I'm not dead yet...

Sorry for dropping off the face of the blogosphere for a bit, life is crazy.  I don't much feel like giving a recap of everything that has been going on, but I'll give a few highlights:

1. My apartment has a new roof!  This is exciting because now it won't rain into our bathroom anymore.  They still have to come back to fix the bathroom ceiling, but at least there haven't been any pieces of it falling on us recently.

2. Rebuilding Day is over!!!!!  (This is the crazy home repair volunteer day that the non-profit where I am doing AmeriCorps does every year.)  Repairing 30 houses in one day requires a crazy amount of planning and preparation, and we have basically been working on nothing else since January.  The event was Saturday, April 30th, and I am so glad it's over!  Of course we are still dealing with all kinds of wrap-up things, but the day itself was great.  Now of course we're going to be having a ton of smaller projects, so the work continues.

3. I had an unexpected amount of free time yesterday, so I decided to try my hand at watercolors again.  I walked to the art supply store to get some masking fluid (which I had been wanting to try) some nice watercolor paper that isn't really textured (I had no idea how much I disliked textured watercolor paper until I used this) and a new watercolor tray.  I used watercolors I already had, as I have accumulated a handful of tubes and a couple of sets over the years.  I also used watercolor pencils for small details and some regular colored pencils for texture, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out.  Maybe I will do some more?

Mad scientist ninja stitcher

So this is basically just me rambling about my recent burst of craftiness.  If that isn't something you want to read...umm...stop reading.

So I recently got this hooded vest/dress thing at the thrift store down the street.  I liked it because it was comfy and has pockets, but I'm not really crazy about hoods unless they are on sweatshirts.  Also, the pockets are kind of awkwardly high, and the color is kind of boring.  Also, there is a zipper that runs about halfway down, which adds an extra element of challenge to re-designing this thing.  So here is the ultimate plan (in the order in which the ideas came to me):

1. Embroider something on it!  I spent most of our Stitch 'n Bitch time yesterday doing this.  I am nowhere near done, but as you can see there are some green, gold, and brown leaves starting on the shoulder there.

2. Cut off the hood and make it into a cowl somehow!  You would be amazed at how many online tutorials there aren't for this kind of thing.  I found one video that uses a regular hooded sweatshirt (not a zip-up) but the end result is kind of a weird scoop-necked thing.  I watched it to get a general idea, then just went for it.   As you can see, I didn't mess it up too horribly yet!  It mostly resembles a cowl now, I just need to get some buttons so I can close the neck when I'm wearing it but have it open when I need to get it on and off.  Right now there are just safety pins, which are not a long-term solution.

3. Move the pockets!  I haven't started this yet, but I am confident that with the careful application of a seam ripper, I will be triumphant.  The pockets are currently somewhere between my naval and my chest, which is just a weird location.  I am hoping to relocate them (possibly reshape them, too) to a more comfortable position lower down and further apart.  We'll see.

Anyway, my room is now a disaster area, because I had to move things to have space to set up the sewing machine, plus there is a bunch of laundry and all the stuff that I just haven't put away from whenever I was last using it.  I feel like a mad scientist, if sewing can be considered mad science.

I promise I will post better pictures when this is actually finished.  Someday...

Drip. Drip. Drip. THUNK.

I love spring, I really do.  But I will never be crazy about unpredictable weather, at least not when I have to drive in it.

So I left the office half an hour early today because it was supposed to storm, and since it's usually a 45 minute drive home (because of traffic more than distance) I wanted to get out of there before it got too bad.  MISTAKE.  Almost as soon as I left it started pouring, and by the time I got onto the parkway (if you didn't read last week's post, that's the highway that runs through Pittsburgh) it was bucketing down rain and hailing.  Normally nobody likes to drive through the tunnel (there are several tunnels in Pittsburgh, but I only have to drive through one of them) but today it was a relief to be out of the deluge for a few minutes.  The weather hadn't improved any by the time I got out of the tunnel, and there was also some flash flooding/giant puddles going on.  Basically that means that every once in a while I would drive through a large patch of water and pretty much get blinded by the sheet of water that splashed up onto my windshield.  I have never been more terrified while driving, at least not recently.

