- The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Last Book Read:
- The Salt God's Daughter by Ilie Ruby
**Strange and coincidental similarities that my current read always seems to have with my last read...**
The Language of Flowers opens with the line "For eight years, I dreamed of fire," and is also set in San Fransisco, California. In The Salt God's Daughter, each of the three generations of women have some experience with fire from dreams of trees being on fire to the wildfires of the Santa Ana in the 70's. This novel is also set in Long Beach, California. In The Scent of Rain and Lightning, there is a general fear of fire among the farming population due to the drought in Kansas. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Hagrid's eyes are described as "glinting black beetles" and in Fahrenheit 451 the firemen's helmets along with the futuristic cars are all described as beetlelike or as black beetles, a symbol that used to represent Satan.
In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle, is run down by Tom's wife who is driving Gatsby's car. In Fahrenheit 451, Montag discovers that his source of inspiration, Clarisse, has also been hit by a car.
Pile of Books I Recently Read (and recommend*):
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oliver Wilde*
- The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer*
- Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese*
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett*
- Things Fall Apart by Chinewa Achebe
- Bloodroot by Amy Greene*
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
- Room by Emma Donahue*
- Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin*
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury*
Books on my Reading To-Do List:
(I'm trying to knock out the classics first as one of my 2012 resolutions is to catch up on classics I have either never read or that I haven't read in a very long time)
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
- The Sunset Unlimited by Cormac McCarthy
- Roots by Alex Haley
- Before Ever After by Samantha Sotto
- The Raven's Bride by Lenore Hart
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- I Wore An Ocean in the Shape of a Girl: Memoir by Kelle Groom
- Seriously, I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- 11/22/63 by Stephen King
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Violets of March by Sarah Jio
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Children's Bookshelf (a list of books that the kids and I cherish and read over and over)
- If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond(particularly If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, and If You Give a Pig a Pancake--but really they're all super cute)
- The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsberg
- SkippyJon Jones Series by Judy Schachner(all are completely hilarious and completely wonderful
- Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle (we also love The Mixed Up Cameleon, The Very Busy Spider, and The Hungry Caterpillar)
- Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin (also writes Diary of a Fly and Diary of a Worm--also fabulous
- How Dinosaurs Say I Love You by Jane Yolen (the whole series is great)
- Tea with Ruby by Sarah The Duchess of York Ferguson
- On The Night You Were Born by Nancy Tillman
- A Tree Named Steve by Alan Zweibel
- The Magically Mysterious Adventures of Noelle the Bulldog by Gloria Estefan (also Noelle's Treasure Tale)
