I recommend these to anyone who enjoys a medieval romance once in a while.

The sun is still shining, I finished Dead Until Dark. And the silly romantic mood I was in just disappeared. But did that stop me from reading? Oh, no, I just changed the genre to thrillers. I read "Anna

Well, being a girl of the more romantic kind, I saw that same movie as you did Giulia, and that was where I discovered it.

This is just about the only poem I know in English. So I guess that would be my favourite, then. It IS beautiful. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put cr

Heavenly- this sounds like something I might like. I will keep my eyes open.

I had a weekend full of light and funny reading. Two Janet Evanovich started and finished, Twelve Sharp and Lean Mean Thirteen. (I know which guy I would take, but then what would the books be about..) and started Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris, I am now about halfway through it and I am absolutely sure I will have to read every Sookie Stackhouse book there is. All aspirations to read anything but sweet-funny books have vanished, there's sunshine outside and spring in my heart. Oh, it's still lots and lots of snow here, but it's melting..

I've been reading again. Terry Pratchett- Thud! I finished, and as a light snack in between meals I also started and finished Kerrelyn Sparks- How To Marry A Milloinaire Vampire. Some books are like that- easy to read, but don't stay in your memory for five seconds even.

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 1984 - 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 Faulk 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 Hitchhiker’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 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 Inferno - Dante- 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 That's 37. Edited: I managed to miss Dracula. So it's 38.

I just started to think about it, and in the books where the hero is a police officer, they always catch the criminal in the end. It's the same formula as in a romance novel in a way- happily ever after. No matter how complicated things get, I can trust that by the end of the book things will be sorted out. I wouldn't have dared to read about a pregnant woman being held hostage if I hadn't trusted it to turn out OK.

Tess Gerritsen- Vanish finished. I'll be forever grateful to you on this forum who recommended her. I now have another writer on my regular list. I liked this book even better that the first one by Tess Gerritsen I read.

Don't apologise for being grouchy. I'm fond of grouchy people. They might bark, but they rarely bite - at least the ones I know.

An other book finished just before I went to work. "Anybody Out There" by Marian Keyes. I have read her books before, and liked some and loved some. My main objection to this one is that I started to feel like I was bombarded with emotions from all angles, and nobody had any time to deal with them, least of all me as the reader. Marian Keyes' trademark is to deal with difficult things in an easy-going way. But I thought that it was a bit too much in this book. I'll still give it 3/5, on my scale that's an average book.

Hello and

Welcome! I'm sure you'll like it here.

For me, it does help to visit the library often. I still buy books, just not so many (this is a matter of opinion, and you might get another answer were you to ask my husband)

Ooh, two good suggestions, hurrah! I read a children's version of The Count of Monte Christo back in the days when I fit the target group, it might be worth reading the complete version. .. and off to the Trusted Local Library I go! By the way, I finished a book this morning, too. Finnish author Kaari Utrio, book name Vanajan Joanna. Kaari Utrio is a great favourite of mine, historical fiction at its best. And she does her research thouroughly, but still its not presented in a dry way.