Anyway, despite all this, the day was not ruined: by the time I got to my neighborhood the rain had basically stopped, for the time being, and so I went to the grocery store, then came home and baked cookies.  Gluten-free oatmeal white chocolate chip cranberry cookies, to be precise.  The storm picked back up again for a while, but I have cookies, my roommate is making cupcakes (which are also gluten-free!) that somehow involve peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and buttercream frosting.  And we're having another Stitch 'n Bitch tonight (which is good, because there will be more people to get fat from our baking!)

So all in all, a kind of crazy day is turning out pretty well.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering...the title of this blog is in reference to the ceiling above our shower.  I knew it had been leaking for a while, but last Friday it finally decided to actually have a plaster cave-in.  So now there's a lovely big hole above our shower, and every once in a while the dripping from the rain is punctuated by the sound of grit falling.  This is the other reason weather is not particularly in my good books).

Everyday Adventures

So I'm taking a cue from Jennasaurus and posting about an everyday sort of adventure that happened to me today (this is what happens when I'm at the office, waiting for a meeting that doesn't start for at least two hours but which we are already completely prepared for...I write silly blogs)

So a few days ago one of my roommates, Sarah, asked me if I worked near the airport because she had a flight that was leaving at 9:30 in the morning and wasn't sure about taking the bus.  Now, I had never driven to the airport before, but I knew it was in the general direction of my office, just further away.  So this morning I drove her to the airport, which was pretty straightforward.  It looked something like this:

 

(A is where I started, B is the airport)

The real adventure started after I left the airport.  My route should have gone something like this:

 

And mostly, it did.  Everything was going beautifully until I got on the exit for where the office is.

Now, here's the thing about driving and me: I have a terrible sense of direction.  If I haven't driven somewhere at least 3 times (and that's driven, it doesn't work if I'm just riding in the car) I can't remember how to get there.  I'm also not good at making logical conclusions based on driving in places I should be familiar with, aka which way I should go when I exit from the opposite direction.  So almost as soon as I exited, I got in a line of cars.  I saw one sign (for the line of cars I was in, on the left) that said "Crafton".  I saw one on the right (which had no cars in it) which said "Green Tree".  Now, I knew that Green Tree is where we tell everybody our office is, so I got into the right lane and turned.  I immediately realized that I had just turned the wrong way, since at least I am observant enough to recognize landmarks I drive by on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, I was driving the wrong way past those landmarks, and that stretch of road has several lanes and is very busy, so there are not many good places to turn around.  At some point (after several failed attempts to turn around) I realized that I could turn onto a road that I usually take on my way home from work, so I logically assumed I could just take the same route, but backwards.

One critically important wrong turn later, I learned to my chagrin that apparently I couldn't.

I think I turned too early, or wasn't thinking clearly, but in any case I found myself on the parkway (which is what everyone around here calls the combination of highways and interstates that meld and run through the city) going the WRONG WAY.  I took the first exit intending to just turn around and find a way to get on the parkway going the correct way, but then I couldn't a way back to the parkway or a particularly good place to pull over.  At this point, I was just waiting for an opportunity to pull out my GPS, which probably would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had just used it in the first place.  When I finally found a place to pull over and plugged in the address, I noticed that the sign for the street in front of me: Mansfield Ave.

That's right, everyone.  After driving in some kind of crazy road tornado (this is Pittsburgh, after all) I somehow managed to end up where I needed to be...even if I was coming from the wrong direction.

 

Morals of the story:

1. Don't offer to give anyone a ride to the airport, ever
2. If you have a GPS, there is probably a good reason.  USE IT.

Despite the rocky start, today is not all bad: I get to sew dinosaurs with a bunch of my friends/roommates (who will be knitting or crocheting, mostly) tonight.  We're trying to host a weekly Stitch 'n Bitch at our apartment, and I've heard rumors that ice cream will be involved.  Now if only this meeting would just start and then be done so I can go home....

HOORAY!!!!

GUYS I SOLD SOME DINOSAURS ON ETSY.  TO SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW.

