Weekend Wonderings

This week I got to thinking, why is it that I never seem to have enough books? Why am I always looking for another book to read?

Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.

I have, in the past, purchased, borrowed, found hundreds (not kidding) of books that are sitting on my shelves waiting to be read. I thought they sounded interesting when I got them, yet for some reason, they are still unread. I pondered this question within my mind and came to the conclusion that there are several causes at the root of this issue.

1. We've all heard about having eyes bigger than our stomach when we put too much on our plates and can't finish our food, well, that's me with books. I think it's a disease because whenever I hear about another interesting book, I have to find it right away and that just shoves the other books that I already have deeper into the mushroom cloud that is my TBR list. One day soon it will envelope the earth!

2. I read a great book and it is part of a series and I want to find out the next adventures, so I go and get all the rest of the series. Mushroom cloud expansion again!

3. One of my fellow book bloggers is having a contest and the book being given away looks good so I throw my name into the hat not believing that I will win, and what's the old saying - Lo and behold, my name is picked. Another book is on its way to my house.

4. My friends know that I love to read, so they bring/send the books they're finished with so that I can "enjoy" them too.

This year I am taking a challenge for reading Books Off Your Shelf (BOYS) so if you see the BOYS tag on my Challenges for I book I read, I have successfully removed one book from the mushroom cloud in an effort to avoid the disaster of collapsing bookshelves.

Okay, so what are your excuses/reasons for constantly inflating your bookshelves?

Weekend Wonderings

This week I began realizing that I was tremendously far behind on projects that I wanted to finish this year (Mainly because my reading was taking priority.) and wondered if there was some motivation that I could give myself other than guilt to get my projects caught up.

I send myself reminders of the projects, I have them on a checklist on the refrigerator, I walk pass them frequently, but how do I get myself to put down that book and start working on the project? Maybe it's that word "working" that gets me. Is there any solution? I really want to do them, and once I start in on them, they do consume my attention, but it's that starting point that's the kicker.

Do you have a magic process that keeps you on the straight and narrow when you have a number of projects that are going on at the same time?

Weekend Wonderings

For those that stop by regularly, aren't you surprised by the picture for my wonderings?

Earlier this week, I was going through the blogs that I follow and realized that many of them pass along yummy sounding recipes and it got me to wondering....

When you see a recipe that sounds absolutely scrumptious on the Internet, have you ever tried it out? If you have, was it as good as you thought it would be? What's your experience been in this area? Have you tried recipes from any of the books you've read?

I've tried several recipes that I've seen at different blogs and websites. Some were better than I thought they would, some were just so difficult that even though they were good, I wouldn't make them again, and some were not great.

Weekend Wonderings

It is extremely hot! What has that got to do with reading, you say? Well, I was just wondering if the weather ever effects what you read, where you, or even if you read?

For me, I love to read when the air has a chill and is crisp and clear so when the hot, humid, hazy days arrive in my area, I either hide inside to read or don't read much. Now that might change a bit with my new Nook e-reader because one of the reasons that don't like to read when it's hot is that my hands get sweaty and the pages smudge my fingers with ink. But an e-reader doesn't do that, so I'm going to see if this changes my reading habits for the rest of the summer. Also, when it's hot I don't want to read stories set in the fall or winter and I don't like to read winter stories in the spring or summer so I think that weather does affect my reading. What about you?

Weekend Wonderings - Memorial Day

This is Memorial Day Weekend and everyone is planning trips to the pool and barbecues on the patio but are we forgetting the reason for this holiday? It's not just to officially acknowledge that Summer is upon us, but to acknowledge that there are brave and generous men and women who dedicate their lives literally to protecting us and our loved ones.

So next time you see someone in uniform, thank them for their service. They may not have made the decisions that lead to fighting a war, but they are the ones that fight it and we should show our gratitude for their service. I, for one, wonder where we would be without them and hope that we never have to find out.

Weekend Wonderings

Where would we be without our Moms?

Happy Mother's Day to all!

Weekend Wonderings

The Weather Channel and local forecasters are agreeing that this weekend the weather is going to be beautiful. I'm wondering does the weather affect how much and what you read?

I hear some people say that they are going to be out and about because the weather will be great and others who say they'll be jogging or sightseeing (I live in DC area) but for me, I'll maybe sit out on the porch with a good book but I won't allow the weather stop me from reading. Winter weather gives me a good excuse to just snuggle with a book and when the weather is too hot to do anything, reading is a nice cool activity.

So what about you...how do you adjust your reading with the weather?

Weekend Wonderings

This week I got to thinking about my ancestry and popped over to http://www.ellisisland.org/ to see if I could find my grandparents record of arrival. After some searching I was delighted to find both of them. It got me thinking, since them arrived in the early part of the 20th century, if there were any books about the immigrations of that period. I think I'll have to do some more research and see.

Have you ever looked for an old relative or researched your family tree?

Weekend Wonderings

I was over at Random Musings where David is running a poll and it got me thinking.... Why do we buy a book? His options were Cover, Author, Price, Description/Synopsis, Genre/Subject, Recommendation from others, Reading Sample, Peer Reviews, Professional Reviews, and Publisher. You could only chose 3 and I had a hard time. Can you narrow down your reasons to only 3 of these or are there other reasons for you?

For me, I am first drawn by the genre /subject - it gets me to the area of the books that I would most likely enjoy and then I start browsing. The biggest draw at this point is the cover art - I know that sounds stupid but that's what draws me to a book. I won't necessarily buy it for that reason but that's what gets me to look at it in the first place. Then I read the description/synopsis and see if it is a book that would grab my interest. I will then try the first few pages to see if my interest is whetted and then the decision is made. Granted I don't normally buy a book that is over $15 - those I hunt down in the library. So it really takes about 5 options for me to choose a book.

