a favorite poem

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

– Emily Dickinson

Blog Challenge, Day 25: My top five favorite blogs

I read a lot of personal Tumblr blogs written by friends, but this list will concentrate on blogs written by people I don’t know in real life.

  1. Story by Modcloth
  2. A Little Earthquake – cancer blog/personal. Hasn’t been updated in a few months. I hope that changes.
  3. The Bloggess – I’ve always been bad about staying up to date on this one, but now it’s in my WordPress feed so yay!
  4. STL Hops – because beer.
  5. The Dressed Aesthetic – fashion blog. My favorite.

2014 Book List

  1. Allegiant – Veronica Roth
  2. The Lonely Polygamist – Brady Udall
  3. Ghost Story – Peter Straub
  4. How To Be A Good Wife – Emma Chapman
  5. Me Before You – Jojo Moyes
  6. Eleanor & Park – Rainbow Rowell
  7. Lies You Wanted To Hear – James Whitfield Thornton
  8. Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell
  9. The Never List – Koethi Zan
  10. If I Stay – Gayle Forman
  11. Reconstructing Amelia – Kimberly McCreight
  12. Where’d You Go Bernadette? – Maria Semple
  13. The Waiting – Joe Hart
  14. House of Glass – Sophie Littlefield
  15. Attachments – Ranibow Rowell
  16. The Magpies – Mark Edwards
  17. Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson
  18. The Martian – Andy Weir
  19. Breast Left Unsaid – Jude Calligros
  20. The Winter People – Jennifer McMahon
  21. Promise Not to Tell – Jennifer McMahon
  22. You Should Have Known – Jean Hanff Korelitz
  23. Before I Go – Riley Weston
  24. The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
  25. Dark Lullaby – Mayra Calvani
  26. Still Missing – Chevy Stevens
  27. Heart Shaped Box – Joe HIll
  28. Lineage – Joe Hart
  29. What Alice Forgot – Liane Moriarty
  30. The Guilty One – Lisa Ballantyne
  31. Me, Earl, and The Dying Girl – Jesse Andrews
  32. The River is Dark – Joe Hart
  33. Before I Fall – Lauren Oliver
  34. Charm & Strange – Stephanie Kuehn
  35. Complicit – Stephanie Kuehn
  36. Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
  37. The Silent Sister – Diane Chamberlain
  38. Landline – Rainbow Rowell
  39. Three Wishes – Liane Moriarty
  40. Help For The Haunted – John Searles
  41. The Girl You Left Behind – Jojo Moyes
  42. Falling Into Place – Amy Zhang
  43. Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty
  44. Not That Kind Of Girl – Lena Dunham
  45. Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James
  46. Flatland – Edwin Abbott
  47. The Tender Bar – JR Moehringer
  48. One Plus One – Jojo Moyes
  49. On A Hill – Michael Whitehouse
  50. The Last Letter From Your Lover– Jojo Moyes
  51. After I Do – Taylor Reid
  52. Turn Of Mind – Alice LaPlante
  53. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler
  54. We Were Liars – E. Lockhart
  55. Conversion – Katherine Howe
  56. Contact – Carl Sagan

I haven’t yet decided what to read next, but I doubt I’ll finish it this year (though it’s possible). My goal was to read 36 books this year, so I’m quite pleased that I somehow managed to read 56. 

My top 10 of 2014:

(in no particular order)

  1. The Girl You Left Behind
  2. Landline
  3. Me Before You
  4. Not That Kind Of Girl
  5. Heart Shaped Box
  6. The Martian
  7. Eleanor & Park
  8. Attachments
  9. Fangirl
  10. One Plus One

Basically, Moyes and Rowell for the win. But read The Martian if you like science fiction, because it is amazing. 

https://www.goodreads.com/jennalter

book meme

I was tagged by karaisafourletterword. These are ten books that have a special place in my heart:

  1. In Cold Blood (by Truman Capote)
  2. One L (by Scott Turow)
  3. Gone With The Wind (by Margaret Mitchell)
  4. 100 Years of Solitude (by Garbriel Garcia Marquez)
  5. The Six Wives of Henry VIII (by Alison Weir)
  6. The Handmaid’s Tale (by Margaret Atwood)
  7. She’s Come Undone (by Wally Lamb)
  8. As I Lay Dying (by William Faulkner)
  9. The Red Tent (by Anita Diamant)
  10. The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer And Back (by Katherine Russell Rich)

I tag: hardpatch itsjustcarrie honoluluorbust talknboutluvdancnboutarktecture walruswidow

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ― Ernest Hemingway

This is the best book I’ve read in a long time.

I really identified with the female character, as she is depicted with a home life very similar to the one I experienced growing up. The characters and dialogue were great. I just loved it. I cried at the end, and several times throughout, of course.

It’s rare to read two really good books in a row, and now I’m worried the next one is going to be a disappointment by comparison. Next up is Lies You Wanted To Hear by James Whitfield Thomson.  I always find it so difficult to pick the next book. I have a bunch of books on my “to-read” list, but it’s so hard to choose just one. I don’t enjoy reading more than one book at a time.  It reminds me of college. I was an English major, so I often read three or four books at once, and I feel like you can’t really enjoy a book when you do that.

Books read so far this year:

  1. Allegiant by Veronica Roth
  2. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
  3. Ghost Story by Peter Straub
  4. How To Be A Good Wife by Emma Chapman
  5. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
  6. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

My 10

  1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
  2. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
  3. The Season of Passage by Christopher Pike
  4. She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
  5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  6. The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer and Back by Katherine Russell Rich
  7. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  8. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  9. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  10. The Shining by Stephen King