"Queen of Babble Gets Hitched" by Meg Cabot
Finished: July 27, 2009
Page Count: 277

Why I read it:
I love Meg Cabot books (not the Princess Diaries or 1-800 series though). The Queen of Babble series has been fun to read but not my favorite. This book was the final in the trilogy and has been sitting on my bookshelf at home since January. Since I had no books from the library, I decided to finally read this one. I ended up finishing 3/4 of it in 2 hours (between 11 pm and 1 am today) because I got hooked.

Booklist Synopsis:
Lizzie Nichols should be the happiest girl in the universe. The phone has been ringing off the hook ever since a wedding gown she restored appeared in the New York Times. Her wealthy ex-boyfriend, Luke de Villier, has decided their breakup was a mistake and has finally proposed. But Lizzie made the mistake of sleeping with Chaz, Luke’s best friend, during the brief hiatus in her relationship with Luke, and now she spends more time thinking about Chaz than her fiancé. In addition to an angst-ridden heroine and a loyal, waiting-in-the-wings hero, Cabot’s novel is filled with unforgettable, quirky characters. There’s Lizzie’s bad-mouthed, cooking sherry–guzzling granny; a spoiled, self-centered fiancé; a best friend who is a newly outed lesbian; and a high-strung assistant. Celebrities demanding a Lizzie Nichols’ creation include a familiar, gum-popping, red-carpet regular always accompanied by her shivering Chihuahua and bodyguard.

What I thought:
I'm glad I finally read the book as it did not disappoint. I enjoyed one love story more than the other and was pleased when I got the ending that I more or less wanted. There were parts of the book though that I had to skim because Lizzie was acting really stupid and bothering me. I cannot finish the "Shopaholic" series because the main character does stupid things and it really drives me nuts. I had my moments with Lizzie in this book but got over it and moved on.

I think this book was especially helpful because it has wedding history and tips for planning. That's great since Allison, one of my 3 best friends, just got engaged yesterday and I'm helping to plan the wedding. Maybe that's why I was so determined to finish fast... I was just excited!

"Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen
Finished: July 19, 2009 (2 days before library due date)
Page Count: 335

Why I read it:
One of my (many) bosses at school recommended this book to me. He enjoyed it and when I told him I was reading "Columbine" he suggested I read this because it is not as dark.

Wikipedia Synopsis:
Set during the Great Depression of the, Water for Elephants tells the story of a young man who leaves his life as a Cornell University veterinary student after losing both his parents in a car accident, and jumps onto a train that happens to house the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. After a short confrontation with Blackie, a bouncer that stops stowaways, and Camel (a limp old worker) promising him a job and an audience with Uncle Al (The Ringmaster) Jacob decides to stay aboard the train. Since his parents have died in an automobile accident, and he has not a home to call his own, he decides to remain with the circus. Jacob is employed as the show’s veterinarian and he faces a number of challenges in dealing with the head trainer, August, while also learning how to function in the hierarchy of the circus and falling in love with August's wife, Marlena.

The story is told as a series of memories by Jacob Jankowski, either a ninety or ninety-three year-old man who lives in a nursing home.

As the memories begin, Jacob Jankowski is twenty-three years old and preparing for his final exams as a Cornell University veterinary student when he receives the news that his parents were killed in a car accident. Jacob’s father was a veterinarian and Jacob had planned to join his practice. When Jacob learns that his father was deeply in debt because he had been treating animals for free as well as mortgaging the family home to provide Jacob an Ivy League education, he has a breakdown and leaves school just short of graduation. In the dark of night, he jumps on a train only to learn it is a circus train. When the owner of the circus, Uncle Al, learns of his training as a vet, he is hired to care for the circus animals.

The head trainer, August, is a brutal man who abuses the animals in his care as well as the people around him. Alternately, he can be utterly charming. Jacob develops a guarded relationship with August and his wife, Marlena, with whom Jacob falls in love. August is suspicious of their relationship and beats Marlena and Jacob. Marlena subsequently leaves August, which is the precipitating event leading to the ultimate demise of the Benzini Brothers circus.

What I thought:
I immediately really liked this book but it took until the library deadline to get me to sit down and read most of it in a day. I'm glad I did because there were little parts to the story that I feel like I would have forgotten.