Ok, so I'll stop with the caps lock and bold, but I'm so excited!  It was great to get a few sales right away from my friends, and I had been selling them to friends over the summer outside of Etsy...but it's so affirming to know that people want to buy my dinosaurs even if they don't know me!  Now of course I'm sitting at the office wishing I was at home sewing, because it's a custom order so I get to make some new ones. :)

Also, have a picture of the cardboard house I made for work last week:

Oh, and some crazy person is in the picture too.

Have a fantastic day everyone!  I have to go back to pretending to work while dreaming about dinosaurs.

Little bits of life

Hey there everyone!  I know I have some new followers, so I figured I should maybe post an update (I am notoriously bad at updating this blog).  This past week has been kind of awesome, mostly just because of random little things that make the world better.  Since I tend to ramble on and forget things I was going to say, I'm going to try to make this a list.  A list of little bits that make life lovely, if you will.

So here goes:

1. Etsy.  I have been trying to be as active as possible with my new Etsy shop, and so far it has been fun.  I made three sales right away to people I know in real life, so although I am still waiting for my first "found through Etsy" sale I at least know people are interested.  I have also met a bunch of swell people through the Etsian newbie team, which is there to help new sellers get connected.  I also re-connected with my friend Laura who sells on Etsy and is an amazing artist.

2. Blog love!  It is great that you all are following along with my life, I am super excited about that.  I am not the best at blogging regularly, but I will try to do so more often.  But not so often as to be obnoxious.  I have also been featured on some blogs, so I should probably return the favor sometime with full-post features.  For now though, I would like to highlight my friend Jihan who is a great blogger and lover of cute things.  We worked at summer camp together, where we put the "ARRR!!!" in "ARRRts and crafts".  She also has an Etsy shop and is part of the reason I finally motivated myself to get my shop together and start selling.  She did a blog post about me which includes a picture I haven't seen in years, it is great!
I have also met another lover of cute and crafty things on Etsy, Jennasaurusfun.  She makes all kinds of whimsical crocheted things, plus her name is awesome and she also featured me on her blog!

3. So I'm an AmeriCorps member, and I'm serving with a non-profit that does home repairs.  We've spent a lot of time in the office recently, and I get pretty burned out when I spend the whole day doing meaningless work at a computer.  I just don't care all that much about volunteer recruitment or sponsor packets, as it turns out.  However, this past Wednesday and Thursday I got to do something which is right up my alley: build a house out of cardboard.  I know, I know, that sounds weird.  But I never realized until I graduated that I really enjoyed having assignments like "make a 3D miniature version of a room you spend a lot of time in, using only paper" and have that be my "job".  When my boss asked me to take on this "art project" I jumped at the chance.  It was a display for an event my organization had to be at, and although I wasn't there I have been told the house was a big success.  It's going to be hard to go back to typing up boring things now, but for two days I was actually excited to go the office.

4. My Pittsburgh friends are the best!  On Wednesday night we had our first weekly "Stitch and Bitch" which was exactly what it sounds like.  Two of my roommates plus two other friends who knit and I sat around our living room making crafty things (I was working on a dinosaur) and talking about life.  We also had cupcakes (gluten-free, with about as much frosting as cupcake) and ice cream.  Next week we are hoping to have more people, as we have other friends who knit, crochet, and sew.

5. I got to see two of my current favorite music groups in concert on Tuesday.  Not like one of those huge stadium concerts, but a small one.  Pearl And The Beard has a new CD which I got to buy before the official release, plus I talked to one of the band members about the three-person sweater (this is a real thing!) which she knitted and which is featured on the new CD's album artwork.  I also got to see Brad Yoder again, although I get to see him randomly in a non-musical context (he lives with some of my friends) it is always good to see him in concert.

6. Sending off some dinosaurs to my friend Jake, who commissioned them from me a while ago.  I received payment for them today, so I will be sending them off on Monday.  Since they haven't been featured online anywhere, here are some pictures:

 

 

 

Okay, so I got carried away and put up pictures of most of the things I have just mentioned which rock my world.  I don't have any pictures of the cardboard house, but rest assured that whenever I do you will see them.  I think that's all for now, hope this monster of a blog post didn't overwhelm you!

