*What a title.*
Days here are ordinary. It's the second week of the semestral break and it's ending. One more week and I'm back to college for the last semester.
Along with my group of three, I am working on my undergraduate thesis. In between bouts of facing the computer for intensive amounts of time, I crack a spine - or summon Adobe PDF Reader, in the case of an e-book, and read.
I've just finished reading Coraline, Neil Gaiman's dark and creepily adventurous yet triumphant children's novel. I liked it a lot. Looking forward to watching the 3D stop-motion animation film version of it. I've read and watched that it was quite, much quite laborious making the entire film. It was.
Wuthering Heights is the book I'm now on. I have been wanting to read it ever since I finished reading Pride and Prejudice more than a year ago, but for a long time I could not find the exact book I was looking for. This April I finally found one, but I was reading The Odyssey then, and two other books were waiting in line: The Alchemist and Say You're One of Them. I managed to finish The Alchemist last September in spite of the tight schedule I was running for my internship (by the way it was finally over and I'm very very much well pleased with the grades I got) and I got done with Say You're One of Them just one of these past few days. Coraline, however, suddenly came into the scene even before I finished Say You're One of Them and, since it was way shorter than Wuthering Heights, I thought of finishing it first before moving forward. And so finish it I did, in two days consecutively. I think 1/4 Wednesday, and the other 3/4 I read yesterday.
Aside from novels, I also read reference books. Those with publishers like Pearson, O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill whatsoever; half because I need to, and half because I'm disturbingly hungry for knowledge, as always. My favorite topic is applications development. The latest addition to my reading targets is a book about iOS development, although perhaps either of Java or C# are my favorites to study on.
A little trip down memory lane
The first novel I read was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I was thirteen and at that time, I haven't watched the movie version yet. I remember how hard my heart pounded during the climax: Harry Potter encountering Petigrew, encountering Sirius Black, encountering Snape and so on. I loved the book, but it was the ONLY Potter book I have read ever. I borrowed that book from my highschool teacher.
I couldn't remember reading another novel until New Moon on December 30, 2008 (I'm not exactly sure if it was 29 or 30 or 31, dates are tough on me), and I was 17. I finished the entire novel IN A DAY, pausing only to eat because, again, the book was only borrowed, and I had to return it that immediately.
Some time after that, in 2009, we were able to buy a box set of The Twilight Saga, and I read it all: Twilight, New Moon (yes, AGAIN), Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. This marked the beginning of my habit to buy and read novels on a regular basis.
After the Twilight Saga, I read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's classic: how Elizabeth prejudiced Mr. Darcy and Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth. The story was very much interesting, though I admit much of the novel was a jargon to me. It was not without effort that I understood the vague-at-first parts.
And then came The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's classic - a story of a silly boy's adventures in old America. Finn was a fun read, full of insights and satires.
Jonathan Stroud's Heroes of the Valley was next. And again, a child's adventure story! Perhaps children's stories, adventures in particular, is my favorite theme to read. Second is classics (though The Twilight Saga didn't fall into any of those categories).
Then I read The Shack by WM. Paul Young, a fictitious novel about a man who lost his youngest daughter and after quite a long time, ended up being invited by "Papa" (God) into this shack, the place where the blood-stained clothes of his missing daughter was found. A good read, gives insight about God and His great love. Just keep in mind it's still fiction. It's not bad to try to sift the details from time to time.
By October last year I started reading Trenton Lee Stewart's trilogy, The Mysterious Benedict Society - a children's adventure series! The first book was the title of the trilogy, the second was The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey (my favorite among the three) and the third, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma. It was fun to read! Action-filled, puzzle-filled, mystery-filled, and quite perfect for those readers who are... kids!
April this year, I read Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper - the first (and ONLY, to this day) novel I read as an e-book. It was after I purchased a smart phone for the first time, installed Adobe Reader to it, and marveled at how I can finally read e-books at the palm of my hands. Also, it was the only novel thus far to make me cry, though only at the end.
And then I read The Odyssey, though after quite a long while. The form and the vocabulary of the epic poem scared me for some time and I didn't read it until I mustered courage enough to dive into it. And it was a worthy read indeed.
Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist came next to that, one of my favorites. And then Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan. I LOVE this novel, however harrowing the condition of the lives of the African children in the story may be. And then, Coraline.
So to sum it up:
1. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K. Rowling
2. New Moon, Stephenie Meyer
3. Twilight, Meyer
4. Eclipse, Meyer
5. Breaking Dawn, Meyer
6. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
8. Heroes of the Valley, Jonathan Stroud
9. The Shack, WM. Paul Young
10. The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart
11. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Stewart
12. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, Stewart
13. My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
14. The Odyssey, Homer (verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum)
15. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
16. Say You're One of Them, Uwem Akpan
17. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Update:
18. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte / Nov. 15, 2011 midnight update, book finished on Nov. 13, 2011 midnight.
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