"Water for Elephants" is about a man who used to work for the circus and is now 93 and living in a nursing home. He recalls his time at the circus and every few chapters the book talks about his present life and how miserable he is at the nursing home. The book paints an amazing picture of the circus, a show I went to once when I was younger but was so much different when this book was set.

Lots happens at this circus, good and bad, and there was a love story, which is my total weakness, so I was pleased. The book had an ending I was hoping for after so many trials and tribulations in this man's life. It wasn't the most light-hearted of books but it was still a great read and I'm glad to have taken Ron's advice!

I have several book lists to choose from. I have no idea where I got most of these lists, probably online. My goal in life is to finish every book on this list of 100. It will probably take the rest of my life to do but I'll get there eventually. The Laura Bush list is a good goal as well, as she (and Barbara) are the only Bush women I like.

100 Life Changing Books
1. Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
3. Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
4. All the Kings Men, Robert Penn Warren
5. Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
6. The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron
7. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
8. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
9. Audubon: A Vision, Robert Penn Warren
10. Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
11. Beloved, Toni Morrison
12. Black Boy, Richard Wright
13. Body Rags, Galway Kinnell
14. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
16. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
17. Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
18. The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
19. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
20. Confessions, St. Augustine
21. The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide
22. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross
24. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
25. A Death in the Family, James Agee
26. Death of a Lake, Arthur Upfield
27. Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann
28. Dracula, Bram Stoker
29. Eight Men, Richard Wright
30. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
31. Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
32. Fathers And Sons, Ivan Turgenev
33. Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce
34. Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
36. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
37. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
38. Great Dialogues of Plato
39. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
40. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
41. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
42. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
43. The Essential Akutagawa, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
44. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
45. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
46. Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry
47. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
48. Kafka's Other Trial, Elias Canetti
49. The King James Bible
50. The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke
51. Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
52. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
53. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
54. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
55. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
56. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso
57. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
58. Metamorphoses, Ovid
59. A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
60. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
61. Monsenor Quijote, Graham Greene
62. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
63. My Book House, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller
64. My Name Is Aram, William Saroyan
65. Native Son, Richard Wright
66. The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes, edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee
67. Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe
68. Open Secrets, Alice Munro
69. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
70. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
71. Paradise Lost, John Milton
72. The Pointed Bone, Arthur Upfield
73. The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike
74. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
75. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
76. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
77. The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain
78. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
79. The Richard Trilogy, Paul Horgan
80. A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud
81. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
82. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William F. Maxwell
83. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, Breece D'J Pancake
84. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
85. The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
86. Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener
87. The Tempest, William Shakespeare
88. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
89. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
90. The Times Are Never So Bad, Andre Dubus
91. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
92. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
93. The Twelve Caesars, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
94. Ulysses, James Joyce
95. The Voices of Marrakesh, Elias Canetti
96. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
97. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
98. Watt, Samuel Beckett
99. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
100. The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

25 BOOKS TO READ recommended by Laura Bush
Atonement; Ian McEwan
Bless Me, Ultima; Rudolfo Anaya
The Brothers Karamazov; Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories
The French Lieutenant’s Woman; John Fowles
The Heart of the Matter; Graham Greene
I, Claudius; Robert Graves
A Lesson Before Dying; Ernest J. Gaines
The Little Prince; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
My Ántonia; Willa Cather
Mornings on Horseback; David McCullough
Music for Chameleons; Truman Capote
The Optimist’s Daughter; Eudora Welty
Pride and Prejudice; Jane Austen
The Razor’s Edge; W. Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books; Azar Nafisi
Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier
The Secret Life of Bees; Sue Monk Kidd
Ship of Fools; Katherine Anne Porter
Siddhartha; Hermann Hesse
Sophie’s Choice; William Styron
War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