Taking the Plunge

I've been working at setting up an Etsy shop for quite a while now.  I actually registered for Etsy back in August, spent a good long time forgetting about it or not wanting to figure out PayPal, figured out PayPal and made a shop in January.  Then today I decided to stop worrying about how many things I had ready to sell or whether or not I am ready to ship things, and I decided to just go for it and list some things. 

That was a long-winded way of saying: PocketTheSaurus is now open for business!  If you or anyone you know would like to own a pocket-sized, handmade stuffed dinosaur, please visit me on Etsy!

Shaking off the dust

So I kind of disappeared from the blogosphere for months on end...it's not that I haven't been doing things, just that nothing has particularly struck me as blog-worthy.  I promise I am working on things though...exciting things!  Most notably, I am working to get myself established on Etsy, a website where you can set up a personal shop and sell handmade or vintage goods.  Since I have had numerous people ask me about buying my dinosaurs, I figured this would be a good way to get organized about it.  I have a lot of work to do before that happens though.  For example: 

I have set up the shop and made a paypal account, but I am still researching shipping prices.  I also need to sit down and make my shop look pretty, which means making a banner and taking quality photos of the dinosaurs.  I want to be able to list a fair number of them at the beginning so people won't show up at my shop and think "man, she doesn't really have anything here".  Even if all I have there is pocket-sized dinosaurs made of felt...I think it's probably better to have ten of them than two.  I'm also trying to figure out a fair price that balances the end result (a stuffed animal that fits in your pocket or the palm of your hand) with the amount of labor involved (they're entirely hand-sewn, embroidered, and take probably 2 hours to make if I actually sat down and worked straight through).  I don't want to get ripped off, but I also don't want to try to sell things that people won't pay for.  After reading a bunch of the blog entries on Etsy, I am also considering ways of personalizing the packaging and such...like, making little tags with some kind of shop logo, or a tag with the buyer's name on it.

Oh, and if all of that wasn't crazy enough, I actually need to make more dinosaurs before I start listing anything.  I only have two available now that have embroidered spots (my original ones don't) so I should probably have more.  I can always give the option for custom ordering, of course, and I probably will because then I get fresh color combination ideas.

Oh, and I'm still in AmeriCorps...so basically working full time...and getting into our busiest time of year.  Probably not the best time to be starting a side business, but at the rate I'm going, I might have a while before I actually list anything. *sigh*

Anyway, sorry for the rant-type thing, I just needed to get all of this into a form I can look at.  Once I launch my shop I will be sure to post an exuberant stream of excitement (and promote said shop like crazy).  Until then, I'll just keep plugging away...

 

By the way, if anyone is super excited to see my empty Etsy shop, it is called PocketTheSaurus.  I am quite taken with the play on words, although I imagine there are plenty of people nowadays who have no idea what a "pocket thesaurus" is.  Since they probably have iPhones for that.  And now I sound like I'm 85 years old.

.Song. .Sung. .Blue.

So I haven't posted in quite a while, but basically the pertinent information from the last few weeks is: I live in Pittsburgh now and I like it pretty well, I enjoy many parts of my AmeriCorps position (like painting the porches of old ladies who think my name is "Karen") and overall, life is pretty good.

In other news, it has been raining here for the past several days, and the combination of sitting in an office pushing paper most of the day and the grey sky has been getting me down.  I am trying to fight it off with creativity, but have been kind of hopping from one thing to another.  I did manage to make a hat though!  I am quite a fan of this hat, it makes me want to crochet more.

I used a pattern by Vickie Howell, which can be found here. 

Also, since no blog post would be complete without a dinosaur:

I didn't know I was moving to the city of dinosaurs when I came here, but I love it!

Moving In

This is just a quick update to inform you that I am in Pittsburgh!  I got back from my two week training in New Orleans yesterday, and so today and tomorrow I will be settling in and figuring out how this city works before I start at the office on Wednesday.  At some point I will try to write more about New Orleans and put up some pictures maybe (I'm awful at remembering to take pictures so I hardly have any, oops) and also give a little information about my AmeriCorps position with Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh.  Right now I'm just excited to be finally almost moved in.

