Books, Books, Books

I love to read. I'm not the fastest reader, but I enjoy it. I love getting engrossed in the characters' lives and escaping my own. I love when I get so into a book that I lose complete track of time and the next thing I know it's 4 am and I am forcing myself to put the book down.

I don't get wrapped up in a lot of books, and I don't read many of the "must reads." I usually stick to the chick-lits or ones written for teenagers. I know...I'm 27, I should not be reading books written for girls in Jr. High. That's why I'm starting this new goal.

BBC has published a list of the top 100 books which I am (slowly) work my way through. It's going to take me years probably to get through them, but I figure it'll be something worthwhile to work on. I've put an "X" next to the books I've already read - not including ones I read in school because I never actually "read" them - I passed my AP Lit class thanks to sparknotes.com. Hahaha! So...here is the list of 100 books I am going to start working on. Man, I sure have my work cut out for me! Now the question is where to start...

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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (in entirety)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
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
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
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
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
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
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 -X
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 - X
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 
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 - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
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
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
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
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
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
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

7 Things to Do Before I'm 30

I'm guilty of watching a Lifetime Movie at work...RIGHT NOW! And, unlike most Lifetime Movies, it's NOT about a murderous husband, a cheating husband, an abusive parent, or a teenager who gets knocked up by her high school crush only to be left to raise the kid on her own. It's about a girl, living in NYC, 29, who quits her job & is forced to move back home to Colorado to live with her mom.

Sound familiar?

Well...besides living in Colorado, turning down a great guy's proposal, and having a gorgeous high school crush who is still in love with me. Oh - and being 29. But other than those things, I felt like I was watching my life. Sad, I know.

Well...what the movie is about and why I am posting: the girl finds a list of 7 things she wanted to do before turning 30. She wrote the list when she was quite young, so some things (e.g.: become a rock star) are more funny than achievable. But there are some good things on the list (e.g.: get a tattoo, go sky diving, tell the truth to her brother, forgive her mother, marry her high school crush, Danny & dance under the moon).

Well...in short, it got me thinking. What do I want to do before I'm 30? I mean, it's less than 3 years away. I should really think about it. Most people say you should have a 5-year plan, but I'd be 32 and that's just too far away. So I'm going with 30. But what do I want to do before I'm 30? I mean...I've done quite a lot already (see this post). But obviously I haven't done EVERYTHING I want to do. So here you have it. 7 things I want to do before I'm 30:

1- Get married (sadly, unlike the movie I don't have someone specific in mind)
2- Go to Africa
3- Start dancing again
4- Figure out what I really want to do for a job (it might be what I'm doing now...I just need to decide)
5- It's a secret ;)
6- Kiss in the rain
7- Pay off my car

There you have it. My list of 7 things I want to do before I turn 30...I better get to work! (both my actual work and on the list. haha!)

Inspired

I love The Biggest Loser. I haven't watched it for the past couple of seasons, but this season I have a friend from high school competing so I started watching last week to cheer her on. As I'm sitting here watching this week's episode, they advertised the Pound for Pound Challenge. I immediately went online to look up more information and decided to pledge to lose weight. I know I've been saying for ever that I'm going to lose weight and every time all I've managed to do is lose a few pounds only to gain that plus a few extra back. But this time I'm serious.

So what did I pledge? I pledged to lose 15 pounds by May 31, 2011. I have 5 months get me part way to reaching my goal weight. I can do it, right? Scratch that....I CAN DO IT!! That's right. This time will be different and I have committed to making a change.

So now I challenge you - if any of you are in my same position - to pledge to lose weight with the pound for pound challenge. Even if you pledge to maintain your weight, the food bank will donate 5 lbs of food for that! Awesome, right? That's what I thought! So...let's do it together!

New Beginnings

It's a new year. It's 2011! Can you believe it?!?! I sure can't. It feels like it was just a few months ago that I moved back to Utah from NYC, but it's been over a year. Last year at this time, I was preparing to go away to Costa Rica for 6 weeks. Sadly, this year I am just preparing for busy season...again. But I'm excited for this new year. I'm determined to make it a good one.

Just yesterday I was talking with Jo about this coming year. I told her that it was going to be a year where I focused on myself. I want to really work on being a better person and becoming the person that I want to be. Sounds like a great goal, right? Focusing on one's self is the best way to gain happiness, right? At least, that's what all those self-help books say. And, as we all know, the people who write those are always right. HAHAHA! But so was my thinking - focusing on me for the new year is going to be the best way to make my life the one I really want to live.

But the Lord knows better. He knew my new goal and so inspired me to attend a different ward today. I went to my friend Kimmy's ward in West Bountiful. I am so glad that I did, too. The Relief Society lesson was based off President Dieter F. Uchtdor's talk Happiness, Your Heritage. Toward the end of the lesson, the girl who was teaching began speaking on how we can be truly happy - focusing on others, not on ourselves. She said that in this time of our lives it's so easy for us to slip into thinking only about "me." We have such big decisions to make during this time of our lives we feel like we should be focusing on ourselves. But President Uchtdorf points out that it is through focusing on others that we gain the Spirit and in turn are guided by the Lord in what we should do.

As she was speaking, the conversation I had with Jo the night before came back in my mind. I immediately raised my hand to tell of my previous thinking. I told her that I was so thankful for this lesson because it helped me see that to become the person I want to be I needed to spend the upcoming year not focusing on me, but focusing on others. So this is my new goal for the year - focus on others and their needs.

Sure there are definitely things in my life that I need to improve, and I am going to work on those as well. But I pray that I will be able to keep this focus throughout the year and that by doing so I can become closer to my Lord & Savior.

Just to close, I want to leave you with the inspired words of President Uchtdorf:

In the end, the number of prayers we say may contribute to our happiness, but the number of prayers we answer may be of even greater importance. Let us open our eyes and see the heavy hearts, notice the loneliness and despair; let us feel the silent prayers of others around us, and let us be an instrument in the hands of the Lord to answer those prayers.

May we all go out and be the Lord's hands in 2011. Happy New Year! 

Picture Update

So I realized that I haven't posted any pictures of what I've been up to lately in a REALLY long time. As in since JUNE! Holy crap! I apologize. I've been so serious in my blog posts lately - what with the complaining and moping and deep thinking I've been doing - I haven't had the time to post fun things I've been doing. Sad thing is, I haven't even taken most of my pictures off my camera. I've been slacking in many ways. So New Year's resolution: post more pictures and talk about the fun things I'm doing along with the 'thoughtful' posts. Good plan? I think so. And just to prove that I'm serious about this, here are a few (ha) pictures of some of the stuff I've been up to lately. Don't worry - I'm not going all the way back to June (you can thank me later).

HALLOWEEN

Frightmares @ Lagoon

 Witches' Night Out for Jo's birthday

 

 

Ward Halloween Party

(I was the outline of a dead body at a crime scene)

MY SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTY

 THANKSGIVING TURKEY 5K RUN

 

MEXICAN TOGA PARTY (HEATHER'S BIRTHDAY)

NEW YORK CITY

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS AT TEMPLE SQUARE

BLACK & WHITE NEW YEAR'S PARTY

That, in a nut shell, is what I've been up to.