I am SOOO excited!

I absolutely love this blog thing! It's so much fun reading all your posts! You guys remind me of books that I had forgotten about and get me excited about reading new books. I CANNOT WAIT for Breaking Dawn to be released. I'll probably pre-order it, so I can get it right away! :) Of course, if you're in 2B, you SAW how excited I was and you HEARD how excited Miss Tuggle is, too!

Speaking of teachers, Mrs. Bailey read Life As We Knew It (sorry, still can't do italics) & LOVED it! I'm trying to get her to post her reaction here...

Now, Johnny reminded me of books that I haven't thought of in quite some time... He mentioned Grapes of Wrath in his post. I tried Grapes of Wrath a number of years ago & had a REALLY hard time b/c the first dozen pages or so (at least it seemed that long) was about a turtle in the dirt and I could NOT get past that! I LOVE John Steinbeck! He's a great writer and I have LOVED his other books - East of Eden (Eli read that), The Pearl (Adam read that) & Of Mice and Men. Mice & Men was one of my favorite books in high school! Thank you, Mrs. Gibbs, for making me read that! I'm actually really glad that I had teachers that forced me to read the other classics in high school because I probably wouldn't have read them otherwise. Maybe that's why I push you guys to read books from that College Bound List so hard...

So in high school I wasn't forced to read as much as I would've liked (in hindsight), but these are the ones I did read & I LOVED them:
- Lord of the Flies
- The Great Gatsby
- The Awakening
- Huckleberry Finn
But my ALL TIME FAVORITE, the book that I loved the most, I read in 9th grade English and it was A TALE OF TWO CITIES. You know, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Such a great book by Charles Dickens. I don't know if they still read it in high school, but it's something that you should all check out sometime. Don't let the fact that Dickens wrote it scare you. It's about a great romance, a love rejected, and the French Revolution. Love & war! What more could you ask for?!?

Now you all have me on this serious reading bug... I cannot stop reading! Right now I'm into EAT, PRAY, LOVE but there are at least a dozen or so books that I'm hoping to get to ASAP: The Wizard of Earthsea, two novels by Ann Rinaldi, Breaking Dawn (thanks, Yang!), the sequel to Life As We Knew It (I forget the title), A Thousand Splendid Suns, etc. There are also a TON of books that I want to re-read AFTER I finish all the new ones, two of them are The Grapes of Wrath & The Heart of Darkness. I figured after all these years I should probably give them another shot. Maybe I'll like them/finish them this time. :)

What books are you planning to read this summer???? (19 school days left, I think.)

My FAVORITE thing

Have you guys seen The Sound of Music? If you have then you know the song where Julie Andrews belts out "These are a few of my favorite things..." In it, she goes on and on describing the little things in life that make her happy - "girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes" is one. I have to admit IN PRINT that I love that movie and that song. It IS the little things in life that make me happy. The perfect pen; bubble gum with a fountain Coke; a clean house; the smell of freshly cut grass; a new magazine in the mail; an unexpected note from a friend... I could go on & on like Julie Andrews, but don't worry, I won't sing about them. EVER. (Sorry, Ruba!)

My MOST favorite thing though is finding that book. You know, the one that you absolutely, positively cannot put down. It's been quite sometime since I found one of those books. The last one was Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, but that was nearly a year ago! I've read a ton since then - mostly young adult stuff - but I FINALLY found one yesterday that I could not tear myself away from: Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. YOU HAVE GOT TO READ IT!

I started it at school. While y'all were watching A Midsummer Night's Dream, I read a bit. And then I picked the book up at lunch and read at the table with my homeroom. When I got home it was the first thing I did - after I let Cooper do his thing! I didn't put the book down until 9:45 and only then did I put it down because I FINISHED IT! It was that good!

Now Mrs. Bailey wants to read it because it's go the science stuff - the moon & gravity. Ms. Tuggle wants to read it because she & I like the same stuff (Lonesome Dove and Twilight). There's only one copy in the media center though, so you might have to fight over this one! If you're still looking to hit your 25 books, this one MUST be one you use to get there!