Stuff and Anna and the French Kiss

To start on a particularly geeky note, I finished reading DH en français a few months ago. It took me a good few months, started at the start of summer but was determined to finish it before the DH Part 1 came out. I think it actually made me read it more closely, so I still enjoyed it as much as I did (though being my favourite of the series probably helped...).

For those interested:

Poulard = Hogwarts
Poufsouffle = Hufflepuff
Tom Jedusor = Tom Riddle
Rogue = Snape
Moldus = Muggles

For more go here: L'encyclopédie d'Harry Potter

Well, I was impressed with myself... lol. Might attempt Twilight (La Fascination) next (though compared to HP, it looks really easy), or maybe HP1 or 6 in deutsch (which looks REALLY hard)?

So. To the title subject of this post: Anna and the French Kiss.

This is a book written by Stephanie Perkins, that I saw mention around the forests of Twitter in the past few weeks. I trust my Twitter people in terms of what's good to read so I just bit the bullet as it were and ordered it off of Amazon. Few days later it popped through my letter box, and omg. It's amazing.

(More review after the jump.)



Loved it.

Étienne makes Edward Cullen look like... well... a stony-faced meh. (Great description there...)

It was also great to have a characterful lead in Anna. She cracked me up on several occasions. Mainly due to her reactions to St. Clair's Britishisms.

Though having said that my 'laugh out loud' quote of the book has to be from Étienne:

I shake my head. "Only when I talk to my mom. Then it slips out because she has one. Most people in Atlanta don't have an accent. It's pretty urban. A lot of people speak gangsta, though," I add jokingly.

"Fo' shiz," he replies in his polite English accent."

I spurt orangey-red soup across the table. St. Clair gives a surprised ha-HA kind of laugh, and I'm laughing, too, the painful kind like abdominal crunches. He hands me a napkin to wipe my chin. "Fo'. Shiz." He repeats it solemnly.

I have this scene pictured so perfectly in my mind, and I would have been in fits, crying with laughter if I was at that table...

There were also several other moments like this, as well as MANY 'will-they-won't-they' moments. And of course the setting in Paris is great. Considering, according to Stephanie Perkins' blog, that she only been to Paris once (granted, she stayed a month but still), and that she hardly speaks any French, I thought she captured the French capital's character really well. If nothing else, I really want to go for another visit.

So all in all, I definitely recommend this book. Check out her blog, too. It's pretty hilarious, plus she has some BHMs (British Hot Males/Men) dotted about to entice thee ;).

Oh yeah, finally remembered something else I wanted to post:


"Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

I'd also amend this with an *asterisk* if you've seen the movie/tv version. Bring on the shame! :-)"

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen*

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien*

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)*

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa May 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 Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger*

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot (Poor show, I come from where she lived...)

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 Berniere

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - William 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 - Gabrial 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 Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martell

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

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

74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. 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. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens*

82. Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell

83. The Colour 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 - EB White*

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 Misérables – Victor Hugo*

So I got 10... out of 100. Not too bad, right? Lol. I am so bad at starting a book and not getting round to finishing it. Must stop doing that.

What did you get?