Missouri in Mazury

I read this book in Polish, mainly because the cover is gorgeous. To be completely honest, if I had been presented with the English cover, I probably would not have read the book. The English language cover makes the book look like a cheesy romance novel, whereas the Polish one just looks much cooler; it looks more like a novel with a badass female lead, and less like a novel that's solely about the romantic aspect of her adventures.   I think it's the face that makes the difference. This is the story of Aladdin, but with a twist. Instead of the main character being the male thief, it's the female genie. In this version of the story, women are powerful. There's no princess who needs the thief to show her a "whole new world" with the help of a male genie who's just there for comic relief; instead, the princess is a powerful rebellious force with an army of strong women to back her up, and the female genie has a past that she's fighting hard to ov...

As you might've gathered from reading other posts, we are raising B and L to be bilingual. We've also tossed around the idea of adding yet another language, as I also speak German. So far we've still been hesitant, since it complicates things a bit: when would we speak English and when would we speak German? Wouldn't it confuse them more? Eh. Today we decided to just dive in a try it out, so I began speaking only German to B, using a lot of hand gestures. At one point: B: No! Me: Nein? B: ...ten. As he was leaving, I got a "tschüß", so I'd call it a good start.

Who knew having a baby would be so time consuming and would leave so little time for reading!? Ha ha ha. My adventure with Jasper Fforde's books started last year with The Eyre Affair (highly recommend!), and because my library doesn't have any further books in that series, I started on the Last Dragonslayer series . The Eye of Zoltar is the third book in that series that revolves around Jennifer Strange. She is an orphan who runs Kazam, an employment agency for magicians in a time when magic is weak and fading even more. In this book, the Mighty Shandar (the most powerful wizard ever) is back. He has a beef with Jennifer, who ruined the progress he'd made on a deal from long ago. In order to make amends, Jennifer must bring him the Eye of Zoltar. Unfortunately, the journey will be a very dangerous one into the Cambrian Empire, where their tour guide estimates their survival rate to be around 50%. If you haven't read other books by Jasper Fforde, read them....

I read this book, because everyone I know seemed to be going crazy about it. I borrowed the Polish/English version and would give a big thumbs up to the translator, who did a fantastic job.  As for my review of the original works, I wrote a poem in the style of the book to sum up my feelings on this one: if i write without capitalization and punctuation but add line breaks at random moments that don't add meaning to the actual poem did i just write a poem I enjoy poetry when it's well written, but I didn't like this book of poetry. I felt it was overrated and not original. There were definitely a few poems I liked, but it was disappointing to read essentially the same poem over and over - there were very few new ideas between each poem and also very few new ideas in the book as a whole. I was extremely disappointed in the quality of the poems themselves. I expect poems to be lyrical and to express a different idea - it may be along the sam...

Learning English, or any language, can be so funny. B: L got shot. M: L got *a* shot. B: Mama did it. Thank goodness we're not in an English-speaking country.

It's pretty apparent from the books I've read in the past that I'm a fan of the Daily Show . I was a huge fan of it when Jon Stewart hosted and, like most, I was a bit wary of the change - I had never heard of Trevor Noah before. His first show was awkward, but I kept watching and now am an even bigger fan of Trevor Noah as the host. If you quit watching after Jon Stewart left or if you're not so sure about watching: just go watch. I've read a lot of books-from-television this year. And this is another one of those. It's a completely different book from what I had expected, but Born a Crime by Trevor Noah is so very much worth the read. This book is a-ma-zing. I had expected (again, not really fully reading the book's summary before reading) a book similar to the memoirs that other comedians have written - a book that touches on the comedian's childhood, but moves quickly onto their career and experiences at work. Not this book, and that'...

My mom and I have this tradition: when we're together, we binge-watch episodes of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. The most memorable season we watched together was, of course, Juan Pablo's. This time around, we watched Nick's season.  When we finished this season, we decided to also read this book, which had also been talked about a lot on Bachelor in Paradise . This book,  It's Not Okay was written by Andi Dorfman, who was one of the contestants on Juan Pablo's season, and was also later a Bachelorette. In all honesty, I have a hard time remembering which Bachelor/Bachelorette contestants are who, as they all seem about the same to me (think: Saturday Night Live 's parody). I had the hardest time remembering the difference between Andi and Caitlin, for example, but both struck me as being normal enough ladies, who were smart and successful (Andi's a lawyer) and interesting (Caitlin was hilarious).  I was so wrong about Andi. After reading this...