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To be honest, as a first time author I wasn’t expecting Charlton to have created such a wonderful storyline. Boy was I in for a surprise when I started to read Terra Nova: The Search. It has all the ingredients for a good book: unexpected twists, a realistic story, characters you can relate with, and excitement from start to finish! Terra Nova: The Search is a great first book in what will hopefully be an ongoing series.

Well done The Blarg, well done.
The next paragraph is a tiny bitty spoiler, so don’t highlight/read it if you haven’t read past page 9 in the book.

—–>The one thing I didn’t think I should put in my review is my biggest problem with the book. And that problem is a single quotation. I wish I had the book with me to get it right, but my Dad is currently reading it back in Downey. It went something along the lines of “I’m about to go bungee jump…without the cord!” Why did you have to put that in there?<-----

But seriously, good job.

I finished the His Dark Materials series.

1. The Golden Compass
2. The Subtle Knife
3. The Amber Spyglass

I must say, I was not impressed. So much hype for such mediocre books. The story in the middle of each book had me turning the pages to get more, but each end had me vastly disappointed. Especially the last one.

Terra Nova: The Review is coming soon!
Might get delayed though…Left 4 Dead DLC just came out!
They made two more campaigns to be able to handle Vs. mode, and put out an all new mode, Survival!
Here are two fail videos of my first day playing each.

Hunter Pounce Fail

Survival Fail

COME TO THE RESCUE!
www.invisiblechildren.com

So the BBC says that on average people have only read 6 of the list of 100 must read books

X means I’ve read it.
X+ means I read it and loved it.
X- means I read it and hated it.
* means I plan on reading it.

1. [ ] Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
1.5 [*] Pride and Prejudice AND ZOMBIES!
2. [X+] The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien
3. [X-] Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
4. [X+] Harry Potter series JK Rowling
5. [X+] To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
6. [X+] The Bible
7. [ ] Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
8. [X+] Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell
9. [*] His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
10. [X] Great Expectations Charles Dickens
11. [ ] Little Women Louisa M Alcott
12. [ ] Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13. [ ] Catch 22 Joseph Heller (I have yet to finish this one)
14. [X] Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read enough)
15. [X-] Rebecca Daphne Du Maurie (If you decide to read this…the important part is at the end)
16. [X+] The Hobbit JRR Tolkien
17. [ ] Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
18. [ ] Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger (I am like the one person I know who hasn’t read this)
19. [ ] The Time Traveller’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger
20. [ ] Middlemarch George Eliot
21. [ ] Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
22. [X] 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. [X-] 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. [X+] Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis
34. [ ] Emma Jane Austen
35. [ ] Persuasion Jane Austen
36. [X+] 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. [X] 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. [X+] 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. [X-] A Tale Of Two Cities Charles Dickens
58. [ ] Brave New World Aldous Huxley…scarrry book
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. [X+] Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
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. [X] 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. [X] Ulysses James Joyce
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. [X] 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. [X] Charlotte’s Web EB White
88. [ ] The Five People You Meet In Heaven Mitch Alborn
89. [*] Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. [ ] The Faraway Tree Collection Enid Blyton
91. [X] 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. [X] Hamlet William Shakespeare
99. [X] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100. [ ] Les Miserables Victor Hugo

I’ve read 25! I guess that is a quarter of them all, but I feel like I should be reading more of these books.

So I went out and bought the Wind before thanksgiving. I had a bestbuy coupon for 10% off any item and I used it. So it totaled up to about $345. Not bad for a totally portable netbook. It’s really cool too. The keyboard is just a little bit small, but nice to type a short blog post on or take notes during class. The screen size is just small enough to read some blog posts, watch a youtube video, read a word document, or web chat with a friend. The only beef I have with it really is the function key. They put it on the outside of the bottom row on the left so I’m constantly pressing it instead of the left control key. Slightly annoying, but i’m learning to move a finger, or to just press the right one(which is bigger anyways).

Thanksgiving was amazing, as always. So much food. So much football. So much awesome.

I’ve started creating a list of things to hang in my room. I can’t really hang a lot in my campus village apartment since they don’t want holes in the wall, but next year in my new apartment I can. So far I have some video game posters that just went on sale at the Valve store, constructing invisible bookshelves that make people have a double take at floating books, and I’m also creating a Harry Potteresque display case. It is the first of two quality crafts that I am planning on making. The latter will be a sort of wooden chest to hold them all since I am utterly unsatisfied with the cardboard one that borders is selling to hold all the books. Those projects will get posts of their own in due time, probably when they are finished.

Well, I hope you all had a great holiday. It’s almost Christmas so you all better come back home and hang out!

In the recent death of Michael Crichton, Borders had a sale on all his books. So being the true fans that we are, Cory and I pillaged the remaining books were eluding our Crichton collections.

Since I recently finished re-reading Harry Potter again it is time to work through my to read stack.

Currently in my ‘to read’ stack:

Eaters of the Dead
Airframe
The Great Train Robbery
Halo: First Strike
Halo: The Flood
Halo: The Fall of Reach
Snow Crash
His Dark Materials trilogy
The Chronicles of Narnia(another re-read)