Road Test: Passed

Today, August 11th 2010, I, Kira Yeversky, took and passed my road test.  I am now a licensed driver, according to New York State.  Hooray!

More tiny wordless stories

I actually drew these before the other series, way back in the fall.  I don't know how to get my scanner to not destroy the image quality, but it did.  In other words, they look SO much better in real life.

(These are all 2.5"x3.5", by the way.  I used pencil, colored pencil, crayon, and a little bit of pen.)

Tiny Wordless Stories

These are some tiny drawings I made this past school year.  They are all 2.5 x 3.5 inches, which is the size of ATCs and ACEOs (artist trading cards/artist cards, editions, and originals)  There's a whole community of people who trade them, apparently, but I just liked working with the small format.  Unfortunately, my scanner does not like scanning the small format, so the quality has been compromised.

I think I will leave you with these for now, but be prepared for another series (in color, but with worse scan quality) later.

Doing Something Different

Okay, so up until now this blog has been dedicated to whatever random thing pops into my head.  This will probably still happen a lot, but I'm going to try to focus in on my creative exploits, possibly culinary exploits as well (since gluten-free cooking is kind of like an art form).  Basically I want to emulate my good friend Jihan, whose blog The Moldy Cannoli is always making me want to be crafty and then post about it on the internet.  So we'll see how this goes.

So!  To start, we have some dinosaurs.  I have been making them over the last few months whenever inspiration strikes (or, recently, when someone offers to pay me for one)  The little ones are the original design, and I am still perfecting the larger pattern.  The small ones are made of felt and are entirely hand-sewn, the bigger ones are made of fleece with some felt details.  Although the jumbo dinosaurs are machine-sewn, they have hand-embroidered spots on their backs, and the eyes are appliqued by hand too.

Ralph (left) and Waldo (right) are about 16" tall.  And fun to squeeze!

The circle of dino-friends...I have made more, they just aren't in this picture.

Close up!  This is Phinneas.

This is Enrique, who I made for my friend Linnea.  Note the spots!

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed my dinosaur friends...I have sold a few to friends and am hoping to make an Etsy site to sell them from, but we'll have to see if I get bored or overwhelmed trying to do that.  Oh, and there are more photos of them up on my Flickr site, if you want to have a look.

'Nother list

I saw this on someone's facebook...it has a lot of the same books as the other list, but it has some different ones too. The rules for this one are a little different...you're just supposed to put your first initial after the ones you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen K
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkien K
3 Jane Eyre-Charlotte Bronte K
4 Harry Potter series-JK Rowling K
5 To Kill a Mockingbird-Harper Lee K
6 The Bible K
7 Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte,
8 1984-George Orwell K
9 His Dark Materials-Philip Pullman K
10 Great Expectations-Charles Dickens (does it count if I read half of it?)
11 Little Women-Louisa M. Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller K
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien K
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger K
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger K
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald K
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens,
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy K
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 1/2 K
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll K
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame K
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (All of them) K
34 Emma - Jane Austen K
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen, K
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis K
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini, K
38 Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres K
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden,
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (maybe?)
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 K
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy,
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding, K
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel, K
52 Dune - Frank Herbert K
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen K
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 K
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon, K
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez K
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck, K
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov,
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold,
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, K
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, K
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 K
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 K
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 K
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl K
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I have read 34, not counting the ones I only read half of. Apparently the BBC says most people have only read 6 out of this 100, so 34 isn't too shabby.
Edit: 12/24/10 Someone posted this on facebook and I thought, hmm, I think I have done this.  So I went back through it and found I had read four more, bringing my total up to 38.  Also, I bolded the ones I have read in their entirety and italicized the ones I had read part of, to make it easier to see.  Left the "K"s there, though.

I don't seem to be doing much with this blog. I don't really mind, since it's mostly just for me to ramble and not something I expect others to be actively following. But hey, if you stumble upon it, go ahead and say hi, I like visitors.

More Books!

