Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house… or wife. No mention of his books though.

Ooooh.  Talk about dead sexy!

There’s a book I’m lusting after from the Folio Society…. which being from the Folio Society automatically means it’s prohibitively expensive and likely totally unnecessary.  There is no doubt in my mind that this particular book falls into those categories quite nicely indeed as it may well be the most expensive book I’ve ever taken a fancy to. 

But it is rather gorgeous altogether.  There’s no way in hell I’d ever purchase such a thing, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to!   If by chance anyone reading this is stuck for a Christmas present idea for Borys this year, or just wants to secure her undying affection and devotion with a ridiculously extravagant gift… feel free to contact me for my delivery details.   😀
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I’ll beat it out of him.

Small child:  If you’re going to read, so will I Mum.
Mom:  That’s a great idea.

56.2 seconds of silence ensues

Small Child: What page are you up to Mum?
Mom:  Page 139 Sweetie.
Small Child: I’m only up to page 42. 
Mom: It doesn’t matter how many pages you’ve read so long as you’re enjoying it.

38.7 seconds of silence

Small Child: How many pages are in your book Mum?
Mom: Hmm… 336 pages Babe, this is a pretty short book.
Small Child (frowns): Mine has only 89 pages.

23.4 seconds…

Small Child:  What is the biggest book you ever read?
Mom: Hmm… I’m not sure it’s probably one of these on the book case.
(Pulls down the first hefty tome to hand – Tolstoy’s War and Peace)

Small Child: Wow!  Fourteen Hundred and forty five pages! That’s a big book!  Did you read the whole thing?
Mom:  Yes Bub.  But it doesn’t matter how long it is.  It is a wonderful story of Russian princes playing politics and princesses going to balls and falling in love and dashing army officers rushing gallantly off to battle and…
Small Child (clearly disinterested):  Oh okay. 

15.1 …

Small Child: But you know… I think my book is much better!
…he says brandishing ‘Pokemon #21 – The Chikorita Challenge"
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I read a book… and even remember some of it.

I think this is largely due to the fact that I’ve had to lay off the Valium since Friday. Nothing quite kills the concentration like a not so healthy nightly dose of sedatives. i’ve been reading through a series of books that are set out of in nice neat self contained sections. So if I don’t remember what I read yesterday it doesn’t matter so much. The books in question are about etymology, superstitions, origins of everyday inventions and common English phrases.  I love these sorts of books that are full of seemingly useless trivia.  I like to know how the strange phrases we use every day came into common usage.  I think that sort of thing is interesting… I might be alone in that but- meh.

 So since Friday with my new found concentration and superior memory I’ve been readaing "Bad Girls and Wicked Women: The Most Powerful, Shocking, Amazing, Thrilling and Dangerous Women of All Time" (available from the ABC shop in Oz).  What a great read!  Some of the women depicted in this book are horrific but at the same time they are fantastic.  So many of them have overcome abject poverty and unbelievably heinous abuse in their childhoods and early years to become strong, fierce and some of them terrifying, women.  Admittedly many of them tended to wield their power to avenge themselves on those that wronged them in their early years and yes, some of them also acquired a sociopathic indifference to the suffering they inflicted on others.  But what a thrilling and at the same time appalling read… it’s like watching a literary train wreck and you can’t bring yourself to look away.  Loved it.

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Grade One… vocabulary building.

The Small Child brings home a new reading book every night and we sit and read and help him with any difficult words.  Most of the stories are kinda bland and tend towards the repetitive (including this one) and  the children work through various levels as they progress.  Just before the school holidays Angel went up a reading level to level 13.  One level up and the vocab has gone through the roof!  I can’t believe some of the adjectives in this little story….

Mother Hippopotamus’s Bad Hair Day

0hippo01 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

“I wish I had some hair,” said Mother Hippopotamus.
“You have a meticulous mane, Mother Zebra
You have curly curls, Mother Monkey
You have lanky locks, Mother Giraffe
But I have no hair!”

“You could buy some hair,” said Mother Zebra “You could buy a wig.”

0hippo02 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Zebra and Mother Monkey and Mother Giraffe went with Mother Hippopotamus to buy a wig.

0hippo3 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Hippopotamus tried on a black wig.
“Amazing.” said Mother Zebra
“Appealing.” said Mother Monkey
“Astonishing.” said Mother Giraffe
“Awful.” said Mother Hippopotamus and she took it off.

0hippo04 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Hippopotamus tried on a brown wig.
“Magnificent.” said Mother Zebra
“Marvellous.” said Mother Monkey
“Miraculous.” said Mother Giraffe
“Messy.” said Mother Hippopotamus and she took it off.

0hippo05 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Hippopotamus tried on a red wig.
“Fantastic.” said Mother Zebra
“Frivolous.” said Mother Monkey
“Fabulous.” said Mother Giraffe
“Frizzy.” said Mother Hippopotamus and she took it off.

0hippo06 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Hippopotamus tried on a blonde wig.
“Stunning.” said Mother Zebra
“Splendid.” said Mother Monkey
“Scintillating.” said Mother Giraffe
“Stupid.” said Mother Hippopotamus and she took it off.

0hippo07 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

Mother Hippopotamus tried on more and more and more wigs.
“No good,” she said “No more wigs!  They make me look ridiculous!”

Mother Zebra and Mother Monkey and Mother Giraffe went home with Mother Hippopotamus.

0hippo08 mother hippopotamus bad hair day

“You look beautiful just the way you are!”  they said.

“Do I?” said Mother Hippopotamus.  “That’s good!”

Pretentious book meme :)

Picked up this meme from

 and

[info]abeekay

 . The list has some great books on it but where is Stendhal, Defoe, Disraeli, Pushkin, Gaskell, Lawrence, Swift, Trollope, Wilde???  And barely one Dostoyevsky?  Mumblefuck mumblefuck… I think we could make a better list (and yes I am aware that I sound like a right prat :S)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them
5) Put a star next to those you’ve only partially read. 

***********************

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
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 Alborn
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