Posts Tagged books

30 Books before 30

Posted by Kristin in Life on January 25, 2012

I used to be an avid reader. But, then, I went to college, graduated, got a job and prefer to spend my free time watching awesome TV shows like Modern Family and The Bachelor. Go ahead, judge me.

However, I got an iPad for Christmas, and I am very excited to start reading on it. Mainly, because I enjoy “flipping” the digital pages. It’s awesome. So I asked friends for recommendations from friends before we left on our honeymoon. I read Unbroken and The Night Circus on the trip – and they were fabulous.

While searching for new books to read, I came across this list of 30 books everyone should read before their 30th birthday. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t read many of these.

  1. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  2. 1984 by George Orwell
  3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  4. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  5. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  6. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  7. The Rights of Man by Tom Paine
  8. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  10. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
  11. The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
  12. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
  13. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
  14. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
  15. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  16. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  17. Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot – ugh, poetry?
  18. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  20. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  21. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  22. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
  23. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  24. The Republic by Plato
  25. Lolita
  26. Getting Things Done by David Allen
  27. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  28. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  29. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  30. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  31. BONUS: How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
  32. BONUS: Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner

I guess I know what I’ll be borrowing from the library for a while… How about you? How many of these have you read?

, ,

No Comments

What’s your WORD?

Posted by Kristin in Life on May 13, 2010

While on my vacation, I finally got around to reading Eat, Pray, Love. The book, as a whole was great – a wonderful example of writing about personal experiences and simply about self. However, I don’t want to write a review, especially since I am quite possibly one of the last people to have read this book. Instead, there was one small part of the book that I found to be very intriguing.

In conversation with one of the many characters the author comes across throughout her journeys, they discuss the idea of cities having one word. According to this individual: “Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies with most people who live there… And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don’t really belong there.”

The natural follow-up question to this idea is: What’s your word?

Is this a fluid concept? Does it change as you age, accomplish new things and meet new people?

At the moment, I think my word is BALANCE. Finding equilibrium is consistently on my mind. Work-life balance. Friends-family-fiance balance. Active-lazy. I also like to think this fits in well with Minneapolis-St. Paul. But, I could definitely see others having a different word for the Twin Cities.

What do you think? What’s your word? What’s the Twin Cities’ word?

,

6 Comments