My Favorite Mags

I love reading magazines! But unlike most women, I don't really go for fashion or beauty glossies. I only buy them once in a while. My faves are Entrepreneur and Moneysense. I'd like to educate myself on money matters, like investments, personal finance, Small Business Loans, because nowadays it's getting more and more difficult to make ends meet, especially if you have a growing family. Sigh... I also buy Smart parenting and The Working Mom. I actually have a growing pile of mags here at home and I'm losing storage space! May have to get rid of some of them soon :(

Oh, Wow!

A 5 million advance for a novel...in a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty. Wow!

This was supposedly the amount given to Audrey Niffenegger, author of the blockbuster novel "The Time Traveler's Wife".

Full article here on the NYTimes.

About Books!

I got this from the n@w mailing list:

1. Two books that you can read over and over again
Doctors by Erich Segal
Tomorrow Never Dies by Sidney Sheldon

2. Top 3 fave books
Doctors by Erich Segal
Tomorrow Never Dies by Sidney Sheldon
Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Kiyosaki

3. Book that you started to read,but can't finish reading
Lord of the Rings -- I skip chapters on this. I actually prefer the movie.

4. Book that makes you sleepy
Textbooks!

5. First book that you bought with your own money (not bought by parents)
I can't remember which. But I guess it has to be one of my "leisure" pocketbooks. My parents didn't buy me any, as far as I can remember. What they bought me were textbooks and "serious" books, and some storybooks when I was younger.

6. Most expensive book you bought
I can't remember. Maybe the "dummies" books I have? For my leisure books, I seldom spend more than 400 pesos unless I really, really want it! I'm fine with second hand books.

7. Book given to you as a gift
The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach
Love Strong by Green

8. Favorite author
Plenty! I have no particular favorite, but I love the works of Sidney Sheldon, John Grisham, Judith McNaught, Erich Segal and many many more.

The Big Read

The Big Read - books you've read.

Tagged by Pat!

The directions are simple:1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.2) Italicize those you intend to read.3) Underline the books you LOVE.4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

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

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

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

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - love, love the movie. but haven't read the book

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

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James

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

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 - E.B. White - have the book for tina

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

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor H

I have to confess, though, that some of the books I read are short versions. Or I skip some parts :P

Passing this tag to my fellow PPBC bloggers!

"Drawing From The Well" -- A Book Worth Looking Into

My father died from cancer a few year back. I know how devastating a disease that is, both to the individual and to the family, so I am always very curious and very inspired by stories of a cancer survivor.

The book, Drawing From The Well, is supposed to a journey of discovery through the power of prayer. The author, Ruth Wilma Shults, is a seventy five year old woman who looks back on her life and sees God's presence in her life's significant moments.

She believes that she was able to survive cancer because of her faith and her willingness to listen to and trust in God.

She also touches on past life therapy. This is a foreign concept for me, so I am going to quote heavily. This is a modality that searches the subconscious mind to retrieve data stored there and not available to the conscious mind without a past life therapy professional's assistance. The purpose being that to help patients dealing with issues stemming from subconscious pain experienced in past life abuse and/or trauma. The focus is to find what is referred to as "first cause." By dealing with the first cause patients will eventually be able to stop the cycle once and for all.

I think this will make an interesting read.