30 Day Book Challenge

I'm going to do another challenge this year! Maybe these posts will motivated me to do my homework on time so that I can make room to read my own books, lol.

Hosted by Jude from In Between, I will be participating in the 39 Day Book Challenge!

I'll be making a post daily for 30 days doing the activity of each day. Feel free to join me if you like, you can grab the button at the bottom of the post and do the whole challenge or just do a few :)  

My Start - September, 1, 2012.

Finish - September, 30, 2012. 

1. Your favorite books and the best one's you've read of all time [yes, there can be a difference]
2. Least favorite books of all time.
3. Favorite characters and which books they’re from.
4. Characters you hate and which books they’re from.
5. If you were stranded on a desert island, what five books would you take with you? 
6. The best book you’ve read.
7. The worst book you’ve read.
8. Your favorite quotes from books.
9. Your favorite quotes about books.
10. 3 Books you'd really like to see go to the big screen.
11. Favorite book genre and what book made you fall in love with it. 
12. Your favorite authors.
13. Your favorite book cover.
14. A book you regret not having read sooner 
15. A book you'd like to forget and read all over again so you can fall in love with it once more.
16. 5 books you really really want to read and haven't had the chance for whatever reason.
17. A book you haven’t read and have no intention of ever reading.
18. A book that you think is highly overrated.
19. A book that you think is woefully underrated
20. The environment you most enjoy reading in.
21. The most disturbing book you’ve ever read.
22. A book you once loved, but don’t anymore. What changed?
23. A book you once hated, but now love. What changed?
24. Your favorite series.
25. You Judged a book by it's cover - and it was awful. What book was it?
26. You Judged a book by it's cover - and it amazing. What book was it?
27. A book you want to like, but can’t get into for whatever reason. Why can’t you get into it?
28. Favorite Book Boyfriend/Girlfriend.
29. An author you wish was more well-known
30. The book you’re reading right now.

Hopefully, I'll be able to do a post for all of these.

Tumblr Pics 28 [the extra long version]

Just got out of my first class of the day 20 minutes ago. My next class is at three and it's my UNV class so I'm just going to chill. Only one class tomorrow in the morning, and then I start my Labor Day weekend. I can't wait! :L

It's only been the second week of school, and I have only managed to read my textbooks in between socializing and homework and procrastinating on the interwebs. -__-" I really don't know where the time has gone. I guess it's because I don't hang out in my room when I come back to the apartment, so I don't get time to read much anymore since it's usually not quiet in the living room until it's midnight when we're all doing homework, lol.

Anyway, enjoy! As the title explains, this post is really long. :P

I feel like I need to see this frequently when I'm procrastinating on the interwebs, lol.

Shakespearean Insults

Oh BuzzFeed, how you distract me with your random posts--this one about easily creating your own Shakespearean insult. XD

Book Review: The Secret of the Scarlet Stone (Gabby Girls Adventures #1) by T.L. Clarke

Title: The Secret of the Scarlet Stone (Gabby Girls Adventures #1)
Author: T.L. Clarke
Pages: 242
Publication: January 27, 2011
Publisher: One Wish Publishing
Summary taken from goodreads:

The Secret of the Scarlet Stone (Book #1, The Gabby Girls Adventure Novels) | Age Level: 10 and up 

The Adventure Begins...... 

My name is Gabrielle Martin. And before I discovered that the scarlet pendant I received on my thirteenth birthday was not just any ordinary pendant but a crazy weird talisman and lifeline to my supernatural powers; the only major thing that I cared about was starting my freshman year at Vineswell Academy. But that was way before finding out that everything that I had known about my life was a lie....essentially smoke-and-mirrors designed to hide the truth about my powerful supernatural legacy.

1.5 STARS - I DIDN'T LIKE IT THAT MUCH

MY REVIEW:

It was a little bit of everything combined together that made it so hard for me to finish reading this book. The small editing mistakes, the awkward dialogue, the clues, and--most irritatingly--the characters, were all small annoyances that I usually could stand to ignore in any other book. However, in THE SECRET OF THE SCARLET STONE, there was too much of each of them that I slogged through the book whenever I found the will power to pick it up again.

Honestly, I think that this book just reminded me of how much I dislike middle schoolers. They're so...obnoxious. Not to mention rude, and while they might be more frank and open about their feelings than high schoolers and adults, it doesn't really mean much since middle schoolers typically care for the most trivial things.

And in THE SECRET OF THE SCARLET STONE, middle school girls tend to scream. A lot. It gets quite irritating after a while. Instead of happily saying something, the girls feel the need to scream it out loud instead. Or, instead of just letting out a sigh of frustration, they scream everything they're thinking out loud. I forgot how noisy middle school girls are.

I don't even want to get into how annoying the girls are. Gabi is a diva, Jessica is constantly nervous and aprehensive, Zora is the stereotypical nerd with glasses, and Rosa is a stuck up brat without a spine. Yeah, throughout their adventure, they had some character growth and showed that they had the courage to suck up their fears and just continue on with their journey, but Rosa's constant I-give-up-there's-no-way-out attitude had me in such a rage that if I were her friends, I would have left her after the second time she wanted to stay put.

