Tag: top ten

Sunday Post #15: Wuthering, Wuthering Heights

Posted on by Dana

Sunday PostWhat has been happening this week? It’s been crazy busy. I haven’t had a ton of time to read, so I sat down and read most of today (with the exception of doing a little bit of work and washing the dishes). I have been spending most of the day wandering the moors, reading The Annotated Wuthering Heights. What a great addition to my library. I am truly enjoying it. Each time I read Wuthering Heights, I notice something I didn’t pick up on last time, and this time, it’s how horrible Nelly Dean is. I mean, I have often thought of her as mostly a reliable narrator, and because of her, I have really disliked Catherine. Heathcliff is just plain hard to like, no matter what. As soon as you start feeling sympathy for him, he goes off and kills lapwings for no reason or hangs a dog. Perhaps because I’m reading an annotated version, I am noticing so many more things than I ever have before. All the birds, for one thing; I’m sure I noticed that before, but even though the annotations don’t discuss the birds in a great amount of detail, I think my antennae are up, so to speak, and I’m noticing the symbolism more than I usually do. And there are birds just everywhere in this book. Another thing I am seeing are the close connections to the Romantic poets. The annotations help there, and I am really pleased I chose to read this one for the Literary Movement Reading Challenge. Hope I can finish it in time! Even if I don’t, I definitely want to finish reading this lovely annotated version. I realize a lot of people hate this book, but I think if you peel it apart and and see what makes it work, it is genius. I am especially enjoying the nuances I am noticing in Nelly’s character this time around.

I finished reading Pleasantville by Attica Locke and wrote a review for the TLC Book Tour this week as well. A good read. I am also still working away on Katherine Howe’s Conversion on audio. The reader for that one is really good. I recommended it to a bunch of my students this week when I saw it was one of their choices for a summer read.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was top ten favorite authors of all time. You know, I am actually liking the idea of saving these for my Sunday Post instead of doing them on Tuesday. I just have less time to write during the work week. To qualify as a favorite author, I decided that I needed to love multiple books by the same author. So I didn’t count authors who have only written one novel. I also didn’t count authors if I had read only one of their works (even if I loved it). So here is my list:

  1. William Shakespeare
  2. Jane Austen
  3. J. K. Rowling
  4. J. R. R. Tolkien
  5. Diana Gabaldon
  6. Ernest Hemingway
  7. Sharyn McCrumb
  8. Jasper Fforde
  9. Neil Gaiman
  10. Judy Blume

Who would be on your list?

Authors whose work I love, but whom I didn’t count because of my self-imposed rules are Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harper Lee, and Emily Brontë.

Some links I enjoyed this week:

Here’s a bonus for you:

For the record, I have always believed it really was Catherine’s ghost who disturbed Lockwood early in the novel.

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week on your blog, and showcase books and things we have received. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme.

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Sunday Post #14: Top Ten Tuesday

Posted on by Dana

Sunday PostSunday? Tuesday? What is she on about? I keep forgetting to check in with the Top Ten Tuesday meme, so I’m plucking a couple of recent topics and posting about them today for the Sunday Post.

First up, “Ten Books You Recently Added To Your To-Be-Read List.” These are the ten books most recently added to my Goodreads to-read list in order from most recent to least:

It might be fun to list the novels I added to my to-read pile each week in my Sunday Post. I think I might just do that.

Next up:

Top Ten Characters You’d Like To Check In With (meaning, the book or series is over and you so just wish you could peek in on the “life” you imagine they are leading years down the line after the story ends). Does this prompt make sense?? It makes sense in my head! Let me know and I can clarify haha

In no real particular order:

  • Harry Potter and the gang. I’d read any TNG or even Marauders books Rowling might want to write, but I’m not sure she’s keen.
  • Scout Finch. And guess what? We get to! This summer!
  • Holden Caulfield. I often ask my students to write a new ending chapter because the end of his book is so ambiguous. Is he going to be okay?
  • Huck Finn. I think Twain wrote some stuff about Huck and Tom as adults. I am curious as to how he turned out in the end.
  • Samwise Gamgee. I know he had a bunch of children, but I sure would like to have checked in with him and his (hopefully) quiet life in the Shire.
  • Ennis Del Mar from “Brokeback Mountain.” Did he ever learn to accept himself and find love?
  • Peter Hatcher. What kind of people did Peter, Sheila Tubman, Fudge, and Tootsie grow up to be?
  • Taran and Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. Tell me they got married.
  • Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw. Did they break the family curse and find happiness together?
  • Jane Eyre. What were the Rochesters like after they married? I can’t believe all the adventure was over.

