10. Read the book "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky - Check!

I may have waited until the very last week of the year, but I did it! 

I finished the book Crime and Punishment! 

Phew! 

 Overall it was a good read. 

Because of the writing style, and the very Russian names, It was a challenge for me to read if I was at all tired, which was always for the past 8 months! 

I felt like I needed a good stretch of time to really be able to dig into the novel and get anywhere. I'm glad I put it on my list because I always wanted to read it, but it was definitely challenging to find the time. 

Fluffier, easy-to-read books are usually more my style, lol.

I will probably not be putting another classic novel on my 2014 goal list... 

... but this one was a success! 

{xoxo}

Studying Up

The amount of reading that I do always decreases during the summer.

I'm too busy spending time outside and enjoying the fresh air. 

Even when I do hunker down with a book, I'm usually sitting on my back deck or a beach soaking up the sun as well. 

Besides the fact that I haven't been reading much, whenever I do turn to a book it's usually baby related. 

I feel like there is just sooo much information to take in! 

I have to be careful that I don't fill my head with too much information that it becomes overwhelming, but I like to know that my symptoms (or lack of symptoms really) are normal too.

And I like to read what's good for the baby's growth so that I'm more encouraged to be healthy. 

Without the books (and my helpful CSA produce!), I would not be eating as many leafy greens. 

So I'm still reading and learning :)

Some friends have warned me that reading ahead of time is good, but reading books about what happens after the baby is born are not helpful. 

They tell me that I have to get to know my own baby and not fill my head with info about other babies. 

I haven't formed an opinion on this yet (maybe cause I'm nowhere near that stage! lol). 

I can understand the need to get to know your own baby obviously, but I also see the merits in finding out how other parents coped with changes, etc. 

I think that since I've been around a lot of kids in my life, and babysitting them since I was legally allowed to (and even a bit before that.... shhhh) I'm not all that nervous about the baby being here and pooping and crying, but I can see how others would be (aka my husband!). 

I am maybe nervous about what to do if babykins gets sick... but that's normal I think. 

Anyway, what did you do? Did you read up? Scour the internet?

Any thoughts? 

Good "baby" books? 

Did you avoid them?

For now, I'll just keep learning from my pre-baby books :)

{xoxo}

100 Books Revisited...

Some of my more faithful blog followers may remember I blog post I did last year about wanting to read more - specifically, to read some classic novels. If you didn't get a chance before, you can read the post here.

Anyways, I didn't quite reach my so-called "realistic" goal of reading 30 of the books. I often had to read a fun book in between the not-so-fun classic novels.

I had already read 14 of them. The new ones I managed to read were:

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Favourite: Catcher in the Rye

Least Favourite: Wuthering Heights

Most Disturbing: Lolita

Some other books of note that I read and enjoyed this past year included:

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

3. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

4. Monster by Frank Peretti

5. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

6. House Rules by Jodi Picoult

Overall I'd say that that's a pretty good collection of novels I've read!

I'm still working on that classics list though! My 2012 reading resolution is to top this years progress and read 15 books of the list over the year. We'll see if I succeed in 2013!

100 Books

I came to realize the other day that I'm not a well-read person. When people talk about certain classic novels, I've never read them, I don't recognize the author name, and sometimes I've never even heard of it. So I decided to do something about it. My brother "The Gambler" found some book lists online for me to choose from. Now I'm reading through the list. Some I've read before, but will read again (e.g. the chronicles of narnia), other's I never want to touch again (e.g. the handmaid's tale), other I haven't heard of. But I'll do my best over time!

Goal: finish list this year

Realistic goal: read 30 books from the list this year.

Book #1:

Here's the list if you want to know what I'm working with. I tried to

pick a list of books that I had mostly heard of so that when people said "oh, its like that novel ____" I would be able to say "Yeah, totally!" and actually mean it.

* Books I've read already

1. 1984 by George Orwell*
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee*
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas*
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
20. Ulysses by James Joyce
21. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
22. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling*
23. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
24. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
25. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
26. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
30. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien*
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
33. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
34. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis*
35. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
36. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
38. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
39. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
40. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
41. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. The Stranger by Albert Camus
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
47. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
48. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad*
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. Watership Down by Richard Adams
52. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
53. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
54. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
55. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*
56. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
57. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
58. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
59. Dune by Frank Herbert
60. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
61. Dracula by Bram Stoker
62. Life of Pi by Yann Martel*
63. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
64. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
65. The Stand by Stephen King
66. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
67. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
68. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
69. Middlemarch by George Eliot
70. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
71. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
72. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
73. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
74. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
75. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden*
76. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
77. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
78. The Trial by Franz Kafka
79. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
80. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
81. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
82. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
83. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
86. Persuasion by Jane Austen*
87. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood*
88. The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer*
89. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
90. Emma by Jane Austen*
91. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
92. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
93. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
94. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver*
95. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon*
96. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
97. Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
98. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
99. Beloved by Toni Morrison
100. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Props to you if you made it this far down the post.