Friday, April 27, 2007

Books.

The Five Most Recent Books I’ve Read

White Teeth, Zadie Smith
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sort of.)
Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Cuban Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, Isadora Tattlin

Five Books I Could Read Over and Over

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
The Harafish, Naguib Mahfouz

Five Books That Blew My Mind and Would Be On My Syllabus If I Were a Teacher

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Five Authors With Whom I Would Like to Have Drinks

Rudyard Kipling
Naguib Mahfouz
Azar Nafisi
G. K. Chesterton
CS Lewis

Five Books That Make Me Want to Have Kids Just For The Books

Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark, Jill Tomlinson. Actually, ALL of the books in this series are fantastic.
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis

Five Books the Rest of the World Loved and I Sort of Hated

Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

Five Books I Just Could Not Finish, No Matter What

Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Emma, Jane Austen (I think I'll give this one another go, though.)
The Brothers Karamazov, Fydor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

Five Books That I Am In Awe Of and Are Pretty Much Perfect Pieces of Writing

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

Five Books That Made Me Weep Buckets

Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Five Books Set in Africa That I Love

The #1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence (well, it's sort of Africa)

...I think that's all I've read that's set in Africa, although in my defense, I've read TWO of the #1 Ladies Detective series, so that's something.

Five Things That Turn Me Off of a Book, However Unfair
The feeling that it would Not Be That Hard to Turn This Into a Movie and What's Up With the Lame Dialogue?
Science fiction
A big sticker on the front that says it is now a major motion picture
Chick lit
Slippery pages

Five Things I am a Sucker For in a Book
Plotlines that span generations
Magical realism
Conniving protagonists
Fashionable women
Exotic locales

Friday, April 20, 2007

Maybe it's to show off your fancy cell phone.

InStyle.com says this is one of this season's Hot Trends:

That, my friends, is a clear purse. Chanel. $895.

I would just like to point out that I don't have to spend $895 to show the world that the inside of my purse may or may not contain a combination of: lip balm, pens, old grocery lists, last week's receipts, as assortment of plastic utensils, tampons, mascara, credit cards, picture IDs, a cell phone, a blackberry, keys, hand sanitizer, Neosporin, Lipton tea bags, hair bands, yesterday's earrings, candy wrappers, $1.43 worth of spare change, and, occasionally, my dance shoes.