And finally, “Top Ten Inspiring Quotes from Books (anything that inspires you, challenges you, makes you think, encourages you, etc.).”

I have a blog widget that shuffles my favorite book and bookish quotes, but here are my favorites:

  • “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”—Mark Twain
  • “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”—Ray Bradbury
  • “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”—Ernest Hemingway
  • “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”—Jane Austen
  • “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”—Willa Cather
  • “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.—F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”—Zora Neale Hurston
  • “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”—Henry David Thoreau
  • “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.—Henry David Thoreau
  • “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”—Oscar Wilde

In other news this week I finished Attica Locke’s novel Pleasantville, and I’m scheduled to review it for TLC Book Tours tomorrow. Stay tuned for that.

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week on your blog, and showcase books and things we have received. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme.

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Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday and Top Ten Tuesday—June 21, 2011

Posted on by Dana

What to do when you have found two interesting book memes and want to do both, but you don’t want to write two different blog posts? Combine, them I say.

Teaser TuesdaysTeaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teasers:

[amazon_image id=”0345521307″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” class=”alignleft”]The Paris Wife: A Novel[/amazon_image]“This isn’t a detective story—not hardly. I don’t want to say, Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything, but she’s coming anyway, set on her course in a gorgeous chipmunk coat and fine shoes, her sleek brown hair bobbed so close to her well-made head she’ll seem like a pretty otter in my kitchen.”

—location 116 on my [amazon_link id=”B002Y27P3M” target=”_blank” ]Kindle[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”0345521307″ target=”_blank” ]The Paris Wife: A Novel[/amazon_link] by Paula McLain

Top Ten TuesdayThe Broke and the Bookish has a weekly Top Ten. This week’s focus is book blogging.

Top Ten Reasons I Love Book Blogging

  1. The other book bloggers in the community are some of the nicest people on the Internet. I enjoy being a part of such a friendly group.
  2. Book blogging offers me a chance to reflect on (as well as keep track of) all the books I read. It’s nice to be able to look back at books I’ve read and know not only exactly how many I read, but also how I felt about them.
  3. Blogging has opened some doors for me in terms of being able to afford more books. I am an Amazon associate, and the good people who buy books from Amazon after clicking through a link I followed generate a small commission that Amazon pays me in gift cards. It feels a little bit like being paid for doing something I love, but it has also enabled me to do what I love—not sure I could buy all these books otherwise.
  4. This last year especially had some real professional ups and downs for me, and this blog was a refuge. I blog about education at huffenglish.com, and I have found it harder to feel motivated to write for that blog lately for many reasons, but this blog has been a true source of inspiration.
  5. Through this blog and through Twitter, I have had the opportunity to interact with authors. Syrie James and Jael McHenry both have mentioned my reviews of their books, and I had the amazing opportunity to interview Mary Novik.
  6. Being a part of the book blogging community has introduced books and authors to me that I might otherwise not have heard about or read. It would be impossible to figure out how many wonderful books I discovered through other book bloggers.
  7. Participating in reading challenges and chronicling them on my blog has helped me try out new books. I have enjoyed many of these new books. Some challenges I have begun to look forward to every year (Carl’s RIP Challenge, for one). For the first time this year, I hosted my own challenge.
  8. Book bloggers inspire me to read more. One year a few years ago, I only read 14 books. This year, I’ve already read 21. Some book bloggers are such fast readers that I can never hope to compete with the speed through which they fly through books, but without the inspiration to try, I’m not sure what my reading life would look like. My friends tell me all the time they don’t know how I read so much or how I find the time. Little do they know there is this world of readers in the book blogosphere who far outstrip anything I do! I do think I have become a faster reader since I began blogging.
  9. There is no better community for talking about books and reading than the book blogging community. Everyone else loves reading as much as I do and is just as excited about reading as I am. Reading can be a lonely activity. I’m not part of a book club, but I plan to revive our faculty book club next school year. It’s fun to share books and reading with others. It’s one of the reasons I chose to be an English teacher. Now that I am moving into technology teaching, it will be more important than ever for me to have an outlet for talking about books. The only thing that could be better is if we could gather regularly with food and chat in person.
  10. This last one might seem silly, but I find that book blogs are the prettiest blogs I read. All the pretty book covers and headers with books or readers of cups or coffee or tea. So homey and pretty. I like hanging around places like that.

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