What I Want 2 Read Next...

Yum. I think I could handle a book like this. Easy, comfortable, minimal and ohhh sooo good-looking!

The Help (movie!!!!... help?)

Has anyone else seen this?!?!?!

I can't help feeling that the cover design is not how I imagined it (though the color is)...

I mean, I can't help being excited a leeeetle bit excited about this because even though we, book lovers, know that normally no good can come out of a movie based on a fantastic book... I really love that Emma Stone* is going to be "Skeeter." I just hope justice will be done to the characters.

...she does look awfully cute with Skeetersque hair treatment...

Abileen (Viola Davis**) looks a little young and Hilly is not thin at all (BAD), but we will see... we will see...

*I loved Stone in "Easy A" after all, which is a bit more fun that reading "The Scarlet Letter"...

** Davis is also going to be in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," for which I may make another post like this one. We will see...

Charleston Girl...

Anyone else know about this coming out from under my radar? I saw it in "Kaufland" (buy-country)... what the what?

In other news, I finally got around to listening to "The Help" and am almost done......... so good to have a good book. SO GOOD!!!!!!!
In other other news, I rate "The Alchymist" at lower than Twilight, Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, whatever our current scale is. Not really even interested in listening to the rest of them.

Happy Valentine's Day Lovelies!

A fitting question for today, I think...

What is your favorite love story?

Romeo & Juliet, Sense & Sensibility? Or do you prefer no ampersands, like Bridget Jones's Diary? Or how about Wuthering Heights? (which I still need to read!!) It's actually a quite difficult question, but for today I will give a shout out to Pride and Prejudice. Hello, Mr. Darcy!

Also, do you find it as interesting as I do that Penguin decided to make most of their beautiful cloth bound books, that you can find at Anthropologie among other places, by Jane Austen? They obviously know their readership. And yes, I want all of them.

Dreaming in French

Update on Isabug:

I'm currently reading Dreaming in French and watching Law & Order:SVU and Bones. What does this say about me?

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Dreaming in French by Megan McAndrew review:

I haven't actually finished it yet, but I picked it up because of the title and the cover as I am experiencing some extreme Europe lust. Aka: I need to be there. Alas...
The book is about a teenage girl growing up in Paris in the 70's(her mother and father are both American) and it's starting to confuse me because every book I pick up now focuses on a young girl in Paris. I guess I'm an easy target. It's really much more than just a book about a young girl in Paris but you don't really find that out until half way through. She is the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut man and her mother is a flamboyant and beautiful gal from Kentucky. (Kentucky!) Her mother goes out a lot, paints the house elaborately, etc. etc. and it's all going well until something happens involving Poland. (Poland - 1970s - get it?) I don't want to give everything away.

It's a good read, especially for the subway ride, and because I'm feeling super generous today - YOU'RE ALL GETTING ONE! Well, except Claire. Sorry Badbear.

"McAndrew's novel brings an original sensibility as well as a plot that takes satisfying, unexpected turns." New York Times Book Review

Lost...

We haven't talked TV shows in a while and I want to share with you all how addicted the Mathewsies have become to "Lost".  Yes, Lost (The TV series from ABC) is over after six seasons of which I had watched approximately zero episodes prior to the series ending.  But, lo and behold, with the advent of Netflix in our lives (credit to Isabug...in fact, I think I might start referring in future to Netflix as Isaflix just so she can be fully aware of how much we appreciate her connection with Netflix) we have discovered Lost.  I just want to write Lost in big bold letters or something...LOST!!!

Every night, we hurry through dinner and all of our evening chores so that like families of old gathered around the radio, we can watch episodes of Lost.  We are now on Season 3, Episode 2.  We talk about Lost.  We talk about who our favorite character is, we talk about who The Others are, we talk about the Island, what the button is for, why the plane crashed, who's creepy, who's not, we talk about how when the Wii Fit says "visualize your ideal body" and I immediately think I want to look like Evengaline Lilly...

If you, dearest schwester and neicies (and other blog readers) have not watched Lost, you must.  I repeat:  you must start watching Lost on Isaflix (or the full episodes which are on line on ABC.com)!

Sadly, one day Lost will end and what then, I ask, will we watch next?

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Hello my darling readers! Have you all been reading with the new year?  I read a couple of books from Isabug's parcel that arrived the day after everyone's departure including the A.J. Jacobs book (as written about on other blogs) and Little Princes.  I really liked them both.  Also, I just finished Laura Hillenbrand's (Seabiscuit) new book Unbroken --it's in the Audible library for those of you who are authorized with the secret code.  I recommend it for a wonderful change up from fiction.  Also, I recommend it highly as a "manly book" and I'd put it into the Jon Krakauer company.  It's a very flat, level, detail-rich true story of Louis Zamperini -- who is still alive by the way -- a juvenile delinquent, Olympic runner, WW II airmen, Japanese POW, and all-around inspiration!  Reading it took me back to Mere's and my little visit to the WWII memorial in Washington D.C with Grandpa and filled me with such affection for men like him and their ilk.  Truly, they maybe are the "Greatest Generation" and tough beyond measure.

If you read Seabiscuit, you may remember the journalistic, dry quality of that book.  And, while the story was about Seabiscuit there were a multitude of side roads into the lives of the people who intersected with that horse as well as the horse industry of the day.  Unbroken is much the same -- rich with interesting facts, colorful people and the nature of the war in the Pacific.  The story telling is dry but like a good wine, sometimes dry is just the perfect thing. Plus,  I don't know about you, but while I feel pretty well-educated about WWII and the war in Europe, I'm not particularly informed about the War in the Pacific other than Pearl Harbor and maybe the Burmese Death March.   I now feel so much smarter.

So...Unbroken -- great for long runs in the cold (or on the treadmill).  Try it, you'll like it.