So I still don't know what exactly this blog is for, but I figure since I have it I may as well use it. Since the previous post is entirely about books I hope to read or at least try to read soon, I'm going to continue by talking about the amazing phenomenon I participated in today: The James Prendergast Library Booksale. I ended up there by accident really; I had to return some books in between Jordan's and my wisdom teeth follow-up appointment and picking Kyle up from his allergist appointment, so when we got to the library we ended up wandering around and observing the beauty that is the booksale. Ok, so probably not everyone would call it beautiful, and to be honest I definitely had some moments of "Augh too many people all around me augh augh". But the diverse blend of people that show up there, not to mention the wide variety of books, was pretty incredible. The one other thing that was incredible? The prices. Seriously, where else can you get a hardcover book for $1.25 (or $1.00 if you buy 10 or more) and a paperback for $1.00 ( $.75 if you buy 10 or more)? If you know of that place, send me there and I will never leave.

Basically what I am trying to say is that I walked out of the library with 7 books for which I paid a whopping $5.75 total. Several of those books are on the previously posted "106 books of pretension" (or mind-broadening, in my case) list. So to update my reading list, I now have (in addition to Catch 22, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility) Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, Brave New World, The Prophet, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Canterbury Tales, The Poisonwood Bible, (which Kyle actually bought) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (which Kyle also bought). So basically I have my reading list for the summer, and we got other books that aren't on the list if I finish all of those. In all the free time that I always have. Ha. Ha.

Anyways, if you've never bought 7 books for less than six dollars total, I would definitely recommend it...it's a pretty sweet feeling.

In an effort to broaden my horizons

I decided to do this list of "106 books of pretension" that Kyle has been talking about almost nonstop since we've been home. In a recent expedition to a used bookstore in Mayville, I realized that my literary horizons are rather narrow (as in, I read way too much fantasy and science fiction and I read the same books over and over again) In other words, I do not want to do this list in order to seem pretentious, I merely want to use it as a suggested list of books to read.

A key to the formatting is: *books I've never even heard of*, books I've heard of but never read, books I've read, books I've started but never finished or read only part of, and books I've read, but in a dumbed-down version for kids or abridged version. A ! indicates that I own the book and/or plan to read it soon.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell !
   
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi : a novel
9. *The Name of the Rose*
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. *Madame Bovary*
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
    
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. *Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies*
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
    
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. *The Blind Assassin*
26. The Kite Runner
27. *Mrs. Dalloway*
28. Great Expectations (stupid 9th grade English)
    
29. American Gods
30. *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius*
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books !
    
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
    
34. Middlesex
35. *Quicksilver*
36. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury tales !
38. *The Historian : a novel*
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera (I have actually read the whole thing, but blogger is being dumb and not letting me get rid of the italics.
    
41. Brave New world
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. *Middlemarch*
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984
    
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
    
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. *To the Lighthouse*
62. *Tess of the D’Urbervilles*
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
    
66. *The Corrections*
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
    
73. *The God of Small Things*
74. *A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present*
75. *Cryptonomicon*
    
76. Neverwhere
77. *A Confederacy of Dunces*
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. *The Unbearable Lightness of Being*
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
    
86. *Oryx and Crake : a novel*
87. *Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed*
88. *Cloud Atlas*
89. *The Confusion*
90. *Lolita*
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. *Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything*
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. *Gravity’s Rainbow*
101. The Hobbit
102. *In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
103. *White Teeth*
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

In case you're wondering, I didn't start this blog just for this list, but I did start it because I needed to put this list somewhere and I didn't have the heart to make any changes to my Ecuador blog...it's too sentimental. If I use this blog for anything, it will probably be for rambling.

Edit: 12/11/08 I updated some of the books I've read since starting this...I sort of forgot about this whole blog, but I felt that my excursions into literary variety should be made known.
Edit: 5/13/09 Updated again...a couple of these by Neil Gaiman I read without even knowing they were on here. And I have now read every Jane Austen novel except Northanger Abbey. Oh, and also...a book that isn't on here but should be is Corelli's Mandolin. I just read it and it is excellent.
Edit: 12/24/10 Updated once more.  I have definitely started more books since the last time I updated, but most of the ones I started got left hanging...hmm...