Other "Smart" Reads, as I like to call them
The Bean Trees; Barbara Kingsolver
Smashed; Koren Zalickas
Cat’s Eye; Margaret Atwood
Kafka on the Shore; Haruki Murakami
Girl Bomb; Janice Erlbaum
Goat, a Memoir; Brad Land
White Teeth; Zadie Smith
Autobiography of a Face; Lucy Grealy
The Liar’s Club; Mary Karr
Human Oddities; Noria Jablonski
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests; Italo Calvino
Interpreter of Maladies; Jhumpa Lahiri
Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov
Reasons to Live; Amy Hempel
The Bell Jar; Sylvia Plath
In Pharaoh’s Army; Tobias Wolff
To the Lighthouse; Virginia Woolf
Jesus’ Son; Denis Johnson
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
The Sun Also Rises; Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms; Ernest Hemingway
The Awakening; Kate Chopin
Tender is the Night; F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and the Damned; F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hope’s Boy; Andrew Bridge
Her Last Death; Susanna Sonnenberg
Waiting for Normal; Leslie Connor
My complement, my enemy, my oppressor, my love; Kara Walker
The Glass Castle; Jeanette Walls
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas; John Boyne
Persuasion; Jane Austen
Leave Us Alone; Christopher Reeves
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
The Things They Carried; Tim O’Brien
True Notebooks; Mark Salzman
The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Moshin Hamid
What Is The What; Dave Eggers
The Glass Castle; Jeannette Walls
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; Nick Flynn
persian girls; nahid rachlin
Three Cups of Tea; Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Gang of One; Fan Shen
Kabul Beauty School; Deborah Rodriguez

"Columbine" by Dave Cullen
Finished: June 30, 2009 (the day it was due back at the library!)
Page Count: 432

Why I read it:
I have a weird thing about active shooters and school shootings. Lucky enough to never have witnessed one in my lifetime, I find a fascination in reading about them or watching TV shows that deal with school shootings (One Tree Hill, Degrassi, NCIS). When this book came out in the spring of this year, I immediately had an interest in it and desire to read it. At just over 400 pages, the book looked daunting when I picked it up from the library but I had a deadline of a month and managed to plow through.

Wikipedia Synopsis:
Columbine has two main stories, told in alternating chapters: the 'before' story of the killers' evolution toward murder, and the 'after' story of the survivors.

The 'before' story focuses primarily on the killers' high school years. According to the experts cited here, Eric Harris was a textbook psychopath, and Dylan Klebold was an angry depressive.

The 'after' chapters are composed of eight major substories, focused on indivuals who played a key role in the aftermath, including Principal Frank DeAngelis, alleged Christian martyr Cassie Bernall (another myth, according to the book), "the boy in the window" Patrick Ireland, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the families of victim Danny Rohrbough and heroic teacher Dave Sanders, who died saving students from the gunmen. The Evangelical Christian community's feverish response is also chronicled.

Columbine begins four days before the massacre, at a school assembly hosted by Principal DeAngelis just before Prom weekend. Scenes from the massacre are depicted graphically in the early chapters, and later through flashbacks.

The book is formally composed of five parts: "Part One: Female Down," "Part Two: After and Before," "Part Three: The Downward Spiral," "Part Four: Take Back the School," and "Part Five: Judgment Day." The book contains fifty-three chapters, a timeline, twenty-six pages of detailed endnotes and a fifteen-page bibliography organized into topics like, "Psychopathy," "Government Reports," "Lawsuits," "Christians," "Evidence," "Hostages and Terrorists," "Survivors," "Media Accounts," "Police Ethics and Response Protocols," etc.

What I thought:
Despite the fact that it was hard to read at times, due to the obviously rough material, I found this book hard to put down. Through 10 years of research, Dave Cullen seems to have found his way into the school on the day of the shooting at Columbine and basically described it to a T, as well as the months beforehand and the aftermath following the tragic shooting. I was amazed at how simply the material was laid out in this book and how much more it made sense after I read it. Even though school shootings scare the crap out of me, I found this book to be easy to read and incredibly interesting. I'm actually quite pleased that I was able to finish it. I felt a sense of relief when the book was over and almost a sense of closure for something I was so far away from.

Even though the topic is heavy and some of the chapters of this book are a little graphic, it is a truly interesting book and was put together very well. I definitely recommend it to anyone that remembers the Columbine shooting and just wants to understand more and learn the truth about what happened and as close to the reason why as I think anyone will ever come.