And the plot was pretty predictable. I knew straight away from the beginning that Gabi and the girls were going to figure out their legacy at the boarding school that her grandmother was shipping her off to. In addition, the clues were pretty easy to figure out. It might be because I'm older than a middle schooler, but I'm pretty sure that I could have figured out most of those clues when I was 13.

Also, I felt like the dialogue in the book was a bit anachronistic. I definitely don't know any middle schoolers who say that they don't "give a hoot" anymore. And there were many scenes where the girls talked they were older than their real age.

I hardly read middle grade books anymore, so I feel like I'm being a little harsher in my review than I normally am on books that I did not enjoy because I don't have anything to base my annoyances off of. Hopefully this book is be better recieved with its targeted age group than with an exasperated high school graduate.

Soo...I don't really go around calling myself a feminist because until right now, I have never thought to ask myself if I am one or not. But if I had to choose, I guess I would say that I am a feminist--just not a hardcore one? I'm always irritated when I read books where the heroine always relies on her love interest to save her and stuff, but I don't go out of my way in real life to point out the injustice against women unless it's totally uncalled for and there's no way you can just ignore it.

And I'm taking a Woman's Gender Study class called Gendered Lives this semester, so I'm interested in what I'll learn and do in that class. I've only had the class once, so I'm not totally sure how much I'm going to like it, but I can already tell that the class is going to be debating on lots of topics and questioning many common every day aspects that we take for granted, which is sure to be interesting to participate in.

Yeah...I'm just gonna leave it at that. This was not what I wanted to post about, lol. bitchmedia had written a list of YA books for feminist readers, and I thought it was cool that I had really enjoyed all of the books that I had read on the list.

The * means that I read it. The ~ means that I own but have yet to read.

100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader

1. Estrella's Quinceañera by Malin Alegria
2. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
3. Choir Boy by Charlie Anders
4. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
5. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson *
6. Alt Ed by Catherine Atkins
7. The Rhyming Season by Edward Averett
8. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
9. Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black
10. Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block
11. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
12. Forever by Judy Blume
13. A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray *
14. Debbie Harry Sings in French by Meagan Brothers
15. All-American Girl by Meg Cabot *
16. Graceling by Kristin Cashore *
17. The Plain Janes by Cecil Castelluci and Jim Rugg *
18. This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn by Aidan Chambers
19. Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You by Dorian Cirrone
20. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
21. Magic Knight Rayearth by CLAMP
22. Celine by Brock Cole
23. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins *
24. Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech *
25. The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman
26. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
27. Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis
28. Dreamland by Sarah Dessen
29. For the Win by Cory Doctorow *
30. Down to the Bone by Mayra Lazara Dole
31. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
32. El Lector by William Durbin
33. The Skin I’m In by Sharon Flake
34. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
35. Breathing Underwater by Alex Flinn
36. Crossing Stones by Helen Frost
37. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
38. The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden
39. Sticks and Stones by Beth Goobie
40. Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) by Justina Chen Headley
41. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
42. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones ~
43. It’s Not What You Expect by Norma Klein
44. Uncommon Faith by Trudy Krisher
45. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart *
46. Toning the Sweep by Angela Johnson
47. The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson *
48. Another Kind of Cowboy by Susan Juby
49. White Sands, Red Menace by Ellen Klages
50. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’engle *
51. Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier
52. Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin *
53. Ella Echanted by Gail Carson Levine *
54. Gravity by Leanne Lieberman
55. Ash by Malinda Lo *
56. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry *
57. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden *
58. Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty ~
59. Sold by Patricia McCormick ~
60. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
61. Thunder Over Kandahar by Sharon E. McKay
62. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley *
63. The Secret Under My Skin by Janet McNaughton
64. Night Flying by Rita Murphy
65. Revenge by Taslima Nasrin
66. A Step from Heaven by An Na
67. Skip Beat! By Yosiki Nakamura
68. Simply Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
69. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell *
70. Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
71. Rampant by Diana Peterfreund ~
72. Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters
73. Luna by Julie Anne Peters
74. Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce
75. Trickster’s Choice by Tamora Pierce *
76. What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-Ucci *
77. Imani All Mine by Connie Rose Porter
78. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman *
79. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
80. Beneath My Mother's Feet by Amjed Qamar
81. The Sweet In-Between by Sheri Reynolds
82. Flygirl by Sherri Smith
83. Lucy the Giant by Sherri Smith
84. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
85. Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught
86. Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman
87. Not That Kind of Girl by Siobhan Vivian
88. Izzy, Willy-Nilly by Cynthia Voigt
89. Cress Delahanty by Jessamyn West
90. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld *
91. When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune by Lori Aurelia Williams
92. Blue Tights by Rita Williams-Garcia
93. One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
94. Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger
95. Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
96. The House You Pass on the Way by Jaqueline Woodson
97. Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
98. When the Black Girl Sings by Bil Wright
99. Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
100. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak *

I read around a fifth of these books! Add it together with the total number of books that I have heard and want to read, it would most likely be half of the list, lol. 

Anyway, how many books have you read or plan on reading in this list?

21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity

You know, there are those days when you realize that life really sucks. And then there are the even fewer days when you remember that sometimes, people aren't actually all that bad. You should go over to this link and be reminded so.

Here are a few of my favorite pics.