What about you?

Weekend Wonderings

Now that the weather is starting to get warmer (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), and you have the urge to spend more time outdoors, what do you do when you have a book that you can't put down? Can you read in the bright sunshine? when it's windy? How do you handle the urge to take a walk down a beautiful path?

Not being an outdoor person, I very rarely get that urge to spend time outdoors, but when I do, I'll sit on my porch with that book I can't put down and enjoy the fresh air and maybe even the sunshine. If I do want to take a walk, I'll take along my MP3 with a book on tape and read and commune with nature. But like I said don't expect to find me outside on a regular basis.

What about you? Do you have Spring fever dragging you away from your books?

Weekend Wonderings - Book Mark Day

Tomorrow is BOOKMARK Day!

For avid readers, we couldn't live without our bookmarks! There are magnetic ones that clip to the top of the page, there are elastic ones that hug your book with a brace in the middle, a thread sewn into the binding, there are cloth ones, leather ones, paper or embroidered ones, there are small ones, tall ones, there are even cyber bookmarks on the Internet. They can be fancy or plain, a scrap of torn paper or an elegant printed piece of cardboard. They can have pictures of beautiful places or people we know. They can be verses that we love or funny catch phrases. Some people even use the corner of the page turned down to be a bookmark. Whatever it is that you use for your bookmarks, we all know that a reader absolutely hates to lose any special indicator that was in a book.

For me, probably the worst bookmark I ever used was a piece of Toilet paper (Don't worry, it was unused) and probably the nicest was a magnetic bookmark that my niece made for me.

So what is the worse looking bookmark you have ever used and what is the nicest?

Weekend Wonderings

This week I got to thinking, why is it that I can't be happy with the books that I have on my shelf waiting to be read?  Why am I always looking for another book to read? 
Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.

It's not like a book is going to disapear off the face of the earth and I will never get another chance to read it.  Granted, maybe it will be harder to find if it is not a new book but then again maybe it will be easier to acquire at the library or book store if it has some time to sit on the shelves.  And if I really want to read it sometime in the future all I need to do is make myself a note or add it to my wishlist and it won't be completely forgotten in the rush to another book.  So why can't I wait?

Weekend Wonderings

This week I got to thinking about why readers follow books in a series and whether they ever stop reading a series after they've been at it for a while.

Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.

For me, I like series because I don't have to spend a portion of my reading time getting to know the characters, or trying understand where they would get their motivations in every book. Once I start a series, provided that I like the characters, background and their interactions, I will normally stick with it. I don't think that I have ever dropped a series after reading more than 2 books.

On the other hand, if I don't particularly like the characters or the development of their relationships to each other, I may put the series on the back burner (so to speak) and move on to other series that I enjoy better.

What about you?

Weekend Wonderings

I have been trying to complete a challenge by the end of this month and got to thinking, Is it really worth it to rush through a book just to meet a deadline?

Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.


For me, the answer is a definite NO.

The entire reason for me to read a book is to enjoy the words, emotions, ideas that the writer is trying to communicate to me as the reader, so rushing just to be able to say it is finished, defeats that purpose. I want to savor the book and try to understand everything that the writer is saying, so if it takes a little bit longer, so be it. I will enjoy the journey that much longer.

Weekend Wonderings

I was processing the books that I picked up at the library and realized that I chose three books that were in the Juvenile shelves. It got me to thinking - why are books classified the way they are by age?
Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.


I understand some books are not appropriate for young readers but why would we adults tend to skip over those books and not even venture into that area of the shelves?

I, personally, had challenged myself to broaden my reading to other areas, so this year I have ventured into the juvenile realm on occasion. After all, I love Harry Potter, why wouldn't I like other books that are geared to the younger generations?

I read the A Bad Beginning (liked it) , read The Scarecrow and His servant (liked that too), listened to The Alchemyst: The secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (ditto), and I loved Black Beauty. I may not have small children around, but that doesn't mean, I can't enjoy these books.

I wonder, do other people limit themselves to certain areas because of age or some other reasons?

Weekend wonderings

Do you ever see a book or hear a title and wonder - Why haven't I read that book? So I decided I'd start a new meme - WEEKEND WONDERINGS – which simply answers some hypothetical questions about you, your books and your reading habits. Something to make you stop and think about what, where, when, and why you read what you do.
Feel free to play along, just post a link to your blog or comment here and we can all wonder together.

This week I got to thinking about how well read I am.


After reading the biography of John Quincy Adams who had nearly 4000 books in his library at one time, I wondered how well read I was. So I googled out to the Internet and found a list of the top 100 Novels according to Time. (I thought they would be a good judge.) I'm not very well read, according to this list because I've only read 1 - Gone with the Wind.

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

How do you fair against this list?

Weekend Wonderings

Do you ever see a book or hear a title and wonder - Why haven't I read that book?
So I decide I'd start a new meme - WEEKEND WONDERINGS

Have you read more than 6 of these books?
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so i can see your responses!
*This is a quiz I saw over at http://alexia561.blogspot.com/ . She'd read 23.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ()
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) definitely!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ()
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte () own
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ()
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier()
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ()
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ()
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ()
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ()
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ()
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ()
26 The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway ()
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ()
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ()
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ()
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ()
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ()
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen ()
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein ()
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 (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - 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 ()
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ()
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - 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 () own
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 (X)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ()
76 The Inferno – Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ()
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ()
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray () own
80 Possession - AS Byatt ()
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ()
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ()
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ()
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert () own
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 (X)
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 () own
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ()
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ()
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas () own
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()

If I counted correctly, that makes 19 out of 100. And if you add the 6 books that I own but haven't read yet, that brings it up to 25. Have read parts of the Bible, so that makes...25 1/2? Much better than the 6 expected!

So, how many have you read?