I'm Baaaaaaaackkkk!

Bonjour tout le monde! I missed writing in my blog these past few months! Getting home from France was a bitch, and I never even wrote about my looooonnnnnnggggggggg experience trying to get home, having two, not one, but TWO! cancelled flights to the US, spending a night in an airport without any sleep, and then finally getting home…

Gee. I wonder if I wanted desperately to erase all memory of those horrific 4 days from my mind?? Even now, I cringe just thinking about the pain and anguish that myself and my fellow American student/travel buddy had to endure. It seems like just a bad nightmare now. But I know better. Oh yes. Maybe someday I will blog about that experience…..from the time my travel buddy Alex and I left La Rochelle, to the moment I FINALLY landed not only on US soil, but landed in BUFFALO, amid a snow flurry.

But that time is not today. The memory is still too painfully present in my mind. I only wish that Heather's trip home from France when she goes next semester is a lot easier. Heather, my fingers are crossed for you. I've already started talking to Mother Nature about NOT having any major snow storms on the east coast toward the end of December/right before Christmas.

On to more important business.

As I said above, I've missed blogging terribly. I didn't realize when I started my blog in France that blogging would become such a part of me. It's a great way to relax and relieve stress, believe it or not. So anyway, I've decided that Kelly's France Blog will now be Kelly's Book Blog/Miscellaneous Other Things Kelly Feels Like Talking About Blog. I'm probably not going to change the name at the top of the page or anything because then I might need to change the URL. No, I think we can all just deal with the fact that Kelly's France Blog is no longer talking about France, even though it's still got "France" in the title. I promise I'll write about France next time I go! And I actually do plan on writing a lot about my "French" experiences, etc. I want to eventually start blogging about French novels, and maybe even movies. We'll see what happens… And I just realized that I've been going on and on over a bunch of nothing this whole time and haven't really gotten anything important on the page just yet! Typical..

So……let the book blogging begin!!

………………..

When I was in France, I decided to make a list of 12 books that I want to read in 2010. These 12 books I chose are all either books I've been wanting to read for a very long time and haven't found the time to read them, or books that I had just recently found out about before making my list that seemed super awesome. I was hoping I'd be chugging away at that list by May……but I've gotten side-tracked by a bunch of other books! *gasp* So is life as a book lover. You never know when a random book is going to plop itself down into your lap and beg you to read it! So I've only gotten like two out of the 12 read as of yet. But summer vacation is a mere 2 (yes, I said TWO!!) weeks away!! So I'll have plenty more time on my hands soon!

My 2010 Reading List:
1. The Crow: The 3rd Book of Pellinor by Alison Croggon
2. The Singing: The 4th Book of Pellinor by Alison Croggon
(I have been totally into the Pellinor books since last summer when I picked up book one-they are SO enthralling!! I read book 2 in France..review of that and book 1 will be coming up in the future!)
3. Je suis le dernier juif by Chil Rajchman (I wrote about this while I was in France. It's in French!)
4. The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray (last "Great and Terrible Beauty" book! I've been putting it off for years because I loved the first two so much, and I don't want the story to end!)
5. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
6. The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
7. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe (FINISHED LAST WEEK!)
8. The Guernse Literary and Potatoe Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
9. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
10. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
11. The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke (FINISHED!)
12. Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk

So there you have it. My reading list. I've finished the Deliverance Dane book, and The Thief Lord. I'll write about those soon. Most of the books I have right at home here. Others, like Waiting for Columbus, and The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, and the Guernsey one, I still need to buy.

And of course you've all probably guessed that I'm not currently reading any books from this list!! I actually went to Borders with my gift card from Mommy on a mission. To buy Waiting for Columbus. But alas, my memory failed me. I could not remember the author's name. And the workers were all really busy, so I didn't want to ask them for help. I used to work at a book store and I totally know how it feels when the store is packed and you have wayyyy too much to do! So then I stumbled upon Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves. A book I accidentally forgot to add to my list. So I bought that. Now, I LOVED Kostova's first novel, The Historian. It is definitely one of my all-time faves, and someday maybe I will gush about it more completely in this blog! So when I saw a few months back that she had a new book out, I was super excited. Add to that the fact that Swan Thieves delves deep into French Impressionism and Impressionist painters (which, by the way, I studied in France!), I was pretty much panting for this book. I'm only a sliver of the way into it, but I really like it so far. There are all these little blurbs about the Impressionists, and it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. I especially loved the quote that the book opens with. It's by Edouard Manet, one of my fave French Impressionists. Yeah. I was pretty much in French Art History Heaven. I'll be reporting on the progress of this book as time goes by.

A Bientot! (PS-If you are wondering why my French words don't have accents….it's because the accent codes don't work on my laptop, and I'm too lazy to copy and paste them..)