arubacation-slash-the big read.

hey bitches! happy sunday to all. we are back from a great week in aruba, where i wrote what could have been the best blog post ever (it wasn't), which promptly was lost into the depths of my iphone blogger app. to give you the highlights of that blog post that never was, aruba was lovely and i learned one arubian word, which is truly the only word you need to know in aruba... DUSHI. papiamento is the 'official' tongue of aruba (but they all speak-a the englay) and dushi is a generic term of endearment toward females and items in general, meaning nice, sweet, good... for instance:

Mi dushi: My sweetheart 

dushi 'om: Delicious or great 

hole dushi: Smells good 

so you are welcome. aruba was lovely, but i will warn you that travel time is about 12 hours from space city and the island is largely inhabited by new yawkas on holiday. if you want to hear murray, nicollette, vinnie and barbara argue about the whether or not you should be making your sauces with oregano, or the best way to cook any meats (in a shallow aluminum pan, with a little bitta waaaaatttaaa), GET THEE TO ARUBA.

also in aruba, i read about twelve books, which was fantastic. OKAY NOT TWELVE, but i did read mindy kaling's book (is everyone hanging out without me), all three of steig larsson's dragon tattoo books (which were great but caused me to stay up until the wee hours during the first few days, as i could not put them down), tina fey's bossypants, emma (a re-read, and frankly kind of a snooze after all that swedish rape), and then i re-read all three of the hunger games books (because i am real excited about those movies and obvs really love a book series) and last was farm city (another re-read, but it is really, really terrific). so that is ten books, which is not twelve but is still a lot. i made this collage of images thinking i could link it somehow to each book, but then i remembered how i dropped out of whatever class could have taught me how to do that. HUGE NERDS 101, i think it was called?

this is really the perfect time to link back to one of my 2K11 goals, which was to read a whole lot more. i will say that i have read none of the books on my list, HOWEVER, if someone hasn't recommended the dragon tattoo trilogy or hunger games trilogy to you by now, you live in a van down by the river. other books i've read this year include (and keep in mind, i'm basically reading at a 16-year old girl level):

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me - Mindy Kaling
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Emma - Jane Austen
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Farm City - Novella Carpenter
Room - Emma Donoghue
The Birth Order Book - Kevin Leman (possibly the best book ever, if you are into this sort of thing)
The Blessing- Nancy Mitford
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford (how i never heard of these prior to april 2011 is a shock, because nance-balls is amazing)
The Paris Wife - Paula McLain (ernest hemingway's wife! oh, it's fiction? lame.)
Bergdorf Blondes - Plum Sykes (and this totally derailed me to a massive google and wiki stalking of the entire sykes family)
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ)
Night Road - Kristin Hannah (suuuuuuuper bad. like bad bad, but i accidentally downloaded and paid for it so i was like OH WHAT THE HECK.)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
Garden Spells - Sarah Addison Allen
The Peach Keeper - Sarah Addison Allen
The Sugar Queen - Sarah Addison Allen (these are three super terrible books, but i could. not. stop. myself. )

so here are some before-the-end-of-the-year goals:
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

and here is the list (and the rules) for the big read:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
5) Reprint this list (preferrably in your own blog) so we can have a collective gasp about whether or not you've ever been caught up the romatic escapades of Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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
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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
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
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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 BEST. BOOK. EVER.
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
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
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-time - 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
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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
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