An Abundance of John Green

One of the things I love about my book club, Flips Flipping Pages, is how it opened up new worlds of reading for me.

In the past, I was averse to reading books other people raved about, mainly because I like discovering books on my own, and with the exception of my cousin Dianne, I don’t know anyone who has the same taste in books as I do. The more a book was foisted on me, the more I resisted it, and if I was interested in a popular book, I usually chose to read it long after the hype had gone down.

Making friends with other readers made me realize a bunch of things. One, I was missing out on a whole lot of books. Two, people with entirely different tastes in books can like a same book, or even find different elements to like in one book. And three, you don’t even have to like a book to find it interesting!

Of course, this realization has had its repercussions: the inability to walk out of a book store empty-handed, the triple-layered shelves of TBR books, and transforming from a strict monobookist to a juggling polybookist, but because there are other people as pathologically addicted as I am to books, I don’t really mind.

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The Doodles Diet (review + giveaway!)

As some of you may probably know, I have not had meat for over thirty days now, because of a no-meat Lenten pact we’ve got going at work.

Today’s book is something that has actually made the past few weeks a bit easier for me: The Doodles Diet by Deborah Zemke.

I found this book one day when I was in a bad mood because I happened to pass by a rotisserie and went weak from the wafting smell of golden roasted chicken and shiny cutlets of pork. I consoled myself by entering a book store, and luckily, there was a little bargain sale going on at one of my favorite National Book Store branches (Harrison Plaza, if you must know — awesome bargain section!) and I found this book… (and two more bags full, but who’s counting?!?).

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Victorian Doll House

I didn’t have a dollhouse when I was a kid — the closest I got were haphazardly stacked boxes with cut-out doors and windows for my Barbies, with mismatched furniture made from odds and ends scavenged around the house. Eventually I got Polly Pocket playsets, which I loved too, but a dollhouse that can fit in the palm of your hand isn’t exactly a proper dollhouse.

Last year around the holidays, I scored this wonderful find from Andy, a friend who sells books online: A Three-Dimensional Victorian Dollhouse, which brings me one step closer to my dream dollhouse.

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Shakespeare: A Crash Course

Shakespeare was a rite of passage for me. In the school I attended, the sixth graders put on an annual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for nearly two decades now, I think). Next to graduation, AMND was the most important event of our grade school lives, and the pageant season was something everyone looked forward to — the school transforms into a magical place when Shakespeare-spouting elves and fairies, noble lords and fair ladies, and mustached mechanicals  traipse around the campus, heightening the excitement for the much-awaited annual performance.

It was the pre-digicam ’90s so I don’t have any pictures of our production (the play photos are of a recent batch from the school website), but I don’t think any of us will forget our AMND experience. Up to now, you can ask any of us who were in that play and we can probably recite whole acts from memory.

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Shorts.

I’m back! Pardon the unexpected hiatus — it’s been a busy, busy week month year and I’m still catching up on my blogging.

And I thought the holiday stress was bad! I could barely read last December (at least until after Christmas), so aside from finishing all my trivia books for the year end, my December reads were mostly short kidlit that I unearthed from the annals of my TBR: Pippi Longstocking, A House of Tailors, The Key Collection, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, Catwings, The Cybil War, and The Great Mom Swap. These make books 199-205 for 2010, and after this I owe you one more (for a total of 206; apparently I overlooked one book), and then will proceed to my 2011 reviews.

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