It’s my first reading wrap-up for the year and I’m off to a good start. I didn’t expect this. I thought my reading progress this year would be slow, so I dropped my initial reading goal of 60 books to 30. But now that I’m halfway to meeting the new goal, I think it best to bump it back up to 60.
Yea, March isn’t done yet. But I’m sure I won’t complete anything new before the 31st so I decided to post this wrap up now.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic:
Ten Books I Rated 5 Stars
I altered this week’s topic a little because I don’t want to discuss recent books I’ve read, since I’ve either recently reviewed them or will do so soon and I don’t want to recycle the same books over and over. I intend for this blog to be a sort of reading journal (an idea I got from one of James’s posts at Auxiliary Memory) so whatever books I read, I will discuss on this blog.
The following are books I’ve read over the years and rated 5 stars. A few are fairly recent reads.
And I’m back with another tag, the BFF Book Tag! Shout out to Jesse Nicholas at Books at Dawn for tagging me! The tag was originally created by Chantal at CK’s Reading Corner.
The girls in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series: Lena, Bridget, Carmen, and Tibby. I love the strong bond they have and how supportive they are of each other.
Why did it take me so long to finally read these books? I’ve been missing out on a fun but touching story about female friendships and family.
Quick summary on both books:
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series is a contemporary young-adult series about the friendship of four teenage girls growing up in Bethesda, MD. All born within weeks of each other, the girls formed the Sisterhood when they discover a magical pair of pants that not only fits them all despite their varying body types, but also seems to bring about major changes in their lives whenever they wear it. They only wear the pants during the summer. The pants seems like any ordinary pair but when on, it accentuates the wearer’s features in an attractive way.
In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, we follow the girls as they go their separate ways for the first time in the summer. Bridget, who is tall, blonde, and athletic, is off to soccer camp in Mexico and Carmen, a curvy Latina, travels south to visit her father in South Carolina. Tibby, an aspiring film maker, stays home and finds a summer job while working on a documentary and beautiful Lena visits her grandparents in Greece. The girls decide to stay in contact by mailing the pants to each other along with a letter over the summer.
Weekend Reads is a weekly discussion on a variety of topics. At the end of the post, I’ll include what I plan to read on the weekend.
Writing
I couldn’t think of a question for this weekend’s Weekend Reads post, so I went with the first thought that popped in my mind and that’s to write about my trials with writing.
The Friday Face-Off is a bookish meme hosted by Books by Proxy that compares book covers to decide which is best. Those interested must select a book with a cover that matches the week’s theme and compare it to an alternate cover (the Face-Off). At the end of the post, a winner should be declared.
That’s just a quick run-down of the instructions. Visit Books by Proxy’s blog for more details.
Green with envy
A cover which is predominantly green
It was my birthday a few weeks ago! 😀
To celebrate, I spent my birthday relaxing and doing nothing except rolling around and around in my warm, soft bed until noon or 2 pm or whatever. I just went with the day and spent it how I wanted to — relaxed. Once up, I glided to the book store — yes, glided because I daydreamed the whole way — and afterwards treated myself to a burger because I craved one that whole week. Then I sat outside for a bit, enjoyed the fairly nice weather, and watched the sun set and planes fly by. It was a relaxed, peaceful day. A good birthday.
So here are all the books I acquired for my birthday. Some I bought, some were gifted, some are giveaways, and some are ARCs. I’ll indicate which fit the last two.
Since this is a very popular classic, I won’t bother including a summary. It’s universally known. As for my thoughts on the novel, see below. In short, I didn’t like it and I stopped at Chapter 18 because I refused to continue torturing myself a moment longer. If my harsh reaction to the story turned you off, then maybe you should skip the extended thoughts below.
My thoughts:
I thought I would enjoy reading Pride and Prejudice this time. After all, I’m older, wiser, and more mature than the last time I read it. A few years usually make my reading the classics a more positive experience. I hated The Great Gatsby when I read it in high school, but now I like it. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed Jason and the Argonauts as much as I did last year if I’d read it while in high school or college. I wasn’t as patient with stories when I was younger.
So I thought the same would be true for Pride and Prejudice: I’d return to it a few years later and love it so much that I’d go out and buy all the copies with pretty covers. But I guess I just don’t vibe well with Jane Austen. And when I tried to figure what exactly I don’t like about the story, I found it hard to come up with an answer. At first I thought it was the story. But I enjoyed the movie adaptations and I still thought the story funny when reading it. Then I suspected the writing. But I enjoyed the prose and sped through parts that contained mostly prose. Then I realized it’s the dialogue. It threw me off and since dialogue makes up a good bit of the story, I ended up not liking the story at all.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic:
Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough/In A While
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. I really wanted to do last week’s topic, which was about Spring TBRs, but I didn’t feel like doing it then. Plus, I forgot to do it. But, on a positive note, I’m much more in the mood to do a TBR this week and participate in this week’s topic. I usually stay away from TBRs because I hardly ever adhere to them, but I really want to do one now so here it is.
I’m fashionably late to the St. Patrick’s Day party ;). This tag was created by Emily of Embuhlee liest and Shivii of Brown Eyed Musings. Well then, let’s get the party started!
Zezee with Books 